So the most efficient interviewing process for the employer is also the nicest to candidates? What a curious coincidence. Are you sure there was no wishful thinking involved in writing this post?
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I don't hire unlucky people
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Re: I don't hire unlucky people
#12This is exactly what we've been thinking about for the last year while we've been building http://skillsapp.com . Exactly. Love it when lucid, articulate writers take my mess of a brain and put the right words to it.
I took a look at skills app -- I like the approach and the clean layout, but a couple thoughts from this hiring manager:
* Most of the really good devs I know and hire do not bother with easy metrics like number of tweets, followers, or StackOverflow points. They are perfect to paste together on summary reports and look "complete," but their absolute values or essence don't mean anything.
* The high numbers on public sites seem to be for two classes of devs -- celebrities, who you already know are celebrities -- and people with way too much time on their hands (if they don't work for an open source company, which most people don't). Most people have average values. If someone is on LinkedIn, I'm more interested to see if they have X hundred followers per years in industry up to some maximum lifetime value. I generally ignore recommendations.
* See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3771286 for the discussion about what the number of points actually measures on SO, for example. It's a great site, but it's struggling to handle both breadth and depth of material well. High numbers does not necessarily correlate with expertise, just dedication. Maybe I want that skillset for a customer service rep, but I haven't yet wanted it for an engineer.
* I have shipped 20M loc in my career in 32 regions, and none of it is available on github or sourceforge. Most engineers are like that -- again, the public numbers are biased to certain individuals. Maybe there is a way for candidates to quantify the projects they have worked on?
* What I would love is a way to automatically assess FizzBuzz on candidates. I know there are some sites like interviewstreet.com that try to do this, but they don't yet have the critical mass like linkedin. And I fear, the moment they get critical mass then they'll become a new SAT or other standardized test that becomes too easy to game.
Re: I don't hire unlucky people
#13You belong here. We’ll do great things together
inspiring!
Re: I don't hire unlucky people
#14So the most efficient interviewing process for the employer is also the nicest to candidates? What a curious coincidence. Are you sure there was no wishful thinking involved in writing this post?
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I agree it sounds very reasonable. But the article mentions A/B tests. Did you actually do these tests? The heroine of your story has good reasons to believe that the described interviewing process is pretty good, but why do you believe that?
Re: I don't hire unlucky people
#15My takeaway from the article was that Ernestine wanted to hire a good programmer and she focussed on just that. She did not consider the established conventions on what to do in such a situation.
Interestingly, I have observed this to be true in few other situations as well, where established conventions and processes are actually an hindrance rather than help.
Re: I don't hire unlucky people
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I agree it sounds very reasonable. But the article mentions A/B tests. Did you actually do these tests? The heroine of your story has good reasons to believe that the described interviewing process is pretty good, but why do you believe that?
Sorry, my first reply added zero bits of information. Yes, I have absolutely managed hiring ads exactly the same way one manages selling things online, right down to split testing different ads, managing keyword buys, the usual yadda yadda. It’s tough, because there is so little signal.
It’s also harsh because the best source of good candidates are personal contacts, which violate just about everything in the post. Which suggests that the post is really only about one very specific thing, managing the inbound funnel generated by ads, cereers@yourcompany.com, and so on.
Re: I don't hire unlucky people
#17Sir Reginald Braithwaite is one of Toronto's best. Thanks for yet another fantastic article man.
Re: I don't hire unlucky people
#18This is exactly what we've been thinking about for the last year while we've been building http://skillsapp.com . Exactly. Love it when lucid, articulate writers take my mess of a brain and put the right words to it.
How do you measure "passion" and "respect"? And how are the twitter tags determined?
If I'm a job seeker I want to present myself in the best possible light. Allowing a 3rd party to rate my "passion" and "respect" without any knowledge of the algorithm would keep me from using the service. If you did publish the algorithm it will be gamed just like search engines in a matter of hours. You might want to consider suggesting tags and keywords and allowing job seekers to select the ones they believe apply. I would consider dropping the "passion" and "respect" part as they may open you to future legal action.
Re: I don't hire unlucky people
#19This is exactly what we've been thinking about for the last year while we've been building http://skillsapp.com . Exactly. Love it when lucid, articulate writers take my mess of a brain and put the right words to it.
I took a look at skills app -- I like the approach and the clean layout, but a couple thoughts from this hiring manager: * Most of the really good devs I know and hire do not bother with easy metrics like number of tweets, followers, or StackOverflow points. They are perfect to paste together on summary reports and look "complete," but their absolute values or essence don't mean anything. * The high numbers on public…
Thanks for sharing your brain (and experience) with us!
We don't think number of tweets or followers is a relevant means of assessment at all—quite the opposite. Ashton Kutcher is not an interesting candidate for a rails job, and that should be reflected in our report for him (were he ever to apply for such a position.)
We obviously gather a lot of metrics (hey, storage is cheap) but the ones we actually use in our scoring mix right now are tied to two simple concepts: does this person care about their craft, and do they enjoy any amount of professional respect for what they do.
We aren't offering shoe size; what you need in early-stage hiring decisions is an indicator: something more fast than perfect. Resumes suck at this because everybody is trained to write sterile, "professional" resumes stuffed to the brim with keywords. We can tell a much more interesting story—today!—with the kinds of data that most developers in our industry are already sharing. SO reputation isn't a story, it's a data point. What tech people ask questions about versus what tech they answer questions about reveals something more interesting. They know Python very well but seem to be exploring JavaScript? Interesting. Maybe a hybrid in the making.
Skills isn't for everyone and every industry; it's for one industry and a very specific breed of candidates that has this kind of publicly-visible track record. We think there are enough companies that are hiring in this space that there's a business to be built here now, and the Internet trends towards more public data. Do we really think that we'll still be using resumes in ten years to assess whether to spend more time on engineering candidate X?
Re: I don't hire unlucky people
#20The article summarizes the difference between British and American college entrance system as well.
When you apply for CS in Britain (and I'm talking about Oxbridge), they care only about your experience with computers and mathematics.
However, in HYPMS [1] the qualification is based on your irrelevant grades and your extracurriculars. You might be the most active guy and get a place but a poor programmer.
[1] Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford