The Hiring Post • Hacker News Board

Re: The Hiring Post

#261

Post by jerematasno » Tue, Mar 10, 2015, 10:45 PM UTC

cyounkins wrote: post #74

tptacek wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, recruiting is two problems: outreach and qualification. You're asking about outreach. How we did outreach is a whole 'nother blog post, and one I'm bound to write soon. What surprised me about recruiting was how much more important qualification is than outreach. Without good qualification, it almost doesn't matter how good your outreach is, because you're filtering for the same highly visible easily accessibl…

Maybe I wasn't clear with my question. Say the company indicates it is hiring and gets 100 interested people. How do you filter them down to serious applicants without looking at resumes? I would argue that isn't so much outreach as it is qualification, as the people are already interested. Maybe my premise of 100 candidates is incorrect based on how you did outreach?

At Matasano (slash NCC), we get a lot of candidates. We look at resumes so that we have something to break the ice with when we talk to the candidates. We do triage interns using resumes, because we get hundreds over the course of a few weeks, but never for full-time candidates.

How do we figure out which ones are serious? We talk to them, usually give them homework, and then give them work-sample tests. This is not particularly expensive for us, and gives us repeatable, relevant, apples-to-apples metrics on how qualified they are to do the work. This is, as Tom insists, surprisingly easy for us. (Not to say it's easy, but nothing about hiring is easy.)

Re: The Hiring Post

#262

Post by jerematasno » Tue, Mar 10, 2015, 10:51 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #119

tptacek wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone has exactly the same process, with the exception of interns. Interns have an abbreviated interview (shorthand: we switch from assessing aptitude to assessing enthusiasm ), and any time one came back looking for a full time job, they got fast-tracked. I'm not saying that was the best policy (it did keep us from collecting some extra data), but by the end of an internship you had a really good idea that you wa…

It's interesting that you make an effort to not read resumes. Do you explain that to people you interview during the first call? The reason I ask is that, if a hiring manager asked me things that are already written on my resume (e.g. what did you study in college?), I would definitely be annoyed, as my default expectation is that they should read the resume before the interview. Don't get me wrong, I understand and…

The way we do it now, the initial call person reads your resume, but we categorically do not reject based on the initial call (or the subsequent tech phone interview(s)). So, we get the advantage of being able to talk to someone about their experience and helping them make a plan to get hired, but also the advantage that our process is actually resume-blind.

Re: The Hiring Post

#263

Post by jerematasno » Tue, Mar 10, 2015, 10:57 PM UTC

lilpirate wrote: post #179

tptacek wrote: post #27

Author. I can talk in a pretty good amount of detail about how exactly our process worked, if anyone has any questions. And, to head off a concern a reviewer gave me: from 1997-2005, I was a full-time software developer; I shipped shrink-wrap boxed software on Windows and Unix in the 1990s, then appliances deployed at tier 1 ISPs. I'm a "software person" more than a "security person".

I applied for an internship at Matasano. I was asked about office preference and VISA sponsorship. Now I feel bad I didn't get an interview.

Getting an internship at Matasano is HARD. Unlike normal hiring, we are limited in the number of spots we can offer, and we also have a huge flood of candidates at once. I hate that it's so hard, and that we can't provide our usual standard of support to interview applicants. There's just no way for us to scale with the seasonal demands for summer interns.

Please please please apply for full-time when you graduate! The process is a lot smoother.

Re: The Hiring Post

#264

Post by jerematasno » Tue, Mar 10, 2015, 11:02 PM UTC

thedufer wrote: post #147

tptacek wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had three work-sample exercises at Matasano. All told, they took candidates mid-single-digit hours to finish (many geeked out, or golfed on them; we did our best to keep this from happening --- you can read about this on our hiring page: http://www.matasano.com/careers This sounds onerous, but it is less onerous than the normal dev hiring process, which involves an onsite interview that eats the whole day. We did…

My concern here is that it seems to signal a lack of respect for the candidate if the company expects them to complete a task with no matching employee time. Interviews are even; both sides clearly have skin in the game; a work-sample test could be given to any number of people at basically no cost. This is somewhat alleviated by the knowledge that you do a phone screen with each person prior to that stage, but it st…

We actually pre-pay on that. Candidates get an initial call with a very senior person to start. That call includes coaching on how to get through our interview process, and concludes with us sending free educational material (books, etc.). This coaching and material is not specific to getting a job at Matasano, you can just as easily use it to get a job at one of our competitors. We invest hundreds of dollars in each candidate before we ask them to do our challenges.

Re: The Hiring Post

#265

Post by jerematasno » Tue, Mar 10, 2015, 11:10 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #178

elptacek wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was at Matasano, there was always enough inbound work (sometimes more than enough) to keep the consultants utilized. So yes, a company with a full pipeline will lose money on every qualified hire it doesn't make. Perhaps this is not the case for other industries, but for infosec consulting, there seems to be more work than there are qualified workers. Matasano ran under its own steam and did not take funding.…

Did the salaries of the bargain candidates creep up as their value was realized?

My policy (I'm co-in-charge of recruiting at Matasano/NCC, and a lot of folks report to me) is this:

1) Hire based on current ability, not potential. Hiring based on potential is a minefield that our whole process is designed to avoid. ("Enthusiasm," "cultural fit," talking a good game without being able to walk the walk, etc.)

2) Be aggressively fair in giving out promotions and raises. Keeping someone's salary low because they're bad at asking for raises is not a good long-term strategy, especially in consulting.

Seems to be working out.

Re: The Hiring Post

#266

Post by eru » Wed, Mar 11, 2015, 4:38 AM UTC

jerematasno wrote: post #265

eru wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the salaries of the bargain candidates creep up as their value was realized?

My policy (I'm co-in-charge of recruiting at Matasano/NCC, and a lot of folks report to me) is this: 1) Hire based on current ability, not potential. Hiring based on potential is a minefield that our whole process is designed to avoid. ("Enthusiasm," "cultural fit," talking a good game without being able to walk the walk, etc.) 2) Be aggressively fair in giving out promotions and raises. Keeping someone's salary low…

Thanks for the answer!

> Keeping someone's salary low because they're bad at asking for raises is not a good long-term strategy, especially in consulting.

Yes, in consulting the distance between money made and each individual employee's efforts seems shorter than in a big tech company. So keeping salaries in line with impact of contributions should be easier.