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The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

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Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#71

Post by antonymoose »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #66

Are there any battle-tested strategies for hiring that are generally known to be good, but aren't often used because it's hard or doesn't scale? Asking because my business is growing and we've gotten lucky with our hires so far, but I'd like to add my discipline to hiring well.

We source our intern-to-Junior pipeline from a good state school from which we have a few graduates. We have about an 80% placement rate for the interns. We’ve yet to have any abusive or bad hires, this being a fully remote company. For Senior hires, a prior employee founded a Java User Group and sourced several high quality engineers from the pool of visitors. So, build a pipeline and play the long game?

Previously we’ve sourced candidates via a reputable recruiter from an in-town firm that our manager can routinely sit down with and build a relationship over the years. This had a good rate with only one bad placement. We ultimately traded time cost for money cost in that one, but I liked it.

The worst outcomes we’ve had were via LinkedIn jobs posts. By the time our in-house full-time recruiter would give us resumes half would be obvious frauds with most of the remainder being subtle frauds. I blame this in good part to having non-technical staff as the first filter in our pipeline.

Unfortunately the firm makes money hand over fist year on year so we are no longer a lean mean operation but a burgeoning beauracracy with room to hide, rest, and vest.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#72

Post by cyanydeez »

cyanydeez wrote: post #5
ungreased0675 wrote: post #3

Good hiring almost certainly has to be a significant competitive advantage. It makes me wonder why so many otherwise successful companies let HR bungle the hiring process.

Here's the secret: it's still just gambling. Elon musk isn't a trillionaire because he brought something special to the table; it's because he was able to perform the martigale enough times and he arbitrarily reached the top. Hiring is exactly the same thing, even when trying to do it on merit, people are simply poor judges of character, ability and the rest. Most of society is governed by people who simply kept gett…

People really want _their_ position to be meritocracy because their ego can't handle alternatives of a chaotic world.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#73

Post by thih9 »

addaon wrote: post #70
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #66

Are there any battle-tested strategies for hiring that are generally known to be good, but aren't often used because it's hard or doesn't scale? Asking because my business is growing and we've gotten lucky with our hires so far, but I'd like to add my discipline to hiring well.

Ask the best people you’ve ever worked with who the best people they’ve worked with are. Recurse. When names start repeating through different graph paths, make those people an offer they can’t refuse. Once they join, ask them to do the same, and give them the budget and role to make it happen.

Is this really battle-tested, as in: did you see this work in practice or do you have a reliable source?

Or is this something you came up with?

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#74

Post by dasil003 »

maccard wrote: post #17
dasil003 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Hiring being broken has nothing to do with cost, it's a filtering problem. Even when there's no HR or bean counter in sight it's still hard. There's fundamentally limited signal you can extract from interviews, so there's very loose correlation to on-the-job performance. Saying it's a cost-cutting problem would just encourage more and longer interviews, which could actually work against you because high performe…

> High performers tend to have more options and will not jump through infinite hoops. Biases are a strange thing. “High performers” aren’t one homogenous group; take a staff engineer at a FAANG and plop them in a role at a startup or vice versa and you’ll find very quickly that high performers are a product of environment (IME). The people you need to ship something at a big company will sink your startup, and the pe…

Agreed, that's why I said used the phrasing "tend to". There's no silver bullet.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#75

Post by maccard »

ghaff wrote: post #45
maccard wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> High performers tend to have more options and will not jump through infinite hoops. Biases are a strange thing. “High performers” aren’t one homogenous group; take a staff engineer at a FAANG and plop them in a role at a startup or vice versa and you’ll find very quickly that high performers are a product of environment (IME). The people you need to ship something at a big company will sink your startup, and the pe…

It doesn't even need to be startups versus FANNG. I've seen first-hand how people hired into various roles aren't a great fit for roles as a company grows and changes. Of course, they can adapt to various degrees but they'd probably never have been hired for the roles they're now in. The problem with trials is that people often have a current job of some sort and having things not work out puts them in a difficult si…

> The problem with trials is that people often have a current job of some sort and having things not work out puts them in a difficult situation. May happen anyway but, generally, a new job is assumed to be at least a somewhat stable situation.

