Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

hbr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 223 posts

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#81

Post by toast0 »

oblio wrote: post #65
Aurornis wrote: post #11

> “There is a growing gap between the candidate’s written persona and their live presence. I’ll see a cover letter that is poetic and a résumé that is flawlessly structured, but then the person on the video call struggles to explain their own bullet points. This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”. I can remember a few int…

> This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”. Yeah, but it's now 1000x worse. Before you needed actual skill (or luck) to create a good looking CV, especially for niche positions. Now you take their job description, the company's "About us" webpage, your old CV and have LLMs generate a CV with pretty solid grammar and most o…

> Before you needed actual skill (or luck) to create a good looking CV, especially for niche positions.

Sure, resume writting is a skill, but it's probably not relevant for the position unless the position involves a lot of grant writing or enterprise sales.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#82

Post by vkou »

Bjartr wrote: post #68
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #66

Are there any battle-tested strategies for hiring that are generally known to be good, but aren't often used because it's hard or doesn't scale? Asking because my business is growing and we've gotten lucky with our hires so far, but I'd like to add my discipline to hiring well.

Apprenticeship? Actually spend time working with them on real work. It's both hard and doesn't scale.

The problem is that you have 100 applicants and one apprentice slot.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#83

Post by jppope »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #66

Are there any battle-tested strategies for hiring that are generally known to be good, but aren't often used because it's hard or doesn't scale? Asking because my business is growing and we've gotten lucky with our hires so far, but I'd like to add my discipline to hiring well.

Yes. Figure out who your top performers are ask them for referrals. Some people will recommend "meh" people, but more often than not your top performers hang out with other top performers because they appreciate the same things.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#84

Post by uberdru »

Aurornis wrote: post #11

> “There is a growing gap between the candidate’s written persona and their live presence. I’ll see a cover letter that is poetic and a résumé that is flawlessly structured, but then the person on the video call struggles to explain their own bullet points. This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”. I can remember a few int…

Honestly the problem is hiring teams -- they have created this whole issue. They ask for a resume and cover letter. Fine. But don't make applicants put in the work if you're not even going to provide a response, or any sort of feedback -- even when the position stays open for months. The result is that people looking for jobs have to submit huge numbers of custom cover letters, and tweaked resumes, with no feedback, all within a vacuum. Hence the feeling that they need to "pump up" their resume, just to get over the initial gate.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#85

Post by jppope »

thih9 wrote: post #73
addaon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask the best people you’ve ever worked with who the best people they’ve worked with are. Recurse. When names start repeating through different graph paths, make those people an offer they can’t refuse. Once they join, ask them to do the same, and give them the budget and role to make it happen.

Is this really battle-tested, as in: did you see this work in practice or do you have a reliable source? Or is this something you came up with?

No, this is 100% battle tested. I can't drop numbers but we just did a study at work comparing referrals to non-referrals... its night and day. Referrals are out performing across the board. the only problem is that eventually you run out of referrals

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#86

Post by dan-robertson »

ungreased0675 wrote: post #3

Good hiring almost certainly has to be a significant competitive advantage. It makes me wonder why so many otherwise successful companies let HR bungle the hiring process.

I think being successful makes hiring easier because you can source better candidates, and being big makes hiring easier because candidates are more likely to know people at the firm who can use referrals to work around otherwise broken systems.

It’s perhaps also worth noting that lots of companies used to copy how Microsoft did interviews and later they copied how google did interviews so clearly there were some ideas that those companies were good at hiring. (I’m not sure this strategy was that good. The problem for the Microsoft or google type companies is filtering out acceptable hires from a deluge of applicants with acceptably low errors and costs; the challenge for less desirable firms is sourcing candidates who are both high quality and not about to be hired by Microsoft or Google)

One company that comes to mind when I think about being good at hiring was one that recruited a bunch from my university around when I was graduating. Their particular specialty was hiring illegible graduates with a lot of potential (eg classicists, science students without little programming, etc), training them well, and effectively underpaying them a bit for how skilled they were (which only worked out because the UK has a pretty shit job market for tech and because those people liked working there). I think it was more effective for them than trying to hire the same computer science graduates as everyone else would have been.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#87

Post by vanuatu »

thih9 wrote: post #73
addaon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask the best people you’ve ever worked with who the best people they’ve worked with are. Recurse. When names start repeating through different graph paths, make those people an offer they can’t refuse. Once they join, ask them to do the same, and give them the budget and role to make it happen.

Is this really battle-tested, as in: did you see this work in practice or do you have a reliable source? Or is this something you came up with?

+1, referred candidates at my company perform way better in interviews and on the job compared to cold applicants

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#88

Post by maccard »

gopher_space wrote: post #76
maccard wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve worked with places that have had HR bungle the hiring and places that haven’t. The only difference is whether it’s HR or Engineering bungling the hiring. Writing a job description that actually matches what you want is hard work. Sifting through 300 applicants that don’t meet the requirements or lie on the application form is hard work. Doing 10 30 minute intro calls is hard work. Desigining “standard” questions…

> And then getting the group to stop saying “we want to speak to more people” is harder than any of the previous steps. FOMO will keep them doing this in perpetuity until you find a way to make them feel the pain.

IME the only way to make them feel the pain is have them responsible. Panel gets yes/no and hiring manager makes final decision. It’s not a consensus.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#89

Post by maccard »

uberdru wrote: post #84
Aurornis wrote: post #11

> “There is a growing gap between the candidate’s written persona and their live presence. I’ll see a cover letter that is poetic and a résumé that is flawlessly structured, but then the person on the video call struggles to explain their own bullet points. This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”. I can remember a few int…

Honestly the problem is hiring teams -- they have created this whole issue. They ask for a resume and cover letter. Fine. But don't make applicants put in the work if you're not even going to provide a response, or any sort of feedback -- even when the position stays open for months. The result is that people looking for jobs have to submit huge numbers of custom cover letters, and tweaked resumes, with no feedback,…

Hiring manager here - the last job I posted was open for 6 weeks. We waited 2 weeks for initial applications, and it took 4 weeks to schedule interviews with our shortlist and get to an offer, including a very unfortunate 2 week holiday from someone that allowed us down.

We got 350 applications for it. We listed in the JD that remote was ok but needed to be in specific countries for us to hire. I’d guess 90% of the applicants were outside those countries. Of the remained the problem is that most of them all have the skills we’re looking for. One thing is for sure, I read every single cover letter that came through, and I’d say that the vast majority of ones that made an actual effort we interviewed.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#90

Post by vanuatu »

as someone who has done 100+ first round interviews for SWE, including new grad

zero signal: resume & cover letter. applicants will mass-apply with ai-tuned resumes that happen to perfectly match our listing

medium signal: top 15 school / top N internship experience / built something with paying users

highest signal: personal referrals

Post reply on HN