Earlier quoted context omitted.
Raise the child, build a business from home. I would sign for it in a heartbeat.
Small kids are a lot more work than many people realize. Ditto building a business. Trying to do both at once without being financially independent first is not a choice anyone should make if they can help it.
We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
461–470 of 653 posts
Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I consider it evidence of carelessness - I don't care if you can't spell, but I do care if you don't bother to run it past someone else who can for editing. Getting someone to look over your stuff and looking for spelling errors sounds like a simple and easy fix doesn’t it? But in my experience that doesn't work as well as one would think, prof reading is a lot harder than it looks. After all it's isn't enough to c…
To be clear here - being a poor speller, due to dyslexia or any other reason, is not the problem. But if you know you are a poor speller, you should have someone who is a good speller edit your resume, looking for spelling errors. If you know a misspelled resume can cost you a job, and you don't take additional steps to make sure it's spelled correctly, that's careless.
If we criticize job applicants for mistakes which are unrelated to their field, why shouldn't we do the same for employers? Rejecting applicants for spelling mistakes is not in and of itself a problem, but it indicates carelessness in the hiring process so maybe it's not a good place to work.
It's interesting to think about crafting a resume, not only to get a favorable response from places you'd want to work, but to deliberately create an unfavorable response from places you wouldn't
Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
#463So here's the thing... hiring at larger, growing companies often means weeding through a stack of a hundred resumes, for one or two or five roles. Most of those resumes need to go away. The interview process, for competent candidates, is going to cost you at bare minimum a half hour of one person's time for initial screening. A quality interview is going to take a couple of hours each for a few important people - man…
Honest question - how does this relate to some of the anecdotes in the OP - where someone referred to recruiter/HR as a desirable hire by a current employee gets denied because ? That's the real kicker in the whole article... when "We want this person!" doesn't work because crustimoney proseedcake.
Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
#464This was the most depressing part to me: "Another person I know is in a similar situation because his group won’t talk to people who aren’t already employed." It's a long story, but both my wife and I have most recently been at places, in a small-medium city, that have had huge turnover in the last several years due to mismanagement (her entire unit, except for her, left twice while she was working with them; we've l…
Hang in there.
Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
And recruiters and managers wonder why applicants spam hundreds of cookie cutter resumes and cover letters instead of painstakingly crafting each one. Or why they get annoyed at 'job portal' applications where we have to retype our resume into the various little text boxes the web application provides. Its just a numbers game if you don't have a relationship with someone who can get you a new job. > refuse to hire un…
Except that isn't how statistics work. If you have 100 applications, 20% of which are good, and drop 50% of them, you get 50 applications, but you still have the 20% good application/bad application rate. Of course, you still get 50% less total good applications, but ratios != total.
This is what I was trying to express. At the end of the day there are only so many 'good' applicants.
Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
#466So here's the thing... hiring at larger, growing companies often means weeding through a stack of a hundred resumes, for one or two or five roles. Most of those resumes need to go away. The interview process, for competent candidates, is going to cost you at bare minimum a half hour of one person's time for initial screening. A quality interview is going to take a couple of hours each for a few important people - man…
I 100% understand and I was doing the same. Your approach is ctually the problem. Hiring should be very very important - maybe even the top priority. The two most important things in the company should be: hiring and sales. In that respect, you need to invest into hiring in same was as you invest into sales. For example, sales have much much better heuristics algorithms while hiring is all about weird and random rule…
Tech staff shouldn't waste their time in hopeless cases, but assuming your applicants aren't all about the same the return on hiring the best one could be huge.
Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
And recruiters and managers wonder why applicants spam hundreds of cookie cutter resumes and cover letters instead of painstakingly crafting each one. Or why they get annoyed at 'job portal' applications where we have to retype our resume into the various little text boxes the web application provides. Its just a numbers game if you don't have a relationship with someone who can get you a new job. > refuse to hire un…
It's a joke from the British version of the Office.
Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any decent programmer I know is perfectly fine with switching OSs - if you know .NET and Windows, learning Unix will slow you down for a few weeks, but that's it. "Work experience" is rather overrated. Critical thinking skills are what matters for the job, and those are in awfully short supply. Rejecting a candidate who possesses them because they don't have the right keyword on the resume is... Wait. On second thoug…
I agree that rejecting people for lack of a keyword is a silly practice. But all the decent programmers you know must be really quite good. I know a lot of devs who I consider to be at least decent and switching os, stack, paradigms, everything would trip them up for more than a few weeks in the best case. In a lot of reasonable cases people have a preference what tools that use, that's why there's a "Ruby way of doi…
That may well be. The question for the hiring process then becomes, how do we distinguish between people who lack keywords but could adapt, and people who lack keywords and can't. (Alas, the keywords don't solve anything - because I've interviewed quite a few people with all the right keywords whom I wouldn't consider decent programmers at all)
Programming is one of the disciplines that suffers from the fact that the initial skills hurdle is very low, but the mountain of knowledge is high. And constantly shifting. What we all want, ideally, are people who can navigate the shifting landscape easily. I'm not sure resumes easily give us that. (Unless it's a reasonable long career. If you've got 30 years of adapting to new tech, it's easy to infer you'll probably learn the next one, too. If you've got 3 years, nobody can tell)
Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
#469If Google's hiring is as good as this article suggests, it must have changed a lot in the last few years. Can anyone point me at an up-to-date article on Google's hiring process? Not so long ago, they were very focused on school rankings, GPAs, and academic qualifications. I always felt this was misguided because it was nowhere near as objective and quantitative as they thought. More recently they said they had a big…
Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
#470So here's the thing... hiring at larger, growing companies often means weeding through a stack of a hundred resumes, for one or two or five roles. Most of those resumes need to go away. The interview process, for competent candidates, is going to cost you at bare minimum a half hour of one person's time for initial screening. A quality interview is going to take a couple of hours each for a few important people - man…
If you are so flooded by resumes, you really should be more specific in your job ad. By that, I mean you should describe the position you look to fill I details, including uncomfortable parts. People will self select way more. As is now, many job ads work as something attempting to sell position - but you are flooded by people you don't want (else you would just pick 5 random to interview).
In general, I feel the hiring process focuses on the wrong things. Buzzword compliance is a major problem. Experience in problem spaces is much harder to capture in a resume than a list of technologies that can be software-grepped for the benefit of technically clueless recruiters and HR.
Similarly, I'm not a fan of most technical reviews. They tend to focus on gotcha questions and think-on-your-feet trivial programming exercises that have virtually no bearing on real life as an engineer. To be fair, they can help, but they often exclude excellent engineers who aren't as good at the on-your-feet game as they are at the big picture game.
When interviewing candidates, I tend to pick up on an interesting experience on their resume, and ask them to talk about it. What went right? What went wrong? What was your role in the solution?
Heuristic: Candidates who blame others for failures, especially when they don't praise others for success, get a big black mark. I don't usually like working with people who are looking for someone to blame, regardless of their skill.
Heuristic: When someone starts talking about some project and really geeks out about it, getting into the details of how the solution worked and why it delighted them, gets a huge plus. First, it means they were actually at the core and understood what was going on. Second, it says what they care about.
Sometimes, I'll get them talking about their best experiences as an engineer, or their worst, just to hear the geek come out. It's very telling.
And I have usually decided on a candidate in the first five to ten minutes of an interview. If it's no, it's no. If it's yes, the rest of the interview is mostly about validating my initial impression.