Totally, and I’d never say “hey I think you might be a fit, let’s try it out for 3 months”. But if we interview someone I’m just doing my best to try and figure out do they get on with the team, do they have the right skill set match for the gap we’re trying to fill and will their working style work in the org. Everything after that is (unfortunately) up to how it goes when we’re working together.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#76

Post by gopher_space »

maccard wrote: post #10
ungreased0675 wrote: post #3

Good hiring almost certainly has to be a significant competitive advantage. It makes me wonder why so many otherwise successful companies let HR bungle the hiring process.

I’ve worked with places that have had HR bungle the hiring and places that haven’t. The only difference is whether it’s HR or Engineering bungling the hiring. Writing a job description that actually matches what you want is hard work. Sifting through 300 applicants that don’t meet the requirements or lie on the application form is hard work. Doing 10 30 minute intro calls is hard work. Desigining “standard” questions…

> And then getting the group to stop saying “we want to speak to more people” is harder than any of the previous steps.

FOMO will keep them doing this in perpetuity until you find a way to make them feel the pain.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#77

Post by addaon »

thih9 wrote: post #73
addaon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask the best people you’ve ever worked with who the best people they’ve worked with are. Recurse. When names start repeating through different graph paths, make those people an offer they can’t refuse. Once they join, ask them to do the same, and give them the budget and role to make it happen.

Is this really battle-tested, as in: did you see this work in practice or do you have a reliable source? Or is this something you came up with?

I am aware of several startups that started this way, and have been involved in some. The quality of the results depends on who you seed the graph with, of course; but I’ve seen it work well.

As requested by the original poster, it doesn’t scale.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#78

Post by zulux »

oblio wrote: post #65
Aurornis wrote: post #11

> “There is a growing gap between the candidate’s written persona and their live presence. I’ll see a cover letter that is poetic and a résumé that is flawlessly structured, but then the person on the video call struggles to explain their own bullet points. This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”. I can remember a few int…

> This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”. Yeah, but it's now 1000x worse. Before you needed actual skill (or luck) to create a good looking CV, especially for niche positions. Now you take their job description, the company's "About us" webpage, your old CV and have LLMs generate a CV with pretty solid grammar and most o…

We ask for something stupid like "3 years of Pascal experience." If the resume has it, it goes straight to the trash unless it has specific real-world Pascal experience.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#79

Post by dan-robertson »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #66

Are there any battle-tested strategies for hiring that are generally known to be good, but aren't often used because it's hard or doesn't scale? Asking because my business is growing and we've gotten lucky with our hires so far, but I'd like to add my discipline to hiring well.

I think various ‘longer interview’ processes can be good by reducing the chance of particularly regretted hires. This could be internships (but note this goes two ways and you want interns to accept offers and recommend the programme to their friends even if they are not hired) or work sample tests. Both have the downside that they are more work for the candidate (especially internships or some other short-term-to-possibly-long-term position) and so experienced candidates who feel they have better options and less need to prove themselves typically won’t take part (this depends a bit on how much they want to work at your specific company of course). Potentially this isn’t so bad – competing to hire the same people as everyone else is going to be more expensive – or potentially it is bad – maybe there’s a reason those candidates are in high demand and you will suffer from only getting a look at people who didn’t fit the typical pattern. I think it’s going to depend a bunch on how good you are at sourcing candidates and how hot your firm is.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#80

Post by vkou »

zulux wrote: post #78
oblio wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”. Yeah, but it's now 1000x worse. Before you needed actual skill (or luck) to create a good looking CV, especially for niche positions. Now you take their job description, the company's "About us" webpage, your old CV and have LLMs generate a CV with pretty solid grammar and most o…

We ask for something stupid like "3 years of Pascal experience." If the resume has it, it goes straight to the trash unless it has specific real-world Pascal experience.

You'll also filter out people smart enough to know that this is a bullshit keyword matching game and the only way to win it is to put the keywords on their resume.

Because they assume that the job posting was written by a non-technical idiot, and 95% of the time, they'd be correct, and they are just playing the game as the game expects to be played.

Look. If you're looking for 100% integrity and honesty from everyone in their communication, you shouldn't expect find it in a corporation's hiring and HR process. Everyone white-lies (or black-lies) all the time, both up and down the chain. The bones of this interaction do not value, reward, or even want honesty.

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