How to hire an idiot

>you seem to put a lot of thought into what is on people's resumes.

I actually really don't. I screen resumes pretty quick and just check for a few things. Can they format their resume like a grownup? Does the information appear to be accurate? Does it show relevant skills for the position we're looking for? Does it show an upwards career progression? Are their any oddball things that I'd like to talk with them about (work gaps, unusual education path vs. career, a stint overseas, an unusually short time at a previous employer) etc.

>Resumes exist to secure job interviews.

Then I'd ask, what's the point? Just build a quick site to collect people's names, phone numbers and email addresses, call it "apply for a job with Matasano" and be done with it? If it's not important at all in your process, why are you wasting your and the candidates time?

>but I didn't find that out until after we had hired.

Hell, why do you even interview them? Just check that they have a pulse and valid residency paperwork.

I'm sitting here reading this really rather incredulous that you couldn't be bothered to even ask this during the interview process, or as part of the basic job application paperwork.

Perhaps I'm colored because I do tend to do lots of hiring for contract work and my clients do need that information or we've just hired a wallet to toss money into that won't be doing much productive for us except burning overhead.

>it is 2011, and for at least the least 18 months, it has been a white hot competitive market for talent

Disagree, it's very strongly an employers market right now, the market is saturated with relatively qualified people looking for work. For every position we open, we get a couple hundred resumes. It makes it very easy to be picky at every stage of the interview process. Resume screening is just step 1. The interview process is absolutely critical to step 2 I agree.

I've seen many many horribly broken interview processes, all kinds of clever tests, and Microsoft style quiz questions. Really just having a long conversation with a candidate, treating them as a person and letting them talk about their career, with some guiding questions is about it. If it's a technical position, get some code samples, and talk them through some relevant scenarios or algorithm questions or whatever makes sense.

All of the best hires I've ever gotten flew past those 2 steps.

And I swear to all that's holy I agree that Monster.com is not the place to go as an employer or as a job hunter. Ugh, pile of failure that whole site is these days.

> "look, Bob! this candidate listed 'coursework in computational linguistics'! if he couldn't hack it to a degree, he'd never hack it here!"

I have to go 80/20 against/with you on this. Degrees are easy compared to real life work - shockingly so. If somebody can't finish a degree program with nothing in particular stopping them on what basis should I trust that they can finish a multi-million dollar project under tremendous pressure? You aren't going to figure that out no matter how clever the interview is if they don't have the prior history.

All that being said, I do have experience with self-taught guys who really are very good. But they need to have something else that makes up for it, a really amazing interview, some kind of really spectacular past performance or even amazing personal hobby portfolio that shows off their skillset. But theses guys are very rare. And all of them put "High School" under their education section on their resume. But then they have amazing portfolios of work to compensate.

Sometimes the education section can be an important marker to show upward progression over a career. For example, somebody who went to school later in life, or went back for a Masters or PhD or some such.

Sometimes they demonstrate odd ways you might be able to use a person. For example, you might be hiring for a sales position, and get a resume for somebody with a degree in Literature. Awesome, I bet you can talk to them about improving your company's advertising copy which would help them hawk your stuff better. Or maybe they are a self taught programmer with an Art degree. Super! Maybe they can provide good insight into improving a product's look.

So yeah, if they can't be bothered to put something down on the resume about where they got their learnin' from, I ain't interested in the least.

I'm not going to say that 100% of my hires are the best and the brightest. But I've done far better at it than most of my peers at weeding out poor candidates.

Tell Andrew I have a metamorphic monkey. The monkey does shows for $1000 apiece. I can make him look like any member of the audience.

I think the purpose with credit checks is to catch "irresponsible behavior", like a huge mountain of credit card debt, because it could make someone willing to steal.

It never really made a whole lot of sense to me, since most people in the tech industry in debt got that way through a failed startup, or maybe a divorce, or medical expenses, or something like that; none of which makes you a less good candidate. Maybe a lot of charge-offs would be an issue for a CFO.

My general philosophy on references is they only really count if they're strong mutually known parties; a random manager at IBM vouching for someone is pretty meaningless to me. The first circle is founders' personal contacts, then people introduced by their contacts, and people who are introduced by people known to early employees. That scales pretty far if you're hiring in a specific domain.

Ok, Monster is bad, agreed. But what sources would you use then?

eh, I wouldn't worry so much. Bad references are /rare/ - I mean, I remember once giving one client a long list of references (I'm not exactly sure why I was so concerned with this one client? this was a long time ago) anyhow, I told the client that I'd also include another reference, one that I didn't think would be great.

I mean, that last reference was someone I worked for, and I didn't rip them off or anything, but I didn't do particularly good work. I did some sysadmin work for them, and I was also hosting their shit and, kinda sorta went out of business (well, that part is... complicated. the upshot is that I couldn't host their servers anymore.) The process was moderately messy and there were some unpleasant outages before I finally pushed them off on to a competitor of mine that I had worked with before.

but yeah, apparently that guy, in spite of my reservations, gave me a glowing recommendation.

Oddly enough, I ended up doing a less than stellar job for this person, too. I mean, I didn't rip him off, and my early work was okay, but I took several jobs from him later on when I simply didn't have the bandwidth to actually do the work. I mean, I didn't take money for the work I didn't do, but still, accepting a project and then just flaking on it is pretty rude.