Tech Hiring Lessons Learned
danielmiessler.com
Tech Hiring Lessons Learned
1–10 of 31 posts
Re: Tech Hiring Lessons Learned
#2Examples make a huge difference. I try to keep a few personal projects around for people to look at so that I do not have to worry about proprietary code issues.
Re: Tech Hiring Lessons Learned
#3I'd be interested to know how common credit scoring applicants is. I understand why they'd be necessary for financial institutions but as a general method of filtering candidates it seems rather intrusive.
Re: Tech Hiring Lessons Learned
#4The conclusions the author draws are very similar to the conclusions the I/O Psychology community has proven scientifically. The best predictor of future performance is IQ and sample work product. Period.
Re: Tech Hiring Lessons Learned
#5While you can't train experience, the value of experience decreases steeply over time. Sure someone at year 0 has less utility than someone at year 10, but the difference may all but disappear when comparing year 5 vs 10.
Edit: I started out as a BBS sysop. So you can see which side of the equation I'm on. The value of knowing how to admin door games is practically zero at this point.
Re: Tech Hiring Lessons Learned
#6The conclusions the author draws are very similar to the conclusions the I/O Psychology community has proven scientifically. The best predictor of future performance is IQ and sample work product. Period.
Links?
Re: Tech Hiring Lessons Learned
#7While you can't train experience, the value of experience decreases steeply over time. Sure someone at year 0 has less utility than someone at year 10, but the difference may all but disappear when comparing year 5 vs 10. Edit: I started out as a BBS sysop. So you can see which side of the equation I'm on. The value of knowing how to admin door games is practically zero at this point.
This may or may not be true... it is an example of the old statement that I learned in martial arts"
There is a vast difference between having 10 years of experience, and having 1 year of experience repeated 10 times.
The reason there are often few differences between a 5-year career and a 10-year career is that most people find a niche after a few years, and comfortably sit there. But if you can find someone who spent 10 year actively learning and broadening their skills, never settling in... those extra 5 years are immensely valuable.
Re: Tech Hiring Lessons Learned
#8Nothing beats "work samples", agreed. However, interviews should not be discounted. If interview is "deceptive" in your environment, you need to work on your questions. It took me about 10 face-to-faces with candidates in order to get my questions right. Couple of my own face-to-faces with other companies added even more insight into what I need to focus on in order to get better results for my questions.
Education is something that I always forget to look at while reading the resume.
Re: Tech Hiring Lessons Learned
#9The conclusions the author draws are very similar to the conclusions the I/O Psychology community has proven scientifically. The best predictor of future performance is IQ and sample work product. Period.
Links?
My I/O psychology class in grad school :)
Seriously though, if you're interested in this, check out Applied Psychology in HR Management: http://www.amazon.com/Applied-Psychology-Human-Resource-Mana...
Re: Tech Hiring Lessons Learned
#10If you're a developer, and someone asks for your credit score, refuse. Inform them that it's none of their business. If they demand it as part of their hiring process, get up and walk out of the interview. Whatever credit scores may signal about a candidate's future performance, the request for a credit score signals far more about the quality of an employer. You are not going to like working for any company that credit checks employees.
(You may get asked to authorize a credit check as part of a background check process; background checks can be reasonable, for instance if you're going to work for an exchange. But a background check happens after an offer is made; it's not part of the decision process.)
As always on threads like these, I like to plug our recruitment process, which we've been tuning for 4 years or so:
http://www.matasano.com/careers/
There's more to it than what's on the page, but, long story short, we do two interview phases separated by a battery of "challenges", calibrated to take about as much time as a serious on-site tech-out interview would take, but designed to be done in a candidate's spare time in bits and pieces if necessary.