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I don't hire unlucky people

raganwald.posterous.com

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Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#61

Post by mmcconnell1618 »

davidkatz wrote: post #37
mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm a job seeker I want to present myself in the best possible light. Allowing a 3rd party to rate my "passion" and "respect" without any knowledge of the algorithm would keep me from using the service. If you did publish the algorithm it will be gamed just like search engines in a matter of hours. You might want to consider suggesting tags and keywords and allowing job seekers to select the ones they believe appl…

Hey! I'm David, the other co-founder of Skills. We're been mulling over our scoring for a while, and at this point we don't consider it a fundamental part of the product. Within the next few weeks, we'll be canning 'passion' and 'respect' and replacing it with something much simpler. In the future, we might drop scoring all together. Our mission it to extract the most meaningful data from someone's professional activ…

I think that online activity like contributions to forums, twitter and github could be good indicators of a quality employee. However, I know many really smart, productive people who just aren't participating online in a significant way. If you're hiring for a community liaison then online activity is a critical indicator. If you're hiring a network engineer who watches log files and traffic all day online activity may not represent their "best self."

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#62

Post by terryk88a »

robterrell wrote: post #38
dustingetz wrote: post #21

i know a guy running a software shop. he's an active participant in the local meetup community, and he cares about people. it's no surpise that he has all sorts of talented people trying to work with him, and not enough funding to hire them all . (at least, i think that's why he hasn't hired me ;) i also know a few other people running software shops, who don't participate in the local meetup community. none of the b…

Isn't that just another filter for luck? You're filtering out candidates who don't know about the meetup, or have kids and can't make the meetup's evening hours, or prefer another meetup that happens to be at the same time elsewhere, etc.

I'd tend to agree since that (having kids) applies to me. There's clearly a filtering effect, probably eliminating more experienced people.

However, he apparently has no shortage of suitable talent available when using this method.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#63

Post by idan »

zavulon wrote: post #55
idan wrote: post #4

This is exactly what we've been thinking about for the last year while we've been building http://skillsapp.com . Exactly. Love it when lucid, articulate writers take my mess of a brain and put the right words to it.

Something that wasn't clear to me - as an employer - what do I get when I sign up? Do you have candidates' profiles like the sample one in the system, or I will have to provide my own candidates to filter through your system to get a profile like that?

Yeah, we're working on a new homepage to make that bit clear.

Right now, you sign up, creat one or more positions. Each has a unique landing URL, and anyplace you'd normally publicize "send us your resumes," put that link—job boards, advertisements, recruiters, etc.

Candidates go through a very, very (sub-five-minute) short form to collect their personal contact details, their recant social networks and a 500-char-max tell-us-about-yourself and why-are-you-a-good-fit-for-this-job. You get a brief, and the rest is up to you.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#65

Post by softbuilder »

robterrell wrote: post #38
dustingetz wrote: post #21

i know a guy running a software shop. he's an active participant in the local meetup community, and he cares about people. it's no surpise that he has all sorts of talented people trying to work with him, and not enough funding to hire them all . (at least, i think that's why he hasn't hired me ;) i also know a few other people running software shops, who don't participate in the local meetup community. none of the b…

Isn't that just another filter for luck? You're filtering out candidates who don't know about the meetup, or have kids and can't make the meetup's evening hours, or prefer another meetup that happens to be at the same time elsewhere, etc.

Not at all. You're saying "yes" to something instead of "no". You may go to a meetup, you may meet people through friends of friends, and you may place an ad on Craigslist. All of these things open doors to more people. The filtering was closing doors.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#66

Post by [deleted] »

robterrell wrote: post #38
dustingetz wrote: post #21

i know a guy running a software shop. he's an active participant in the local meetup community, and he cares about people. it's no surpise that he has all sorts of talented people trying to work with him, and not enough funding to hire them all . (at least, i think that's why he hasn't hired me ;) i also know a few other people running software shops, who don't participate in the local meetup community. none of the b…

Isn't that just another filter for luck? You're filtering out candidates who don't know about the meetup, or have kids and can't make the meetup's evening hours, or prefer another meetup that happens to be at the same time elsewhere, etc.

