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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

#151

Post by firebones »

rwallace wrote: post #150
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…

Yes, it logically follows from simple economic principles: if you're competing with other companies for good candidates (which you are), your hit rate will go up if you look for signals that your competitors ignore or reject, because that gives you access to a pool that hasn't already been picked clean. So if most companies prefer candidates who have a college degree, look for candidates who haven't. If most companie…

What about resume styles that focus on "You should hire me if you need X..." with a listing of strengths rather than rote "Seeking a position that Y". Then the CV builds towards that with concrete examples.

That'd be a strategy that would better suit both the hunters and the hunted.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#152

Post by NhanH »

jckt wrote: post #145
NhanH wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Interestingly, the simplest conclusion would be that everyone is good, most of the time . So if we throw hiring out the windows and pick employee randomly, we might still get to the same result. Which actually isn't too outrageous, since if we have 10% unemployment, wouldn't it mean…

Would that completely backfire once everyone knows the selection process is random?

It's just a thought experiment, random definitely doesn't work since specialization does exist. But otherwise, what do you think would backfire?

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#153

Post by bcassedy »

levlandau wrote: post #136
Harj wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's definitely true. Do you have a particular set of questions you ask during project interviews? If so, which ones tend to be the most revealing?

Less an explicit set of questions but more recursively/iteratively asking why/what/when/how at increasingly deeper levels of the problem they're talking about. It requires the interviewer to be at least familiar with the general domain but you don't have to be an expert. It's borrowed from how Elon Musk says he does assessments. People who know their stuff remember everything about every part of something they worked…

I like this style of interviewing as well. What throws me still is when I'm talking to a candidate with only large corp, individual contributor engineering experience. Their answer for why is almost always some variant on "that was the spec".

What do you do with candidates like this besides weed them out at the resume review stage?

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#154

Post by jrapdx3 »

leeny wrote: post #44
msandford wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think what you describe is a real problem and unfortunately one that getting data around is really tough, for the reasons you describe. For what it's worth, when I observed a disconnect between how well people spoke about their projects and how well they coded, it was generally a situation where someone had perfected a pretty polished self-pitch rather than a situation where I drilled down deeply into what they had…

Actually, the experiments that need to be conducted wouldn't be that hard to do. In fact I'd be surprised if research of this kind has not already been done.

The problem of poor performance under scrutiny, where there is pressure for superior performance (as in a job interview) is well-described as a form of social anxiety disorder (or social phobia), a common condition affecting ~10% of adults in the US (lifetime prevalence). Of course, there's a range of mild to severe symptoms, nonetheless it affects a significant population.

The implication is that in a not-so-pressured setting candidates might perform very differently. Furthermore, writing code, solving software problems are generally incremental processes more akin to watching paint dry than putting out fires for all the externally visible action there is to see. A "whiteboard" exam likely isn't a good model of the real requirements of the job.

There's an enormous amount of research on testing methodology, testing is a huge industry. Ironically enough, one that is extremely reliant on software for analyzing test data in order to determine what is a good test of sets of knowledge or actual abilities. Seems like there's a clue in there somewhere about how software enterprises could find out who is really good at creating software.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#155

Post by Bahamut »

blfr wrote: post #7

Would a Northrop Grumman engineer with a GitHub full of cool projects really be overlooked in a recruitment process? Not once, that can always happen, but regularly?

Personally, I'd take a look at the GitHub projects and if the code is clean, I'd do a phone interview.

I'm also in the Valley.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#156

Post by kagamine »

puredemo wrote: post #87
a-dub wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every single time I read these recruitment threads on HN or anywhere else it always comes back to "who can bullshit the most" and "can you solve this ridiculous problem you will never encounter while employed here".

Glad to see an article about trying something different in recruitment, it is a BS industry, partly because it is so difficult to measure "success" and follow up the process with meaningful data.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#157

Post by derefr »

NhanH wrote: post #144
analog31 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Interestingly, the simplest conclusion would be that everyone is good, most of the time . So if we throw hiring out the windows and pick employee randomly, we might still get to the same result. Which actually isn't too outrageous, since if we have 10% unemployment, wouldn't it mean…

Worked for the Ancient Greeks! "Pick someone at random for the job" was the actual, original meaning of "democracy." Elections are a weak imitation.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#158

Post by spacecowboy_lon »

WalterBright wrote: post #138
codeonfire wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The difference between a mechanical engineer and a mechanic is the engineer knows the math. A mechanic can pick up everything about engineering on the job, except the math, and without the math he's crippled. That's why to be an ME, a degree is a gatekeeper. To get a degree, you have to pass the math classes. Yes, I know engineers who can't do the math, despite having a degree. I've never known a mechanic to learn th…

Actually that is the path an apprentice is supposed to take after they finished their apprenticeship should they want to progress.

Apprentice -> Technician -> Engineer

Or alternatively you can like myself start at the Technician level.

And yes I did correct the "proper engineers" maths on occasion their is a bridge in Saudi that I had to fix.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#160

Post by spacecowboy_lon »

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…

Do you think "goading" people is a good idea - your going to get the rep of being that guy/company
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