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We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

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Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#551

Post by cwyers »

na85 wrote: post #543
cwyers wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Applicants do not self-filter. If you've ever read resumes for a job listing that haven't been prescreened, you'll be blown away by how many people refuse to self-filter even for basic fitness for the job. Put out a job listing asking for a college degree, and you'll get applicants who are still in school with their graduation date two years in the future looking for an internship. That's an extreme, but people will…

Applicants don't self filter because they are conditioned by job postings that bear little relation, if any, to the actual job.

Applicants don't self-filter because they need a job. They like to eat, they like to wear clothes, they like to sleep indoors. They often have other people in their lives that also like to do those things and rely on the income of the applicant to do so. They also aren't very able to pool risk. Most people have between one and two wageearners paying towards "household" expenses. There's not a lot of redundancy here. Contrast that with the average amount of employees at an employer. When you're hiring, having a position vacant for weeks or months is something you can work around much, much easier than you can work around being unemployed for weeks or months.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#552

Post by CalChris »

skandl wrote: post #521
CalChris wrote: post #363

Your job, as a job seeker, is to get passed HR to a hiring manager. You can go through HR, around HR (a buddy ships your res to a hiring manager) or over HR (an exec or VC flips your res to a hiring manager). You will not be working for HR. They are merely an impediment to be overcome. If you wish, you can think of it as the border. You can apply for legal immigration (lengthy and dicey; think of the immigration and…

*past

Doh.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#553

Post by alexasmyths »

Analog24 wrote: post #315
alexasmyths wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. So many downvotes. Re: renaissance. Of course. I'm highlighting where the 'we don't hire finance' trope originates. Nothing to do with Renaissance. For all of you too young to remember: In the 'dot-com' era - many 'new companies' still hired 'top down'. They would hire an 'executive team' first, and then maybe developers. Often, a CFO etc.. Think PetStore.com - two MBA's hiring 'others to do the work, as workers…

I'm not disagreeing with your point but I think it's a bit out of context here. The parent comment was specifically talking about what they heard from Renaissance Technologies, not a some hipster startup.

I was literally trying to give context to the 'no finance' trope.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#554

Post by T-hawk »

beat wrote: post #512
kwhitefoot wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that people don't run a spellcheck? It's rare for me to see even official internal documents without several spelling mistakes even after they have been approved for publication. Just turning on the spelling checker in your favourite word processor, editor, or even web browser will go a long way toward catching most typos. The grammar checker in Word is also worth a try. Did you mean "P. G.'s maxim" when you t…

I noticed that even these little HN checkboxes have a grammar checker. Earlier, I carelessly wrote "the the", and it underlined the second "the" as incorrect. And yet, the comments in response to my OP are full of easily detected errors. It's like you have to make an effort to screw it up.

That's your browser doing the checking, not anything that's part of the HN page.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#555

Post by watwut »

beat wrote: post #470
watwut wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

When I've been in this situation, I wasn't the one making the job description. 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.…

I think that asking overly hard technical questions is bad for reasons you said, but if an engineer gets offended over simple "implement linked list" or other basic exercise, something is wrong with that engineer. Either it is that he/she masks some lack of basic knowledge or he/she is too much of primadona. It is perfectly ok for interviewer to check on basic skills, since all interviewer goes by is what you say about yourself.

But, if I had enough social skills to tone down "geeking" withing 10 minutes of interview with stranger, you would not hire me? That is just side note through. The older I am, the less I like to frame myself as "geek", there are some cultural aspects I have grown to dislike. A lot of "geekinesss" is actually trying to be cool rather then anything else.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#556

Post by alexasmyths »

zentiggr wrote: post #412
alexasmyths wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Except all of those companies put an unreasonable amount of weight on degrees" I don't think it's 'unreasonable' at all to put strong emphasis on education. Surely, at the end of the day it's possible to be great without it, but having a good education is pretty strongly correlating factor with so many things. 'Being cool', I don't think is correlated with much at all. Unless it's super consumer facing and inner cul…

Touched my first computer almost exactly 40 years ago. I can troubleshoot most hw/os issues with one ear and eyeball tied behind my back. Can program decently in many general domains. Never went past my associate's because the work was more compelling. Knowing how many PhD's never work in their field, and how many Master's get earned and laid aside, I can't agree with you at all. I think you might be imagining that c…

" I think you might be imagining that correlation."

If you think the entire Silicon Valley is missed this, because it's not 'my' correlation.

People who study CS are probably more likely to better at CS that those who have not.