[deleted]

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#67

Post by dclowd9901 »

plinkplonk wrote: post #26

I agree with every point Reginald makes but (and I am being nitpicky here) the form of the story - the seeming overtailored parable nature of it, of the kind you'd find in the Reader's Digest or a religious tract - rubs me ever so slightly the wrong way. I could have done without all the fake (or seemingly fake anyway) dialogue between the Wooster/Oscar etc and would have preferred a straightforward "This is what I(R…

It actually helped me visualize the conversations better and follow the thought process thinking about them as Sesame Street characters. I don't know why.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#68

Post by msbarnett »

reinhardt wrote: post #59
DarkShikari wrote: post #10

This article is superb. We tried placing ads for ninjas, rock stars, and so on, but I discovered this was the cultural equivalent of advertising for white males who drink dry martinis. Not that white males who drink dry martinis can’t do the job, but there’s no real difference between advertising for a Ninja and throwing half your resumés away because you don’t like unlucky people. Either way, you end up with fewer r…

Ironically, a job seeker that rejects an ad based on a keyword or two is exactly the shallow reasoning this article criticizes; it's just the other side of the same coin. I'm pretty sure there are actually good startups that put out "cool" (lame) ads just, like good programmers that let a typo slip by.

> Ironically, a job seeker that rejects an ad based on a keyword or two is exactly the shallow reasoning this article criticizes; it's just the other side of the same coin.

Not really. The situations are asymmetric -- an employer seeking a talented programmer needs to be rejecting potential employees on as few arbitrary criteria as possible, to maximize their chance at finding just a single qualified candidate.

A talented programmer, on the other hand, has Berty Wooster's time-management problem; there are far more people desperate to hire than he or she could possibly could ever hope to give attention to. You need to winnow out any opportunity that is even the slightest bit unappealing just to get the flood down to a manageable level.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#69

Post by alphakappa »

cookiecaper wrote: post #31
DarkShikari wrote: post #10

This article is superb. We tried placing ads for ninjas, rock stars, and so on, but I discovered this was the cultural equivalent of advertising for white males who drink dry martinis. Not that white males who drink dry martinis can’t do the job, but there’s no real difference between advertising for a Ninja and throwing half your resumés away because you don’t like unlucky people. Either way, you end up with fewer r…

Indeed. My ad scoring program deducts 5 points and transparently kills off ads that contain terms like "ninja" and "rock star" because to my mind they indicate a propensity for either abuse ("a rock star should be able to code this in three days!!") or fad-following ineptitude ("rock stars are the coolest kind of programmers, I must have them! also, we write EVERYTHING in Ruby, it's like the Mac of programming").

Your program would do the same for an advert that said something along the lines of "We don't care whether you are a ninja or a rock star"?

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#70

Post by ericd »

idan wrote: post #19
yajoe wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a look at skills app -- I like the approach and the clean layout, but a couple thoughts from this hiring manager: * Most of the really good devs I know and hire do not bother with easy metrics like number of tweets, followers, or StackOverflow points. They are perfect to paste together on summary reports and look "complete," but their absolute values or essence don't mean anything. * The high numbers on public…

Thanks for sharing your brain (and experience) with us! We don't think number of tweets or followers is a relevant means of assessment at all—quite the opposite. Ashton Kutcher is not an interesting candidate for a rails job, and that should be reflected in our report for him (were he ever to apply for such a position.) We obviously gather a lot of metrics (hey, storage is cheap) but the ones we actually use in our s…

A point of feedback - I write a lot of code that gets used by lots of people, and I don't do any of it in a social fashion because I'm entirely uninterested in creating a brand for myself as a developer. All of these metrics you're talking about would screen me out, whereas a simple "created and scaled FOO with BAR set of technologies, used by 100,000/1,000,000/10,000,000 people/month" on a resume would probably get a good amount of employer attention, for good reason - that's an indication of a real full stack engineer who has faced a gamut of real problems. It's not as easy to quantify, but you should probably take that kind of thing into account, because it's a lot more meaningful than the number of people signed up to receive my quips about how much IE6 sucks or how many side projects I've open sourced.
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