The Way We Hire Is All Wrong • Hacker News Board

Re: The Way We Hire Is All Wrong

#121

Post by ryguytilidie » Wed, Jan 28, 2015, 7:34 PM UTC

lifehug wrote: post #105

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #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 populatio…

"One reason is that employers can easily be flooded with hundreds, or sometimes thousands, of applications" We're told our immigration policy has caused a drought in programmers, yet employers are flooded with applications from the nonexistent workforce.

Just because there are lots of applicants doesn't mean there are lots of qualified people.

Re: The Way We Hire Is All Wrong

#122

Post by palere » Wed, Jan 28, 2015, 7:36 PM UTC

vonnik wrote: post #109

JamesBarney wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds to me like FutureAdvisor might have a problem with low compensation. Previously you mentioned making 8 offers at this event, and only one accepted. And these are candidates who specifically had 2 days free to work on receiving a job, so they have lower compensation requirements then an average dev of equivalent skill, and still 7 of the 8 rejected your offer. This doesn't seem to me to be a problem of marke…

That would be fair to surmise, but incorrect. While most startups cannot pay Google salaries, we are competitive with our salary-equity mix. It took us a while to learn what the market price was for various types of roles, and we offer that. We made 8 interview offers. 7 people either chose not to continue or were rejected by my teams further down the line. Some of those who chose not to continue were not devs, but c…

Funny, I've actually been thinking about this problem recently and can totally relate to your dating analogy as I see it similarly. As you know, there are several steps in the hiring pipeline, from introductions (getting to know one another), to qualifying (what you're talking about and which has n > 1 iterations- phone screen to inhouse to multiple inhouse depending on level), to on boarding, etc. You initially want to apply a speed dating filter to weed out the few of interest (a guy/girl can walk into a bar and within 30 secs tell which individuals is of interest to them. You want to get there!)

Moving on to the initial qualifying state, I think the one mistake you're making is assuming that only your company can validate this unknown person. To truly scale, we need to figure out a trust scheme (we sort of have it already with our belief in top ranking schools - you mentioned it is a crappy metric, which I agree, but this has historically been the baseline). We need sort of an SSL certificate like system where some third party(ies) can qualify individuals for your company. Again we sort of have this (on the technical front) with top coder scoring, online tests, SO rating, Git Hub Repo, etc. We need to come up with a standard "reputation" service, most likely related to skill, that can be applied in scale.

If anyone cares to bat around some ideas, I'd be an interested party.

Re: The Way We Hire Is All Wrong

#123

Post by lubujackson » Wed, Jan 28, 2015, 7:47 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #110

lubujackson wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first real job interview in 1999 worked exactly like this. A pool of candidates came in and were given the same 2 day coding assignment. We were paid for our time and worked on site. It was a great experience, but I tend to like working on interesting problems (which I guess is a valuable trait in itself). It especially made sense at this company because they were using an obscure coding platform and needed to tra…

I think the key part of that is: Getting paid. I'd happily do that type of interview as two days of money coming in is still great in its own right when you're unemployed. Plus it seems like an utterly fair way of evaluating candidates that I don't really feel like trick questions, riddles, and high pressure whiteboard challenges accomplish. One question/concern I have is: How much paperwork is involved in paying som…

I think the law is that if it's a contract job and you get paid under something like $500 you don't even need a W2 form (or whichever one it is for that). That might vary state-by-state.

Re: The Way We Hire Is All Wrong

#124

Post by BrookeTAllen » Wed, Jan 28, 2015, 7:51 PM UTC

owennoah wrote: post #113

BrookeTAllen wrote: post #103

This is awesome; I am so thrilled you are talking about this. I am preparing a response to Deborah’s article; working title: A Hackathon Cannot Fix a Broken Hiring Process. But the Right Experiences Can. You see, in 2004 my life changed when I started caring about the people I did not hire. You discussed that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859199 But the thing you probably don’t get, and I didn't get unt…

I'm Noah, Brooke's partner in crime at Staffup Weekend. To me this has always been an emperor-has-no-clothes situation. People seem to think in terms of "hackathons" whereas we more simply think of things as "doing the work." Since when did resumes and brain teasing interview questions and all this nonsense become MORE obvious and sensical than DOING THE WORK. Let people DO THE WORK that needs to be done and you can…

I agree but I think we must make it clear that the work we ask people to do should be similar to the work the employer wants done, but not work the employer would benefit from. I believe it is important to pay for work done for my benefit. When I've been the hiring manager, once I need to determine if the candidate can do the particular work I need done I'll pay them to do it. Often one day for $150. Usually they offer to do it for minimum wage but the difference is trivial. Many offer to do it for free but again I won't let them.

On the other hand, I tell job seekers to get to work doing things for others whether for pay or not. This is perfectly legal because you are working for yourself and the only person who can pay you less than minimum wage is you.

I wrote about how to do this legally, morally, and ethically here: http://www.noshortageofwork.com/pages/2286

Re: The Way We Hire Is All Wrong

#125

Post by BrookeTAllen » Wed, Jan 28, 2015, 8:01 PM UTC

dropit_sphere wrote: post #119

BrookeTAllen wrote: post #103

This is awesome; I am so thrilled you are talking about this. I am preparing a response to Deborah’s article; working title: A Hackathon Cannot Fix a Broken Hiring Process. But the Right Experiences Can. You see, in 2004 my life changed when I started caring about the people I did not hire. You discussed that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859199 But the thing you probably don’t get, and I didn't get unt…

I came across your (or Chris's?) ad on craigslist, emailed, wanted to attend, and then, uh, completely spaced it. I think you're onto something, but I don't think it can scale. I also think that that is not necessarily a bad thing. Would you prefer Staffup Weekend to have a nationally-recognized brand and attract people who "heard it was a good way to get a job/find good candidates" without much caring about whether…

This can scale but not without a lot of people doing a lot of work that they want to do. And they need to care about the people on the other side; whether they are job candidate you don't hire or employers you don't want to work for.

