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I don't hire unlucky people

raganwald.posterous.com

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Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#31

Post by cookiecaper »

DarkShikari wrote: post #10

This article is superb. We tried placing ads for ninjas, rock stars, and so on, but I discovered this was the cultural equivalent of advertising for white males who drink dry martinis. Not that white males who drink dry martinis can’t do the job, but there’s no real difference between advertising for a Ninja and throwing half your resumés away because you don’t like unlucky people. Either way, you end up with fewer r…

Indeed. My ad scoring program deducts 5 points and transparently kills off ads that contain terms like "ninja" and "rock star" because to my mind they indicate a propensity for either abuse ("a rock star should be able to code this in three days!!") or fad-following ineptitude ("rock stars are the coolest kind of programmers, I must have them! also, we write EVERYTHING in Ruby, it's like the Mac of programming").

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#32

Post by idan »

mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #18
pavel_lishin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appl…

Right now, we aren't doing any kind of indexing. If you apply for a position through our service, you give whatever information you want about yourself, and we check out your public data on those networks. If you don't want to share your twitter or stack overflow, leave those fields blank.

We don't publish the details of the algorithm but in effects it would be fairly difficult to game. Either you have a solid history of consuming and contributing relevant content or you don't. If you are able to manufacture that fraudulently, well, chances are that you're somebody interesting to talk to.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#33

Post by raganwald »

plinkplonk wrote: post #26

I agree with every point Reginald makes but (and I am being nitpicky here) the form of the story - the seeming overtailored parable nature of it, of the kind you'd find in the Reader's Digest or a religious tract - rubs me ever so slightly the wrong way. I could have done without all the fake (or seemingly fake anyway) dialogue between the Wooster/Oscar etc and would have preferred a straightforward "This is what I(R…

Something like this?

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/02/naive-approach-to-hiring...

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#34

Post by esmevane »

plinkplonk wrote: post #26

I agree with every point Reginald makes but (and I am being nitpicky here) the form of the story - the seeming overtailored parable nature of it, of the kind you'd find in the Reader's Digest or a religious tract - rubs me ever so slightly the wrong way. I could have done without all the fake (or seemingly fake anyway) dialogue between the Wooster/Oscar etc and would have preferred a straightforward "This is what I(R…

I agree with you on the preference, but I'd like to add that sometimes a format preference exists only as a way of allowing the author to express their ideas succinctly.

As much as I may dislike the storyteller format of the article, philosophically speaking, I have a practical inability to read other, drier essays. And then there are essays which have no reasonable usage of paragraphs and sentences to encapsulate or describe ideas, etc. Compared to those, I would pick a storyteller format.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#36

Post by plinkplonk »

raganwald wrote: post #33
plinkplonk wrote: post #26

I agree with every point Reginald makes but (and I am being nitpicky here) the form of the story - the seeming overtailored parable nature of it, of the kind you'd find in the Reader's Digest or a religious tract - rubs me ever so slightly the wrong way. I could have done without all the fake (or seemingly fake anyway) dialogue between the Wooster/Oscar etc and would have preferred a straightforward "This is what I(R…

Something like this? http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/02/naive-approach-to-hiring...

yes, something like that. I find the style much more natural and less grating. The 'parable' format 'feels' (to me, purely subjectively etc etc) like chalk screeching on blackboard, obscuring the (very valid) substance of the argument.

Or maybe it is just a matter of better technique. There may be a way of telling a story to make the same points without the reader being jerked out of his involvement with the material,and being made aware he is reading a story. I don't know.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#37

Post by davidkatz »

mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #18
pavel_lishin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appl…

Hey! I'm David, the other co-founder of Skills. We're been mulling over our scoring for a while, and at this point we don't consider it a fundamental part of the product. Within the next few weeks, we'll be canning 'passion' and 'respect' and replacing it with something much simpler. In the future, we might drop scoring all together.

Our mission it to extract the most meaningful data from someone's professional activity online, and we're currently exploring how to best do that. If you're a job seeker, it's our goal to show employers the best version of you.

Question: do you think your current activity online can make you look good to employers? If so, what would you most like to show them?

Thanks!

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#38

Post by robterrell »

dustingetz wrote: post #21

i know a guy running a software shop. he's an active participant in the local meetup community, and he cares about people. it's no surpise that he has all sorts of talented people trying to work with him, and not enough funding to hire them all . (at least, i think that's why he hasn't hired me ;) i also know a few other people running software shops, who don't participate in the local meetup community. none of the b…

Isn't that just another filter for luck? You're filtering out candidates who don't know about the meetup, or have kids and can't make the meetup's evening hours, or prefer another meetup that happens to be at the same time elsewhere, etc.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#39

Post by karamazov »

mathetic wrote: post #20

The 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] Harvar…

In the US, you don't apply to a school for CS - you just apply to the university as undergraduate. It's quite common for undergraduates to not know what they want to study as freshmen, and to change their minds over the course of university.

That being said, HYPMS do want you to have good grades overall and solid extracurriculars, it's immensely helpful to be world-class in some activity; the particular activity doesn't matter as much.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#40

Post by raganwald »

cousin_it wrote: post #28
raganwald wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. W…

Thanks, and sorry for asking a harsh question :-) Your recommendations are sensible. It's curious that they seem to suggest that coding ability is close to a one-dimensional measurement of the candidate. Do you think we could measure the largest principal component of coding ability with a standardized exam, like IQ? That would save everyone the hassle of interviewing, and also ensure non-discrimination as a nice bon…

I don’t personally think software development ability is one-dimensional, but the post was intended more as a caution against an anti-pattern than a how-to for interviewing. But since you ask about non-discrimination, this was on HN recently:

http://raganwald.posterous.com/a-womans-story

Discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3772292

(Warning: Heavy on the subject of Race, IQ, Reverse Discrimination, and other pet topics).

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