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How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

brookeallen.com

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Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#51

Post by fecak »

humanrebar wrote: post #41
sekasi wrote: post #28

I've done a LOT of interviewing, recruiting and ultimately a lot of saying "no" to people. Over the years I've landed on a series of personal rules on how to do just that. 1. Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve 2. Always let people down gently reinforcing positive notions as well, you never know what state of mind they are in. 3. Always respond to requests for more information This takes me a…

> Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve This is my inclination: "We liked your attitude, you seem intelligent, and well-spoken, but we have concerns about your knowledge of , maybe start contributing to or experiment in and reapply in a year or two." ...my concern is opening up my company for legal liabilities. Am I just being paranoid?

Based on what you wrote, you're probably being paranoid. I deliver lots of 'No' answers as well, and I don't see any issues with what you wrote. Legal liability tends to be around the generic responses where candidates may assume the worst (race, gender/orientation, age, etc.). A specific response that points to a lack of experience in a certain area seems a safer bet than 'not a fit' in most cases.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#52

Post by wyager »

sekasi wrote: post #28

I've done a LOT of interviewing, recruiting and ultimately a lot of saying "no" to people. Over the years I've landed on a series of personal rules on how to do just that. 1. Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve 2. Always let people down gently reinforcing positive notions as well, you never know what state of mind they are in. 3. Always respond to requests for more information This takes me a…

>Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve

Many recruiters don't do this for legal reasons. Anti-discrimination laws make it very risky for companies to explain their hiring rationale, even if it's perfectly reasonable. It would be too expensive to have the lawyers check over every rejection.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#53

Post by electic »

humanrebar wrote: post #41
sekasi wrote: post #28

I've done a LOT of interviewing, recruiting and ultimately a lot of saying "no" to people. Over the years I've landed on a series of personal rules on how to do just that. 1. Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve 2. Always let people down gently reinforcing positive notions as well, you never know what state of mind they are in. 3. Always respond to requests for more information This takes me a…

> Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve This is my inclination: "We liked your attitude, you seem intelligent, and well-spoken, but we have concerns about your knowledge of , maybe start contributing to or experiment in and reapply in a year or two." ...my concern is opening up my company for legal liabilities. Am I just being paranoid?

This happened at my last company. It does in fact open you up to legal liabilities. The company had to settle 18 cases where applicants "disagreed" with the reason of their rejection.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#54

Post by humanrebar »

deedubaya wrote: post #3

When you hire for a person , you find that personality traits are much more important than what an applicant has done in the past, including passion, drive, etc. When you hire to fill a position, all this goes out the window the applicant goes into the hiring lottery pool to maybe get an interview, and then the traditional "You could totally goog this IRL, but I'm going to hire you based off your memory" type of hiri…

> When you hire for a person, you find that personality traits are much more important than what an applicant has done in the past, including passion, drive, etc.

For early- to mid-career developers, definitely. But I wouldn't hire a fixer-upper architect (or systems specialist) then turn him loose on business-critical parts of my system. That's not to say you can't hire an architect for her big upside, but you'd want someone to collaborate on important decisions until she's proven herself capable and trustworthy.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#55

Post by seagreen »

computerjunkie wrote: post #22
seagreen wrote: post #6

"So, here is my answer to the question, “What do we owe the people who we do not hire?” 1. Information on where they stand. 2. An explanation of what they are doing wrong. 3. Help improving." Nope! You don't owe them those things. Good for the author that they tried it and it worked out, but it's not a general rule. Everything works smoother in lots of different parts of life if all parties understand the concept of…

Lets talk about a simple example. You apply for a visa to X country for a special occasion (eg; brothers wedding, graduation ceremony et.al). Two weeks later, you get a response saying "No", just no. Will you be satisfied that you never got any feedback to why it was refused, what you did wrong and what to do to fix it? Feedback, be it good or bad is crucial. I, myself appreciate this feedback, especially in this sce…

Feedback is extremely important. So important, in fact, that you shouldn't rely on _deeply_ compromised sources for it.