You cannot care about a resume (because a resume is not a person) or a corporation (because although a corporation is person in the eyes of the law it has no soul). That is why the default way we hire is inhumane and beyond reform.

Caring about strangers is about the most soul-satisfying thing you can do; much better than going to another ball game with your kids. That is why I've taken my kids to my hiring events. (And I am glad to know that at least one job seeker at our Staffup Weekend brought a kid and everyone took turns babysitting.)

Even if you only care about the problem but not the people, once you get going on this approach you'll start caring about people because you cannot help yourself. There is something addictive about that, and addictive things tend to scale whether they are a good idea or not.

This one just happens to be a good idea.

Re: The Way We Hire Is All Wrong

#126

Post by tessierashpool » Wed, Jan 28, 2015, 8:17 PM UTC

joshuacc wrote: post #112

tessierashpool wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a dystopia rather than a eutopia (sic) This is an awesome typo. "Utopia" is a transliteration from Ancient Greek meaning "No place." The same rules of transliteration would make "eutopia" mean "good place." "Utopia" came into English through a satire, the meaning being that nowhere's really paradise, but today we mostly use it without that edge, i.e., as if it really were spelled "eutopia."

FYI, St. Thomas More, who coined the term Utopia, seems to have been intentionally ambiguous about whether the term was a transliteration of eutopia (good place) and outopia (no place).

ah, my bad, I think you're right.

Re: The Way We Hire Is All Wrong

#127

Post by jia_min » Wed, Jan 28, 2015, 8:45 PM UTC

wnissen wrote: post #118

jia_min wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the NYT's article quoting Laszlo Bock: "Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring." Google made the classic mistake of using the interviewer as the predictor of interest. Meanwhile, decades of research has shown it's not who does the asking but how and what you ask. For example, structured interviews are about 50% more predictive of job performance (r = .51) c…

Do you have a cite for this? I thought Google looked at interviewers and found that no particular interviewer did any better than any other, except, literally, one guy in a narrow sub-specialty. That's quite a lot different than concluding a 50% success rate is no better than chance, which I agree would be problematic at best, flat wrong at worst if the expected occurrence was low.

Here's the NYT article where Laszlo mentions the "random mess" they found when they used the interviewer as the predictor and then subsequently mentions how they use structured interviews now instead: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...

The interview correlations I cited are from Schmidt and Hunter, 1998: http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...

My point is, it doesn't matter who does the interviewing - looking for people who are "good interviewers" is a unicorn chase because the vast majority of people don't have a magical ability to guess who's going to be a good performer pre-hire. Unfortunately, Amazon is making the same mistake with their "bar raisers": http://firstround.com/article/Mechanize-Your-Hiring-Process-...

Geez, you engineers don't seem to like to learn from each other.

Re: The Way We Hire Is All Wrong

#128

Post by wink » Wed, Jan 28, 2015, 9:25 PM UTC

fecak wrote: post #81

wink wrote: post #53

Is it me or is there no author name? I mean, it could be deliberately anonymous but then that's usually noted. It was a really interesting read but I am probably just being grumpy and not a fan of medium.

It's in the "footer" of the page continuously as you scroll the entire article. Name is Deborah Branscum.

Oh my, thanks.

On a different monitor now I see the light gray "WRITTEN ON JAN 26 BY" on white background.

Re: The Way We Hire Is All Wrong

#129

Post by shit_parade » Wed, Jan 28, 2015, 9:37 PM UTC

pluma wrote: post #26

whiddershins wrote: post #6

What 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? That's actually one of the reasons I find the idea of a guaranteed basic income so promising. The biggest thing making an "everybody freelances" world a dystopia rather than a eutopia (sic) is that it would eliminate any semblance of income stability. Static long-term contracts would still be an option because of the reli…

It's a beautiful idea but the problem is implementation.

The government of most countries is already a powerful and corrupting force, giving it even the additional power and discretion to 'hand out' a basic income is terrifying to consider.

Re: The Way We Hire Is All Wrong

#130

Post by pluma » Wed, Jan 28, 2015, 10:17 PM UTC

tessierashpool wrote: post #97

pluma wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default? That's actually one of the reasons I find the idea of a guaranteed basic income so promising. The biggest thing making an "everybody freelances" world a dystopia rather than a eutopia (sic) is that it would eliminate any semblance of income stability. Static long-term contracts would still be an option because of the reli…

a dystopia rather than a eutopia (sic) This is an awesome typo. "Utopia" is a transliteration from Ancient Greek meaning "No place." The same rules of transliteration would make "eutopia" mean "good place." "Utopia" came into English through a satire, the meaning being that nowhere's really paradise, but today we mostly use it without that edge, i.e., as if it really were spelled "eutopia."

I wished I could say I coined that term, but I've seen it before. It's sometimes used in literary studies to explicitly distance a positive utopia from a dystopia. That it's a homophone makes it a clever pun, but also pretty useless in normal conversation.