It doesn't prove or mean anything in general, and your personal situation is not relevant: of course there are tons of 'non-degreed' great techies out there. Nobody is denying that.

I've hired a lot of people and there's no doubt that you get better luck with degreed than non - and even school rankings matter.

In Canada, for example, you get consistently strong tech recruits out of U Waterloo. Impressively so. Not always but usually. Other schools in the region - much more hit and miss.

I don't think this is controversial.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#557

Post by beat »

ckoerner wrote: post #520
beat wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my best friends has a MD and an MBA degree. He currently manages a $100M investment portfolio. We chat online almost daily. He is, by far, the worst speller I know. Even after 20+ years of online conversation, I can barely understand what he's saying sometimes. He also passes bits of professional writing past me for validation, usually to check his intent. His professional writing is always perfectly spelled,…

I don't mean to challenge you, but I think your assumptions about how easy it is for others to do something you consider rudimentary are based in an undeclared set of privileges and fortune. A few possible scenarios where getting help might not be as easy as asking a partner, friend, or colleague to help review things. A first-generation college grad paying their way through school by working full time in a new town.…

But that leaves me with a problem - I still need to turn this stack of 100 resumes into something I can be expected to work through, given the limited availability of my most expensive resource - time. I don't want to interview 100 candidates. I want to interview five. That means 19 out of 20 need to be eliminated before it even gets to the interview process.

The spelling heuristic gets rid of between 5 and 20%, right away. A lot of those resumes would also be caught by other heuristics (no ten page resumes, etc). Most of your concern cases would also fall to my other filters as well. And quite frankly, if a resume jumped out at me in a positive way, but it had three or four or five typos? I'd interview. It's not a hard and fast rule.

It's not as black and white as you think it is.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#558

Post by trhway »

austincheney wrote: post #441
beat wrote: post #275

So 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 don't like resumes as 98% of each is probably bullshit unless the candidate is a truly amazing rockstar with 10+ years of valid experience. As a result any heuristic applied to resumes is just as worthless as most candidates. When I have interviewed in the past I literally stopped reading once I see contact information and save reading it for during the interview. If the contact information is not the first thing o…

>As a result any heuristic applied to resumes is just as worthless as most candidates.

Disrespect permeating the industry. A candidate is either a rock star 2% or worthless the rest. And everybody does successfully hires only rockstars. Mathematical paradox. Though seeing how you mention 10 years experience as something important I'd guess you're young, and that would explain your gimmicky and capricious approaches to candidates selecting and interviewing.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#559

Post by BearGoesChirp »

hyperpape wrote: post #488
beat wrote: post #275

So 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 don't even disagree with this. It's just also an admission that you don't hire the best. We can argue about whether there are 10x developers or not, but it doesn't matter for this discussion. If you assume that a developer is going to be with you for a year or more, then it starts to be worth a week or more of your (collective) time to improve the expected productivity of the people you hire by 10%. Not 2x, not 10x…

If you use a technique that cuts a lot of people, but cuts more bad people than good people, you'll still end up with plenty of good people. The difference in comparison isn't between the average and the good person who was cut, but between the good person who was cut and the good person who wasn't cut. What is the chance of the heuristic cutting someone 10% better than the best person not cut?

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#560

Post by unabst »

ballenf wrote: post #452
unabst wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I do care if you don't bother to run it past someone else who can for editing. Even Chrome has a spell checker. Not sure the distinction here between code typos and English typos is a valid one. The OP is saying not bothering to check is the issue, not the specific errors. And this is, by definition, careless. This is a lack of caring for correctness and a lack of awareness of mistakes. It could even be conside…

Screening is all about finding good proxies for the skills you need for the position. Typos on resumes might be a good proxy for something, but not necessarily attention to detail (since you don't know the process the resume went through to get into its error-free state). At the extremes, the proofing could have been forced on them unwillingly by an overbearing parent or partner -or- the applicant could have painstak…

Typos could be anything, period. As could anything else.

Bring a resume with typos and your rebuttal and see what happens. The trouble you go through to defend typos will be far more work than fixing your typos. It's mostly automatic.

Reasoning doesn't excuse you from making mistakes, because excused don't make up for those mistakes. In any professional work environment, your mistakes are someone else's paid job to fix.

OP is talking about attitude and mindset. The "I can reason away typos" mindset is not appealing. The "I will do anything to not make mistakes" mindset is.

I mean, that is still what we are talking about here right? Being attractive to employers.

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