Best Hiring Practices
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Best Hiring Practices
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Re: Best Hiring Practices
#2The first step in opening up a position for hiring is to define the position you are looking for. Most companies call this a job specification (or spec).
I'm still shocked at the number of employers who don't create one before they start looking for somebody. Especially those who don't think about how the new hire will fit into the existing organisation.
For example, I've seen this pattern multiple times.
a) Lead Developer (let's call 'em Mary) gets massively overloaded. No time to do the numerous things she's asked to do.
2) "We need another Mary" is as far as the job spec goes.
3) They find "Bob" who is, indeed, mostly another Mary. Bob gets pulled off onto NewFunProject, since Mary is waist deep in keeping CoreCompanyProduct running. Pattern repeats.
4) Mary rapidly gets rather annoyed that Bob gets to play with all the fun new projects, and promptly finds herself a nice new job. Walking away with a head's worth of CoreCompanyProduct that never got to Bob.
5) Bob gets massively overloaded. Goto 2.
Hiring is not what you should do to fix a short term problem.
Re: Best Hiring Practices
#3Many employees don't know how to interview and you should teach them the basics as well as educate them on what you are looking to learn from their interview
If you're in the position of doing interviews for the first time, and don't have anybody around to teach you the basics, I would thoroughly recommend getting a copy of Lou Adler's book "Hire With Your Head". It has some really excellent advice on how to approach interviewing, and the hiring process in general.
There's a brief article on Adler's site that covers accomplishment based interviewing that you can find at http://www.adlerconcepts.com/resources/column/interviewing/u....
Having a focus on accomplishment based questions - drilling down into a candidates' experiences on real projects - is a hugely useful technique. Talking about the work in detail helps you separate candidates that interview well from those with real skills.
Re: Best Hiring Practices
#4Wilson suggests contacting references not provided by the candidate. That can be a major breach of privacy.
When people are looking for jobs -- particularly while employed elsewhere -- they are entitled to do so discreetly. If employer-directed reference checks are a requirement, candidates should be made completely aware of that and be given an opportunity to opt out. If that halts the hiring process, that's fine. At least the applicant retains control of his or her privacy.
Re: Best Hiring Practices
#5A lot of this post is eerily similar to one of my old blog posts: http://voltsteve.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/why-should-i-join-yo...
I'm not claiming the author lifted any of the content but I am curious as to whether or not he/she had read my post in the past?
Re: Best Hiring Practices
#6A lot of this post is eerily similar to one of my old blog posts: http://voltsteve.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/why-should-i-join-yo... I'm not claiming the author lifted any of the content but I am curious as to whether or not he/she had read my post in the past?
Wait, you don't know who the author is and you call yourself a tech recruiter?
Fred Wilson has invested in what, 100 tech companies? He has been writing MBA Monday's posts for years. This post has multiple hundreds of comments on it. There are probably hundreds of retweets and comments on Twitter about it (you know, another company he invested in).
I'm pretty sure he didn't need your blog post to give advice on hiring.
Re: Best Hiring Practices
#7Wilson suggests contacting references not provided by the candidate. That can be a major breach of privacy. When people are looking for jobs -- particularly while employed elsewhere -- they are entitled to do so discreetly. If employer-directed reference checks are a requirement, candidates should be made completely aware of that and be given an opportunity to opt out. If that halts the hiring process, that's fine. A…
Agreed. I've backed out of the job application process for a company rather than give a reference at my current employer before a written offer was on the table. What if I burn the bridges with people at my company, and then I don't like the offer presented by the hiring company?
Re: Best Hiring Practices
#8The first step in opening up a position for hiring is to define the position you are looking for. Most companies call this a job specification (or spec). I'm still shocked at the number of employers who don't create one before they start looking for somebody. Especially those who don't think about how the new hire will fit into the existing organisation. For example, I've seen this pattern multiple times. a) Lead Dev…
The fundamental problem in your example has nothing to do with hiring. It's that Mary is working on something that she dislikes to the point that having to continue on her project in the medium term will cause her to quit. It's both the company and the employee's joint responsibility to ensure that this isn't the case.
Re: Best Hiring Practices
#9> A HR professional can identify the candidates who don't come close to meeting the requirements of the job and filter them out.
In my experience this is mostly not true. Most HR people don't know tech so what the HR screen devolves into is cramming your CV with acronyms so you make it pass the HR grep filter.
> You will want to interview a decent number of folks for every position.
If you're bringing in more than five people for onsite interviews then (IMHO) you're doing it wrong. You're wasting your time and theirs and it's clear to me that you don't know what you're looking for.
At least Fred advocates phone/video screens (of 15 minutes) although he suggests 6-12 onsite candidates.
> Many employees don't know how to interview and you should teach them the basics ...
This is true but I would go further: most people shouldn't interview. It's arguably a talent not a skill. At Google, it's viewed as every engineer's responsibility to do interviews and I disagree with this. Many of the stories of bad interview experiences can be attributed--at least in part--to people who just don't have the interest or talent in interviewing.
Anecdote: in one quarter I once took 10 people to lunch as part of their interview slate. In those lunches I just talked about the company, answered their questions, etc but didn't get into any technical discussions.
Of those 10 I predicted 8 wouldn't get offers, 1 would and 1 I was borderline. Actual results: 1 offer, 9 no offers putting me at 9-10 out of 10.
> If you connect to the candidate on LinkedIn, you can quickly figure out who you know that knows them.
What an incestuous world the NY/SF tech scene must be if this is true. Well it might be true if you're a veteran VC. I can't see it being true for anyone else.
Otherwise this is all straightforward good advice although it skips the most important step: how to determine if someone is a good fit and competent but that's a topic we'll probably argue about in perpetuity.
Re: Best Hiring Practices
#10Wilson suggests contacting references not provided by the candidate. That can be a major breach of privacy. When people are looking for jobs -- particularly while employed elsewhere -- they are entitled to do so discreetly. If employer-directed reference checks are a requirement, candidates should be made completely aware of that and be given an opportunity to opt out. If that halts the hiring process, that's fine. A…
Agreed. I've backed out of the job application process for a company rather than give a reference at my current employer before a written offer was on the table. What if I burn the bridges with people at my company, and then I don't like the offer presented by the hiring company?
> give a reference at my current employer before a written offer was on the table.
Does that mean to imply that you have given a reference to a current employer after getting a written offer? Why would the new company want a reference at that point?