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Why I Won't Hire You

golemtechnologies.com

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Re: Why I Won't Hire You

#71

Post by kls »

zalew wrote: post #11
csomar wrote: post #6

Why I Won't Work For You: Because you are a dick. Now who are you? What are you going to give me in return? Why should I tell you that I love my job and my career. Why should I tell you about my vision and plans? What are you really looking for in that. The hiring should be a lot simpler: - You have a problem. You need someone with the right skills, and hire him. - I have a problem (need money). I pick a job that I h…

Why should I tell you about my vision and plans? What are you really looking for in that. These 'where do you see yourself in 5 years' questions sound like straight from a 'HR for dummies' book. I would really appreciate if an interviewer reading this post explained me what such cliches are trying to test, other than BS skills. Cliche question => cliche response.

These 'where do you see yourself in 5 years' questions sound like straight from a 'HR for dummies' book.

Many of these open ended questions came about from large companies hiring physiologist to help build and identify a profile of an individual that the company would like the hire. Organizations such as the FBI use similar strategies as well. The problem is that many smaller organizations that did not want to spend the money or simply did not know to spend the money on professionals started to emulate the larger companies, but they did not posses the answer keys once they had the answers they just left it up to the interviewer to divine whether it was the right answer or not. Read that last sentence again and then read the definition of a Cargo Cult. you will laugh at the mental image I promise. You see, these interviewing practices are simply the same mentality that created Cargo Cults, somewhere along the way they lost the intelligence and are just emulating the process in ritual and then divining the results.

Re: Why I Won't Hire You

#72

Post by Xurinos »

astral303 wrote: post #35
gk1 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not from HR, but my guess is that a question like that is for learning whether the candidate is goal-oriented or just goes by living day-to-day. I agree that it's a cliche question, and could be phrased more originally and/or specifically in most cases, but it is not _totallt_ useless.

It's a great question and I ask that question all the time. However, unlike the blog writer, I am looking to weed out those that are looking to become managers soon. If you are looking to get a development job as a stepping stone to a management position in 3 years, then you're probably not a software engineer I am looking for. (One of many factors, of course...)

This is what I fear. I fear that some hiring manager is going to make a career choice for me. I chose to interview with his company for a specific position, my choice of career path.

Re: Why I Won't Hire You

#73

Post by JohnnyBrown »

cunac wrote: post #55
astral303 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long CV definitely tells me something about the quality of the candidate. If I am interviewing someone fresh out of school, I can forgive a rambling resume. However, for an experienced person, I am looking for some ability to present information concisely. It's like a design skill: can you present a focused view of the most relevant information? If you think that more than two pages of information is required to adve…

One page resume might work for people with not so much experience but it is very hard to put 25+ years of work in one page except obvious "I solve your problems for money" :-). Just plain listing all places of work with dates can be 20+ lines How much insight can you get from 1995-1996 Company X , Senior Consultant , project Y ??

Include only the 3 or 4 most relevant jobs/items. This way you have all the space you need to explain what you got out of them

Re: Why I Won't Hire You

#74

Post by zalew »

prophetjohn wrote: post #61
edw519 wrote: post #42

I am expecting you to be one of the 99%+ people who I know I won’t hire in the first 5 minutes. If you can't narrow down resumes and phone interviews to candidates with better than a 1% chance of being accepted, then your interviewing pre-screening process is flawed. What other processes in our everyday work will also be flawed? You send me a stupidly long resume 90% of all written correspondence (from customers, use…

> Do I really want to look forward to your sour attitude every day? This sums it up for me. The author sounds like a grumpy person who would be terrible to work for. I also suspect many of these rejections are self-fulfilling prophecies. When you're actively looking for a reason to reject candidates, you're probably going to find one.

and this:

> Do you have hiring war stories (interviewer or interviewee)? Share them in the comments!

looking for an employee is a WAR for this guy?!!

Re: Why I Won't Hire You

#75

Post by amorphid »

edw519 wrote: post #42

I am expecting you to be one of the 99%+ people who I know I won’t hire in the first 5 minutes. If you can't narrow down resumes and phone interviews to candidates with better than a 1% chance of being accepted, then your interviewing pre-screening process is flawed. What other processes in our everyday work will also be flawed? You send me a stupidly long resume 90% of all written correspondence (from customers, use…

edw519, I love your response :)

I think the article would have been more constructive it was titled "Why I Will Hire You."

