I didn't even read the story after this gem:
"In 2012, for example, consulting firm Leadership IQ announced it had tracked 20,000 new hires over time and discovered that 46% of them had failed within 18 months. In other words, most recruiting practices are about as effective as a coin toss."
Now, what's wrong with this reasoning? :-)
The Way We Hire Is All Wrong
41–50 of 143 posts
Re: The Way We Hire Is All Wrong
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many companies hire contractors and then turn them into permanent employees.
I'm a startup founder and while this had been our initial approach to evaluating new engineers, our payroll company, PayChex, has specifically advised us to NOT do this. Why? Because it sends a red flag to the IRS to come after us for taxes for the period when they were a contractor. Crazily enough PayChex has told us that the real solution here is for us to "sign" the person over to a contracting company so we can h…
So... pay more money now via contracting house markup to avoid maybe paying more later?
Re: The Way We Hire Is All Wrong
#43I strongly believe that hiring should be based on data. Based on the following 5 factors:
1.Intellect 2.Values 3.Motivations 4.Behaviours 5.Experience
With these factors you can determine a persons Cultural Fit and predicted future performance. In fact, you could automate this through technology.
For example, for predicting future performance we could test the high performers in our company then we have a template for what motivations and behaviours high performers are likely to exhibit. Based on this we can then assess new comers and map them against high performers. The more highly correlated they are, the more likely you should be to hire them.
For culture, if you currently like the culture of your company you could simply assess the values of all your employees, average them and assess new applicants against this and depending on correlation, hire them or not. This could be done through a CFT (Cultural Fit Tool)
But this is just one suggestion. Software that enables this could work quite well IMO.
Re: The Way We Hire Is All Wrong
#44What a bizarre and compelling story. Glad to have read it. Meanwhile I think the hiring problem/solution is staring us right in the face. What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default? Isn't it perhaps weird that there is an assumption companies and employees should bind their fates together, and, if it doesn't work out, one or both parties is pretty screwed because of…
> What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default? I've heard this line a lot. The interesting thing is that there are areas, even inside tech, that this is the default. And it's nto necessarily better. For example, steelworks or the oil industry. A pretty significant portion of the employees in these fields (including IT sectors) are contractors. They have minimal job se…
Agreed. I'm guessing there should be (in the realm of possible solutions) some sort of intermediate arrangement, or a whole spectrum of intermediate arrangements. These may previously have been too complex to manage, but might now be plausible.
(Can't help but feel like there's some sort of parallel between this and conventional attitudes towards marriage! Just because marriage is a little bizzare doesn't mean that the only alternative should be bachelor life forever.)
Re: The Way We Hire Is All Wrong
#45One thing I've wondered is why companies hire people one at a time. Barely anyone works alone on anything, yet to decide whether to hire someone, you invite people individually through a funnel process and expect them to be able to work together. The best teams are not necessarily the ones with the most Ivy Leaguers on them. Why don't more companies let the applicants self-organise, and then hire the best teams?
I want to build my own team, not have to take a "best of what I can find" pre-built team.
A lot of pre-built teams work that way because they have naturally developed the rapport required to operate so effectively. You can't force people to like each other and work well together. I'd hire a team in a heartbeat.
Re: The Way We Hire Is All Wrong
#46>Staffup Weekend put the lie to Stein’s pronouncement. As Nicholson later wrote me, “The fact that people stayed for 48 hours to work on something put them head and shoulders above the thousands of applications we receive, because the participants are people who show up and see things through.”
And this event is an attempt to make showing up for a 48 hour 'work trial' a norm. This favors the younger, single population, and while you're working on whatever this event is, you are not putting more resumes out. There's the potential for abuse in getting free work out of applicants from other people mimicking this event.
(How long until we're tossed into an arena with bows and arrows only to survive and rewrite every algorithm from a CS degree on a whiteboard?)
Although the 46% percentage figure was shown in this thread to be wrong/bad, even if you consider hiring as a coin-toss, your success still depends on how many resumes you can put out there. You have to balance the time it takes to tailor your resume to the company versus moving on and finding the next company to submit a resume to. At the extremes, some people don't tailor at all and throw their resume and cover letter at everyone in a suit. Others will do deep-dive research and make 27 drafts of a resume/cover to the point where they already know more about the company than the person who may hire them. I still think there's significant coin-tossery going on: if the companies are having to filter everyone because there is so much volume, then you must at least do as much as you can to increase your own output. The 'trick' then is to just know someone who can put in a good word (and it really has always been an option)
This may work for some job sectors as a novel hiring process (it's certainly overblown for retail/fast food) but if it scales up, you'll end up taking significant bargaining power from individuals. To say nothing if companies start replacing their current employees with the winners from these kinds of events.
Re: The Way We Hire Is All Wrong
#47I strongly believe that hiring should be based on data. Based on the following 5 factors: 1.Intellect 2.Values 3.Motivations 4.Behaviours 5.Experience With these factors you can determine a persons Cultural Fit and predicted future performance. In fact, you could automate this through technology. For example, for predicting future performance we could test the high performers in our company then we have a template fo…
Any system that classifies people who have knowledge of the system will be gamed. eg the endless battle between Google search quality and SEO hackers.
Re: The Way We Hire Is All Wrong
#48What a bizarre and compelling story. Glad to have read it. Meanwhile I think the hiring problem/solution is staring us right in the face. What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default? Isn't it perhaps weird that there is an assumption companies and employees should bind their fates together, and, if it doesn't work out, one or both parties is pretty screwed because of…
> What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default?
It appears to be what we are moving towards, and so far it ain't looking pretty. Sure, "our kind of people" profit from it, but mostly workers are being ruthlessly exploited on a massive scale without the protection offered to employees in most civilized countries outside the US.
Re: The Way We Hire Is All Wrong
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I were ever in charge of hiring for many types of position (whether programming, or writing, or such), I think I would do something similar. The advertisement will say "looking for full time X (must complete initial contract period of Y weeks)" or similar. The best way to see if you like someone's work, is to see it. So, hire them for up to three months (telling them that this is what is happening, and why, and be…
No, that's not similar. There's a huge difference there ... Good consultants / freelancers have higher hourly rates than normal employees, to cover their expenses and the periods of inactivity. Plus really good ones are much more expensive simply because they can deliver value that can't be delivered by average employees, so they are expensive because there's demand for their skill-set. Your solution for example woul…
Of course, for that initial period, paying extra would be the way to go. The difference between what I suggest, and an ordinary probation period is thus: with an ordinary probation period, still only one person is hired, but not only do the others not get paid, the one person is still not guaranteed a job at the end of the process. My way's more upfront.
Re: The Way We Hire Is All Wrong
#50What a bizarre and compelling story. Glad to have read it. Meanwhile I think the hiring problem/solution is staring us right in the face. What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default? Isn't it perhaps weird that there is an assumption companies and employees should bind their fates together, and, if it doesn't work out, one or both parties is pretty screwed because of…
If I were ever in charge of hiring for many types of position (whether programming, or writing, or such), I think I would do something similar. The advertisement will say "looking for full time X (must complete initial contract period of Y weeks)" or similar. The best way to see if you like someone's work, is to see it. So, hire them for up to three months (telling them that this is what is happening, and why, and be…
That's pretty much how it works here. Labour contracts include a provision that you can be fired for any reason at any point during the first three months with the company (they still have to pay you for all the days you're with them, of course). Conversely, they also include the clause that you can leave at any point during those three months without advance notice. After that, both parties must give a full month's advance notice to the other before terminating the relationship.