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What happens when you stop relying on resumes

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Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#81

Post by Nacraile »

codeonfire wrote: post #68
Nacraile wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I buy your implicit assertion that other engineering disciplines are somehow better at hiring than the software industry is. As far as I can tell, mechanical and electrical engineers are hired based on relevance of work experience, some discussion of that experience, and maybe a few specific technical details which should be known by anybody with the experience they claim to have. All of which is isomorp…

Engineering firms won't even talk to someone claiming to be a ME or EE with no degree, no certifications, and/or no license. And, the premise of the article are that they are ignoring both education and experience, so I don't see how your comparison fits. This thread isn't about who is more likely to fail. We are talking about hiring and who is likely to succeed. My point that companies have dumbed down what they cal…

> Engineering firms won't even talk to someone claiming to be a ME or EE with no degree, no certifications, and/or no license.

I don't think software is "dumbing down" by ignoring credentials. We're ignoring credentials because we are finding that they have no predictive power whatsoever for competence. Most software companies do still pay attention to experience (at least while sourcing), on the belief that it is not useless as a predictor. This article is interesting because it provides strong data indicating that experience (as presented by the candidate on their resume) is also useless as a predictor.

The point is that people with good resumes are often incompetent, and competent people often have thin resumes. This article presents data indicating that filtering by resume is no better than filtering by coin flip. Thus, if OP's data and analysis are correct, paying heed to credentials and experience is irrational.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#82

Post by StavrosK »

function_seven wrote: post #67
tikhonj wrote: post #46

First of all, I definitely agree that resumes are woefully overused and overrated. They have structural problems and incentivize people to use "negative selection" criteria where people are eliminated based on not having a specific feature rather than selected for excelling on something¹. This article neatly demonstrates that resumes are not necessary and that not using them can unlock new sorts of candidates. Howeve…

> This reminds me of various captcha strategies I've seen used by small forums to great effect—solving some math, typing a word into a text box, choosing a popular character's picture… etc. They all work, perfectly. But only because spammers don't care about the small fry: it's not worth their time to modify their bots for your little site. If any given captcha becomes used widely—or your forum grows big enough—they…

I don't even go that far, I usually just add a field hidden with CSS that rejects the form if there's anything in it. Works perfectly.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#84

Post by tjradcliffe »

msandford wrote: post #34
leeny wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aline here. Fwiw, I don't disagree with TripleByte's findings... anecdotally, after having interviewed somewhere between 500 and 1000 people in my career, I think they're right -- I, too, have observed a disconnect between how polished people sound when they talk about their work and what happens when they actually have to write code. What we're actually comparing here, though, isn't coding vs. describing projects. I…

> I think they're right -- I, too, have observed a disconnect between how polished people sound when they talk about their work and what happens when they actually have to write code. I've done a lot of work that people would probably find very interesting and useful. But I tend to choke on whiteboard code interviews because they're so high stakes. Any time spent thinking about the problem looks bad, so you have to t…

> The problem is that you never find out because if someone bombs the coding part you simply chuckle and say "well that person is clearly a liar, or something!" and they don't go any further in the hiring process.

This. I've been job-hunting lately and getting asked to do "technical challenges" and such like, which are useless to me because they are entirely asymmetric. They tell me nothing about the company except they are following the latest fad in candidate screening.

I pointed out in feedback to one of the testing companies a while back that they had no empirical basis for believing their evaluations didn't reject more qualified candidates for less qualified ones in terms of ability to do the actual job, I got a reply saying, "No, we have all kinds of empirical data! Our clients save $TIME in the hiring process!"

Which is great until you realize that perfectly competent engineers are being locked out of the hiring process by this nonsense. We saw a fad for this kind of testing in the mid-90's, just as the dot-com boom was starting to roll, and it didn't end well. The few companies I interviewed at that used coding tests of one kind or another all failed quickly, although it did give me the opportunity to ask an incompetent hiring manager at one of them how I'd managed to get a PhD in physics while having "below average mathematical abilities" according to one of their tests (which I swear had been written by an innumerate.)

HR people will simply assert that anyone who fails these kinds of tests is incompetent, and anyone who complains about it is just expressing sour grapes at their own failure, but that all side-steps the issue that there is no significant empirical validation on the quality of hires that such tests produce.

Their only real use from my point of view is that if the "interview" process is heavy on "coding challenges" and the like, I'm a lot less likely to bother with going through it, because it speaks to a company that has bought into policies that have no empirical basis and that provide the least amount of information to job seekers, and I'm not all that interested in working in the kind of monocultures such processes produce.

