I asked an HR rep about this and she told me there is a massive influx of new grads demanding very high salaries. You and I might be from a generation where a CS degree was not an obvious choice and the supply was not as high for organizations. Unfortunately years of experience don’t count for much in this industry, especially with how fast technologies change.
Ask HN: Why are hiring processes flawed and testing random standards?
21–30 of 69 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why are hiring processes flawed and testing random standards?
#22Let's first establish: how are you measuring hiring success?
Re: Ask HN: Why are hiring processes flawed and testing random standards?
#23In a nutshell: they aren't. The economics of it are that in many places in the world, it is extremely difficult to fire an employee. Getting rid of an underperformer can take time, effort, and exposes the company to liability if the termination can be construed as relating to the employee being in a protected class (e.g. can't fire someone because she's a woman). Let's assume that it's a SF startup willing to play a…
Don't know where you live but in most of Europe firing someone is pretty trivial.
For a newly hired, you have a probation period, before your contract becomes permanent, usually between a month and a year, where you can be fired on the spot. After that, your contract becomes permanent and you can get fired, no questions asked, with a notice period of usually between one and 3 months.
In theory, before letting you go, the company has to set up a performance improvement plan for you but companies never bother as it's considered wasted effort to invest in under performers so they just warn you at your performance review that your performance is lacking and that this is strike one. After 3 months of performance monitoring you are let go because your performance hasn't improved so that was strike two and you're out.
Sure, you can sue them if you know you've been wronged, and win a few thousand euros, but nobody's gonna hire you knowing you're in a lawsuit with your ex-employer so nobody bothers to sue and prefers to just find another job instead.
So unless you're a protected category, usually over 50 years old, woman or not, doesn't matter or part of some big-corp with strong unions, the hard-to-fire is not an argument that holds water here.
Re: Ask HN: Why are hiring processes flawed and testing random standards?
#24What I find funny is how little time and effort is put in writing the job description. The interview process is mostly very generic and the questions hardly in alignment to the role. As a profession we try hard to be correct about creating clear specs that can be translated to unambiguous steps for a machine to execute, but when it comes to hiring - we write ambiguous specs, toss it over to recruiters who are poorly equipped.
Here are some thoughts: - When the new position opens, the team (say the scrum team) collaboratively writes a job description based on the current backlog. Let's not leave it to a manager or recruiter who is writing the job description. Use the company/team's mission and values as guidance to see who an ideal candidate would be. This is like writing your stories.
- Then write the filtering criteria based on the typical day to day skills - what are must haves, what are good to have, what is ok to not have. This is like write your test cases.
- What are the areas where the team is lacking. Try to get skills/qualities that will, for lack of a better expression, raise the bar of the team. This is like your retrospectives - and if you have notes from your recent retrospectives, they should help you identify what you are looking for.
- This better spec should help the recruiters, and also give the candidates an honest look into the team.
- For the interview, go back to your previous sprints etc. and build questions that are simplified models of what a typical story would look like. Instead of asking to invert a tree, may be it would be better to talk about how a particular problem you solved and see the approach the candidate would take. Give the candidate all the tools - their favorite editor/ide or whiteboard, whatever they prefer.
Re: Ask HN: Why are hiring processes flawed and testing random standards?
#25I am building a product/startup [1] to address some of the problems you mention, and as a result, I've been talking to hiring teams at several companies, so I can give you some reasons why the processes are bad. * Hiring is a marketplace, and supply/demand is not always balanced, so most issues related to job search/hiring is due to this. * When a company posts an ad for a job, they usually receive about 150-200 appl…
The problem as I see it is that good applicants don't bother with job boards. When you have recruiters banging on your door and begging to handle all the details for you (and provide proper communication) it's no wonder candidates don't bother applying. That, however, means the expectation is that job board candidates are bad and desperate. So companies will filter them more aggressively than recruiter candidates. So…
That's true. Recruiters provide the initial screening, which is lacking in a job board.
But the hiring process is broken beyond the initial screening as well, biggest reason being lack of incentives for the involved parties to close a position quickly.
Re: Ask HN: Why are hiring processes flawed and testing random standards?
#26Hiring is an inherently hard problem. I imagine the additional hard to test requirements of remote work (autonomy, discipline, ability to do your own it, ...) doesn't make it easier.
Re: Ask HN: Why are hiring processes flawed and testing random standards?