Re: Why I Won't Hire You

#76

Post by cchurch »

cunac wrote: post #55
astral303 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long CV definitely tells me something about the quality of the candidate. If I am interviewing someone fresh out of school, I can forgive a rambling resume. However, for an experienced person, I am looking for some ability to present information concisely. It's like a design skill: can you present a focused view of the most relevant information? If you think that more than two pages of information is required to adve…

One page resume might work for people with not so much experience but it is very hard to put 25+ years of work in one page except obvious "I solve your problems for money" :-). Just plain listing all places of work with dates can be 20+ lines How much insight can you get from 1995-1996 Company X , Senior Consultant , project Y ??

As someone who reads a lot of resumes, I regularly see two types of resumes:

1) Those that are roughly 1-2 pages per 10 years of experience with care taken to emphasize relevant and recent experience. Skills and knowledge that I actually care about are placed such that I cannot help but notice them on a first glance. Thought is clearly present in this resume.

2) Those that are roughly 13-21 pages (I have one on my desk that is 17 pages for work experience dating to an internship in 1996). Each job is discussed in mind numbing detail without ever giving me any of the details that I may actually care about. Each job includes an "environment" section that lists every tool that was in the building while that project was going on. Spelling and grammar issues are present. Any skills section will be overloaded with undefined in-house tools and frighteningly basic items (such as a senior developer/architect who lists 11 years of experience with FTP and EMAIL).

When you see an interviewer complaining about resumes that are too long and waste time, understand that they're complaining about the latter. I can easily accept minor issues. It is a huge warning sign when their resume makes me wonder if it is their judgement or motivation that is seriously lacking.

Re: Why I Won't Hire You

#77

Post by kls »

csomar wrote: post #27
benjaminwootton wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- You have a problem. You need someone with the right skills, and hire him. - I have a problem (need money). I pick a job that I have the skills for. If you were hiring someone to dig a hole for you, this may be true. But software is a team sport and you do need an element of interviewing for personality, goals, and attitude as well as skills and aptitude.

But software is a team sport and you do need an element of interviewing for personality, goals, and attitude as well as skills and aptitude. Seriously, you figure that from a 2 hour interview? I fall in love with a girl which I thought/seemed/was told was a very good one. Turns out she's a complete slut. Knew that only after 2 weeks getting out with her. Get the person to work with you for few weeks or may be a coupl…

Right there is no substitute for a dating period. People should know this, if you think you have the right candidate but have some reservations tell them, give them 2 weeks to prove themselves and you may be surprised at how much talent you where missing. As well, use it with all candidates, remember that person that was a star in the interview but turned out to be a flop? yeah the 2 weeks works for them as well, you can send them packing in the two weeks once you realize your error.

Re: Why I Won't Hire You

#78

Post by zwieback »

I don't think this guy's that unreasonable, there's a bit of attitude and maybe frustration but having interviewed a bunch of people lately I can relate.

I think the biggest issue with interviewing is that it can only be done well in a team. We usually have at least 5 or 6 people interviewing and some of them have to be from unrelated projects. We have the luxury of drawing from a large pool of engineers from different projects but for smaller companies it might be a good idea to pull in people from other companies as neutral observers, if that's possible.

I always find it interesting to discover my own biases during the debrief meeting.

+1 on the long resumes, though. Also, listing every programming language or CAD program in the skills list is very off-putting.

Re: Why I Won't Hire You

#79

Post by mikeash »

atacrawl wrote: post #69

Wow, I'm pretty surprised to see such a collectively sensitive reaction to this post. Try to see things from this guy's perspective -- this comes across as a guy who's grown really tired of being bombarded by terrible resumes. Then, the few candidates whose resumes appeal to him result in terrible interviews because the candidate either doesn't give a shit about what he/she does, or misled (if not flat-out lied) abou…

Ornery is fine, the trouble is that half the stuff he wants is crap. You want everybody to have a good answer ready for what their career plan is extending out a full decade? Well, that eliminates a whole lot of people, many of them perfectly qualified, for no good reason.

There's some good stuff in here, but that's outweighed by the large serving of nonsense.

Re: Why I Won't Hire You

#80

Post by cchurch »

ascold wrote: post #45

If you are looking for a good communicator among nerds, you are definitely looking in the wrong place. You need a salesman.

There's a difference between "excellent at communicating" and "obviously does not care".

An excellent example of the latter is the presence of spelling errors that could have been fixed with spell-check, completely random font changes due to copy-and-paste, etc. These typically are just the superficial signs that no thought was put into the content.

It's like showing up for an interview in a dirty t-shirt and sneakers. I'm not looking for excellent fashion sense; I'm looking for a basic awareness of the world around them.

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