For senior people my favoured interview form is to mostly talk about a few obscure language features in their language of choice, and then have a free-form discussion about language design. Senior people who are any good care about languages, and have thought about languages, and can have nuanced, intelligent discussions about languages and the trade-offs involved. It acts as a good foundation for talking about other kinds of design issues as well. For junior people, some basic test of coding competency may be useful, but over the intermediate level they are very likely testing for the wrong thing, and either way we have no evidence.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#85

Post by rando3826 »

msandford wrote: post #34
leeny wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aline here. Fwiw, I don't disagree with TripleByte's findings... anecdotally, after having interviewed somewhere between 500 and 1000 people in my career, I think they're right -- I, too, have observed a disconnect between how polished people sound when they talk about their work and what happens when they actually have to write code. What we're actually comparing here, though, isn't coding vs. describing projects. I…

> I think they're right -- I, too, have observed a disconnect between how polished people sound when they talk about their work and what happens when they actually have to write code. I've done a lot of work that people would probably find very interesting and useful. But I tend to choke on whiteboard code interviews because they're so high stakes. Any time spent thinking about the problem looks bad, so you have to t…

Amen. I do fairly decent on a whiteboard given some practice, but I still feel stupid compared to sitting and coding on my own without massive time pressure.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#86

Post by puredemo »

a-dub wrote: post #66
__z wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of "difficult-to-work-with" questions do you ask? I'd like to filter out these people but I'm not sure what sorts of questions to ask to suss that out.

Basically I goad them into complaining about past bad work experiences and then pay close attention for subtle clues that may indicate that they are systemically disrespectful or unwilling to compromise on things that don't seem worth fighting for. Were they bothered by people, situations or outcomes? Tell me about the most frustrating time when you needed a thing, or consensus on a thing, and you had to go through w…

SO THESE INDIANS MAN. YOU EVER WORK WITH INDIANS?! THEY SAY YES TO EVERYTHING! DOESN'T MATTER IF THEY UNDERSTAND IT OR NOT. OH MY GOD, NEVER AGAIN.

Actual quote from an interview ^

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#87

Post by puredemo »

a-dub wrote: post #78
vonmoltke wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the opposite, someone who has no answer for either of those because they have never pushed hard enough for something or is too willing to roll over whenever someone higher up insists on something?

If that were a problem, they'd be unlikely to have interesting projects on their resume or would have failed the "talk about your interesting projects" phase. In other words: it wouldn't matter if they were easy to work with in that case because they wouldn't be considered a good candidate for the job.

So you want super laid back people who surround themselves with productive geniuses.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#88

Post by sytelus »

You can do much more easier, automated filtering: Ask candidate to submit link to any of the followings:

1. Github a/c

2. StackOverflow a/c

3. Their blog

4. Anything they made online

If candidate fails to submit link for any of above then just don't interview them. I would guesstimate this simple check filters out 70% of the junk resume and probably 20% of the good resumes. It can scale like crazy and expanded even more (for example, use APIs to get their profile information and rank resumes).

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#89

Post by tjradcliffe »

Harj wrote: post #37
lk145 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your programming interview like? If it's whiteboarding algorithms, it's likely to be eliminating a lot of good people who get nervous, and selecting for people who are good at studying interview questions and coding under pressure in an artificial environment. There is good evidence it doesn't predict job performance well, see: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/hire-like-google/ and https://twitter.com/mxcl/status…

We completely agree. We do all of our interviews via screen share, allowing candidates to use whichever language and environment they're most comfortable with. We also give a selection of problems, one of which is algorithm based, allowing candidates to choose which they prefer. Ultimately though people are aware they're being watched and assessed under timed conditions so it's going to be somewhat stressful. If we t…

As a matter of interest, does your company also ask managers to go through a management test as part of the hiring process? Let them run a team for twenty minutes or an hour and evaluate them on that basis? If not, why not? :-)

I think "take-home" style tests are the only reasonable way to evaluate this kind of technical competency. They are the closest to realistic. Throw people a small problem of the kind they'll actually be asked to work on. Let 'em deal with it--including documenting their solution!

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#90

Post by analog31 »

tikhonj wrote: post #46

First of all, I definitely agree that resumes are woefully overused and overrated. They have structural problems and incentivize people to use "negative selection" criteria where people are eliminated based on not having a specific feature rather than selected for excelling on something¹. This article neatly demonstrates that resumes are not necessary and that not using them can unlock new sorts of candidates. Howeve…

However, I don't think there's a conclusion to be made about the actual method used here. I suspect that it worked because it was different, not because it carried a fundamentally strong signal. If everyone did this, project descriptions would be gamed even more than resumes—it would select for people who prepared for the selection process² more than anything else.

I find myself almost irresistably drawn towards the conclusion that people will game the hiring process, because it is a game. It has winners and losers. Everybody is trying to make themselves look better than everybody else, even to the point of making themselves look better than they really are: Job candidates, employers, internal and external recruiters, everybody who is selling a hiring product, etc. Everybody is trying to emphasize their positives and hide their negatives, while searching for the negatives of the others.

A drawback to "do your own thing" is that it is enormously inefficient for candidates, and the results may turn out to be based on the luck of a particular candidate guessing a particular employer's game is, or being generally better at games.

I don't know a solution. What strikes me is that as broken as the system seems, we still manage to hire good people most of the time.

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