
Jason Fried: Never Read Another Resume - seanmccann
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/never-read-another-resume_Printer_Friendly.html
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tptacek
Broken down to bullets:

* Don't hire until you've had to endure the pain of doing the job well yourself. If you don't know how to do the job right, you don't know how to hire for it.

* Don't hire just to capture talent. You'll only end up alienating the talent.

* Stay as small as you can.

* The resume form makes everyone look good, which means it doesn't tell you anything useful.

* Cover letters on the other hand tell you lots, and, incidentally, also tell you how well people can write.

* Sometimes the best candidates distinguish themselves with effort. Their most recent designer hire made this mini-site while applying: <http://jasonzimdars.com/svn/>

* Questions are good, but beware people who ask too many "how do I...?" questions as opposed to "why...?" questions.

* Test drive if you can. They hired designers for 1-week projects at $1500 before extending FT offers.

* Be flexible about where you hire (they're all over the place), if you can.

~~~
kenjackson
I disagree with point 2. You only alienate the talent if you don't have a
culture of exploration. On several occassions I've hired exceptionally bright
people, with no clear idea what they might do. In every case they figure out
what to do, usually by finding a gap that we didn't even know we had.

~~~
tptacek
Some very smart people are just looking for a place where they can experiment
and grow technically and do the basic things they love. If you can utilize
these people _without_ having them end up building and testing CRUD apps to
justify the headcount, that's fine.

But other very smart people want not only to be doing interesting things, but
also to be as close to the money as possible. What they work on needs to have
an impact, and have some chance of setting the direction of the company.

If you accidentally hire that latter person into a role designed for the
former person, they'll get bored, or, worse, irritated when they try to get
close to the money and then rebuffed (or, worse, pigeonholed into something
boring).

What I'm saying is, be careful with the notion that you can always find
something for an A-player to do. Often, no.

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anigbrowl
Ah, the joys of grammatical ambiguity.

~~~
tome
If we're going to be picky, isn't it orthographical ambiguity?

[Edit: rephrased]

~~~
tome
Having read RyanMcGreal's comment above I now realise there _is_ grammatical
ambiguity as well as orthographic :)

~~~
yellowbkpk
Is there a word for ambiguity ambiguity? (i.e. Which type of ambiguity?)

~~~
pigbucket
Ambiguity ambiguity sounds like semantic ambiguity, but there are lots of
different kinds of that. There's a book that disambiguates ambiguity
ambiguity, by W. Empson (math geek turned lit prof), _Seven Types of
Ambiguity._

~~~
ramchip
You just reminded me of why the Internet is an incredible invention.

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patio11
This is just as compelling an argument that you never write another resume.
Or, to make the conclusion a little less doctrinaire, spend more time on
networking and creating things that you can present to prospective employers
to convince them to employ you _beyond_ the confines of the 1-2 page resume
that nobody reads anyhow.

~~~
btilly
I disagree that nobody reads the resume. Last year I was looking for a job.
During interviews I received enough detailed comments on things in my resume
(see <http://elem.com/~btilly/BenTilly.pdf> for said resume) that I knew that
people had read it. Furthermore they had followed through and actually read
things I linked to in it!

That said, it took a lot of work to get my resume to the point where that
happened. And you have to be able to back up your resume.

~~~
ramchip
That's an interesting resume. Gave me some ideas to improve mine. Thanks!

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luckystrike
Almost all the suggestions on hiring in this article are pretty good. The one
where I would differ is:

    
    
      We're happy to skip over the perfect catch 
      if we don't have the perfect job for the person to do. 
    

If you already know the person is 'perfect' for your organization, and have
the financial capacity to hire him/her, you should go for it (IMO). I would
think of it as an investment that would help my business in the longer run.

Right now, a company might be content with their current suite of products,
but constant innovation is required in our industry to stay ahead. It could be
in the existing products or coming up with completely new solutions.

If people working on existing products have their plates full most of the
times, they 'might' not be able to devote as much time as they would like on
coming up with newer things, that could further improve the bottom line.

~~~
danudey
I'm going to second this. If you hire mediocre people without enough work,
you'll waste money, it's true, but consider Google. They hire brilliant
people, and through their 20% time they end up with amazing things (I think
Gmail and Maps are two examples).

Now imagine what an excellent employee could do with 100% time and support
from the rest of your organization.

~~~
tptacek
Here's one strong possibility: noodle, get bored, then quit.

Consider the adverse selection problem here. People who can do valuable things
with "100% time"? They're _inherently valuable_. Since they usually need to be
pretty smart to be that valuable, they _know they're valuable_. Therefore:
they are probably not looking for a W2 position as a base of operations.

 _Lots_ of people, many of them very smart, will salivate over the idea of a
100% self-directed R&D position. But smart or not, most of those people are
not going to do well in that role, because: see last paragraph.

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edw519
_Another rule of thumb: When in doubt, always hire the better writer._

OK, I'll bite. Why?

~~~
axod
37signals is a PR company first and foremost. Programming seems a secondary
concern.

~~~
puredemo
They say 3 million people use their software.

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blizkreeg
What are the elements of a _truly good_ cover letter? Stuff beyond the cliched
advice you get such as showing interest in the company/position and so on.

Are good cover letters "from the heart" (so to speak)? Is semi-formal but
well-written language better?

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siculars
"What we do look at are cover letters. Cover letters say it all. They
immediately tell you if someone wants this job or just any job. And cover
letters make something else very clear: They tell you who can and who can't
write. Spell checkers can spell, but they can't write. Wordsmiths rise to the
top quickly. Another rule of thumb: When in doubt, always hire the better
writer."

Writing is critical in today's technologically, geographically dispersed
world. Those who can write well can communicate their ideas and intentions
well to their team and to their clients. There has been some ink covering the
subject in various outlets over the last year or so.

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tjmaxal
it does seem a little short sighted to pay entire depts lots of over time
because you can't find the perfect hire.

This is what my current employer does and I'm always amazed at the practice.

Isn't paying out twice as much in overtime more expensive than just hiring
more people?

~~~
GFischer
Maybe in the U.S... in parts of South America and Europe the administrative
overhead of hiring new people (and the hefty penalties for firing) means that
hiring has to be really, really well justified.

That of course makes for a less mobile market, a stagnation culture (IMO), and
less entrepreneurism I suspect (though getting a state-paid job that can
realistically mean 20 hrs/week of actual work and doing jobs on the side is
very common).

~~~
btilly
I know a company that was outsourcing work to Argentina and was not entirely
happy with said work. But they had a lot of knowledge sunk there.

Argentina decided to respond to the downturn by bringing in legislation that
would make the cost of firing people even higher. That fact pushed the US
company to fire the Argentina employees right away rather than waiting for it
to get more expensive.

Unintended consequences and all that.

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queensnake
[http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/never-read-another-
resu...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/never-read-another-resume.html)

Link _with ads_ so they can get some small money for their content.

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papachito
> Finally, we never let geography get in the way. We hire the best we can no
> matter where they are. We're based in Chicago, but we have programmers in
> Idaho and California, system administrators in North Carolina and downstate
> Illinois, designers in Oklahoma and Colorado, a writer in New York City, and
> others in Europe. This obviously wouldn't work for customer-facing folks,
> but for most everyone else, it does. The best are everywhere. It's up to you
> to find them.

This is so true, I don't understand tech companies from London or Miami or
whatever that do not accept telecommuting and require someone from their own
city. They're missing out on the best just so they can have face to face? Face
to face is not required in programing!