People who have just rejected you will never be reliable sources for feedback (on average). That's what friends, confidants, and inside sources are for.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#56

Post by sekasi »

wyager wrote: post #52
sekasi wrote: post #28

I've done a LOT of interviewing, recruiting and ultimately a lot of saying "no" to people. Over the years I've landed on a series of personal rules on how to do just that. 1. Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve 2. Always let people down gently reinforcing positive notions as well, you never know what state of mind they are in. 3. Always respond to requests for more information This takes me a…

>Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve Many recruiters don't do this for legal reasons. Anti-discrimination laws make it very risky for companies to explain their hiring rationale, even if it's perfectly reasonable. It would be too expensive to have the lawyers check over every rejection.

I work in Australia, not in the US. I don't know the intrinsic legal differences here, but I do know a few things about my local market.

I feel really strongly about trying to help people improve, and it's really challenging to do that if you can't bring up the reasons for rejection. If you're being dicky about it "You're not good enough in memory management", that instantly makes people defensive.

If you're trying to help them forward and give them useful tips for improving their portfolio and skillset, the conversation is almost exclusively positive and 9/10 times I get a thank you very much in the end.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#57

Post by hluska »

electic wrote: post #53
humanrebar wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve This is my inclination: "We liked your attitude, you seem intelligent, and well-spoken, but we have concerns about your knowledge of , maybe start contributing to or experiment in and reapply in a year or two." ...my concern is opening up my company for legal liabilities. Am I just being paranoid?

This happened at my last company. It does in fact open you up to legal liabilities. The company had to settle 18 cases where applicants "disagreed" with the reason of their rejection.

I think it is a shame when trying to help people opens you up to liability. If that's not a sign that our society is too litigious, I don't know what is.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#58

Post by smacktoward »

I wonder how much of this kind of thinking can be traced back to a persistent startup-culture problem: the delusion that the people who work for you are, or even should be, your friends.

If that's the lens you're looking at candidates through -- as people auditioning to be your friend -- of course you'd feel you're obligated to help them through their job search! That's what friends do for each other.

But the people who work for you -- and even more so, the people who have only applied to work for you -- are not your friends. You can (and should!) be friendly with them, of course; but you can't have a real, true friendship with them, because you have power over their lives that they don't have over yours.

Moreover, if you try to just ignore that power differential and relate to your employees like they're your old dorm buddies, all you'll find is that the power differential poisons the relationship. They'll constantly be second-guessing their own reactions to you, out of fear of negative job consequences. You'll constantly be second-guessing your own reactions to them, out of fear of appearing to play favorites. And they'll all be second-guessing each others' reactions to you, out of fear of someone brown-nosing their way past them on the career ladder.

It's the same reason why it's always a bad idea to date someone who reports to you -- you can never have the kind of relationship with them you have with someone outside the hierarchy you sit at the top of. Suspicion and jealousy and gamesmanship taint it from the moment it begins.

The solution to all these problems is to learn, understand, and internalize the distinction between colleagues and friends -- two groups of people you owe very different things to -- and then act accordingly.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#59

Post by ars »

nostromo wrote: post #15

I have mixed feelings about this. It's easy to see what's to love: an open, honest, and collaborative hiring process with a boss willing to train employees. Awesome! But he also got about 30 people to spend four weeks building trading software for him. Collectively that's over two years of uncompensated work, the results of which the hiring manager may use for free. And from the perspective of the applicant, how many…

It didn't seem like that to me - the time wasn't spent building the software but rather learning APL. So it was valuable to the students.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#60

Post by buckbova »

dccoolgai wrote: post #40
bbcbasic wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that > 90% of interviews to be the latter, unfortunately. The ones where I got the job were the former! I am stronger at concepts than memory.

The worst is when you have to go through one of those interviews with some smug hoser across from you whose face is contorted into a rictus grin because you couldn't recall, immediately from memory, some obscure Junior Year Computer Science thing. It's just amazing how bad the hiring situation is - It makes me a lot less likely to look around because I just don't want to go through that.

This of course goes both ways. If you put on your resume that you have expert/mastery level experience in technology X, don't be surprised if I drill you on it.
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