#27Hiring processes are terrible for lack of accountability, transparency, feedback.
I ran for political office. Endorsement interviews can be either awesome or brutal. One key difference is whether the interview is recorded, and then shared publicly.
It will surprise no one that my worst interviews (in both politics and tech) were behind closed doors.
Worst of all are the 1:1 interviews with inexperienced interviewers. Zero accountability, zero transparency, no feedback loops. They just report whatever they want, are not even expected to explain themselves.
I've since decided that any future job interviews will be recorded and posted. I will definitely embarrass myself. But until someone starts, no improvement can occur.
Re: Ask HN: Why are hiring processes flawed and testing random standards?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem as I see it is that good applicants don't bother with job boards. When you have recruiters banging on your door and begging to handle all the details for you (and provide proper communication) it's no wonder candidates don't bother applying. That, however, means the expectation is that job board candidates are bad and desperate. So companies will filter them more aggressively than recruiter candidates. So…
That's true. Recruiters provide the initial screening, which is lacking in a job board. But the hiring process is broken beyond the initial screening as well, biggest reason being lack of incentives for the involved parties to close a position quickly.
>That's true. Recruiters provide the initial screening, which is lacking in a job board.
It's not just the initial screening. They actively go out and find candidates who otherwise wouldn't be looking for jobs directly. And as I said before, those tend to be prime candidates since they get so many recruiters they have little need to apply directly.
>But the hiring process is broken beyond the initial screening as well, biggest reason being lack of incentives for the involved parties to close a position quickly.
Again, recruiters are a solution to this because their paycheck is based on closing the deal. They will hound the company and the candidate to get the process finalized.
Re: Ask HN: Why are hiring processes flawed and testing random standards?
#29My company is 100% remote so I have quite a bit of experience with being on the recruitment side.
I think if there was a standard for recruiting that the industry followed, then people would just be thinking of ways to "hack" the standard, so I don't think that would be helpful.
Remote working is desirable and rare but also a lot of companies that recruit for remote workers are very new ones and they often have no clue what they're doing. I think they feel that so long as they make it really hard and unpleasant, they'll be like the other massive internet companies.
To be honest, I also have no real clue what I'm doing but I am trying. Perhaps you could give me some feedback on our process while we're here:
1. A written test where we ask a few questions around the candidate's experience - what's the most interesting thing they've worked on, what recent tech are they most interested in, and we ask them to do a code review of a poorly written method. We have a strong culture of documentation so if the candidate can't write well then it's not going to be a good fit.
2. An online interview where we talk about the company, discuss the test, answer questions and write some code together via screen sharing. This latter part takes the longest part - firstly we write a simple string reverse method, write some unit tests for it, debug another method and design a history API for a browser (which has more edge cases than you'd think). What we're looking for: confidence in programming, code, design and communication.
3. An online or in-person (depending on where the candidate lives) interview with me and our CEO. This part has about a 95% success rate for the candidate, our CEO's just a people person and likes to get to know people.
4. The candidate is hired, and we start assigning work in increasing levels of difficulty. This is a probation period of 3 months.
Stage 4 is still part of the interview, we're able to take advantage of UK labour laws that allow us to let someone go inside 2 years without having too much trouble.
This way we can see them working for real and even if they aren't that good, get some sort of benefit from it. Of course, we might waste some money but it's an opportunity to learn what we need to do better during the interview phase.
For better or worse, capitalism rewards those who take risks. I think the companies with their multi-month long recruitment cycles are putting too much effort into risk minimisation. I'm happy when I hear about my competitors' "brutal" interview processes. It means they're moving slower than me.
Re: Ask HN: Why are hiring processes flawed and testing random standards?
#30I asked an HR rep about this and she told me there is a massive influx of new grads demanding very high salaries. You and I might be from a generation where a CS degree was not an obvious choice and the supply was not as high for organizations. Unfortunately years of experience don’t count for much in this industry, especially with how fast technologies change.
Also, startup hiring usually means joining an already close knit team. If you have to interview with 5 people, have a fifty-fifty chance with each and anyone can veto your hire that gives you a 3% chance of getting an offer. Competency will get your foot in the door, but ultimately it comes down to the social psychology of social comparison and propinquity.
If you are a senior/staff with some success at previous startups, you are likely to get vetoed by developers who see you as a threat in the promotions tournament.