
Yahoo's Mayer gets internal flak for more rigorous hiring - lucidquiet
http://www.nbcnews.com/business/yahoos-mayer-gets-internal-flak-more-rigorous-hiring-1C8814659
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zalzane
At first I was thinking this would be an article where management was upset
that they couldn't hire java jockeys anymore because of some rigorous hiring
practice - but it turns out that the hiring practice in question is to require
applicants to have degrees from prestigious universities.

I think this reflects well on Mayer's distrust of yahoo's HR department. Even
though hiring employees from only prestigious universities is a terrible
decision when it comes to getting as much good talent as possible, it's the
only "solid" solution to force HR to at least be hiring candidates who might
almost be good at what they're doing.

The reforms taking place in yahoo are quite interesting. Mayer's probably
running under the knowledge that most of yahoo's employees aren't really good
at what they do, so it's going to be very interesting to see what kind reforms
she can pass so that the quality of the work produced by yahoo doesn't
correlate with the quality of employees they're currently dealing with.

~~~
notahacker
Not sure how the focus on prestigious degrees squares with the seven figure
acqui-hire of a seventeen year old that hasn't finished his high school
qualifications yet...

I'm willing to believe that _people with prestigious qualifications not
seeking work at more prestigious companies_ and _startup wunderkinds_ are
probably the worst talent pools for Yahoo to be trying to dredge, especially
considering the wealth of smart developers who don't fit into those brackets
are probably more likely to stick around.

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swalsh
Let me backseat CEO this for a second. To me, the problem with Yahoo is
they're no longer relevant, they no longer have a thing people want. In the
past they made their money by being the "default" they WERE the front page of
the internet. You open up a browser, there's a search bar, the weather, and a
bunch of fluffy reprinted news articles.

But this isn't 1996. People don't need ANY of this. If I want the weather, I
have a gadget on my phone, which by the way is the first thing I look at in
the morning. If I want to search I type the query into the URL bar (I use
chrome) If I want news I go to reddit or hacker news. Nothing is drawing me
into yahoo. Reprinted badly written blog articles do not attract me. My mom
would probably read them, but doesn't know how to search for them.

Basically, having an army of the top engineers in the world isn't worth
anything if they're not working on something people want to use. Yahoo needs
to rethink who they are if they want to survive, they lost news, they lost
search, and they lost "hosting gadgets".

~~~
wwkeyboard
> an army of the top engineers in the world isn't worth anything if they're
> not working on something people want to use

Lockheed Martin's F-22 team was worth billions, and nobody wanted that plane.
But yes, war profiteering aside, your point stands.

~~~
protomyth
People wanted the original idea for that plane.

The really sad part is that the F-35 is such a problem, they might restart
production on the F-22 to supplement the fleet of uprated older planes to make
up for the F-35.

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lmkg
Rejecting more people is not the same as being more rigorous. They _can be_
the same if your rejection criteria are well-chosen, but I don't have much
faith in "the CEO glances at your resume." For all the problems that Yahoo!
may have with recruiting talent, I have a hard time believing they can be
solved by any filter process whose sole input is resumes.

~~~
drstewart
Google used the same policy, and somehow I don't think you would make the same
argument about them:

>Yet, after five peer interviews, a candidate is still vetted by hiring
committees, and Larry Page must approve every hire.

Source: [http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2012/0124/Are-
Yo...](http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2012/0124/Are-You-Smart-
Enough-to-Work-at-Google)

------
jtchang
Of course she is going to get internal flak: she's basically saying the
current management is incompetent and needs to raise the bar because she can't
continue to blindly trust the hiring decisions that are being made on a day to
day basis.

Brutal but how else will you separate the wheat from the chaff?

~~~
colmvp
By looking at their code? Testing? Hiring based on their university instead of
their chops is pretty narrow minded. I would be livid if I found a great
candidate but was refused the approval to hire them just because they didn't
graduate from MIT or Stanford.

~~~
arindone
To be fair Google has had a similar unofficial policy for ages and it has
worked well for them =)

(Not supporting it either way...a bit undecided myself)

~~~
RyanZAG
Has it though, really?

Google's company-defining products are (in my opinion):

    
    
      Search - not relevant to hiring practices, Search came before the company
      Gmail - initial version made by Paul Buchheit - 
        Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
      Adsense - created by Oingo and acquired by Google
      Android - created by Danger and acquired by Google 
        (Andy Rubin - Utica College, Utica, New York)
      Chrome - basically Webkit, created by KHTML project and Apple
    

As far as I can tell, the breakthroughs Google has had are completely
unrelated to any Ivy League hiring practices.

~~~
rdouble
In addition to having a few key products, a company also needs hordes of
smart, hardworking and reliable people to keep things running and add
incremental improvements. Top grades from a good university is a pretty good
filter for "smart, hardworking and reliable."

~~~
arindone
Agreed -- it's a good filter for a higher probability of better talent (note:
I say "probability" and not "guarantee") and their stock price and potential
for growth speak for their human resources strategy.

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mtoddh
Funny, from the title, I thought I'd read the article and end up wanting to
defend all of Mayer's policy (the intent of which seems right), but then you
see quotes like:

 _Job applicants often go through the interview process, then "wait and wait,"
said one executive who recently left Yahoo. "One person we wanted waited eight
weeks, then they inevitably got another offer."_

It seems like at this point, Yahoo would want to streamline their hiring
process as much as possible to bring good engineers on as quickly (and
painlessly) as possible. And have that be an asset in terms of recruiting.
I've had friends complain about this "wait and no response" sort of thing when
interviewing with Google, but they're more willing to put up with it, because
hey, it's Google.

~~~
itsdrewmiller
If that guy didn't get another offer until 8 weeks later, it was probably not
a huge loss for Yahoo.

~~~
seivan
I suspect your reading comprehension is broken. Just because the person in
question didn't take another job after 8 weeks doesn't mean he didn't have
offers waiting.

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michaelpinto
"internal flak" = if you're hiring someone better than me that will cost me my
job. i hate to say it but the more i hear about mayer the more i want to buy
the stock...

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wwkeyboard
At their level you're better passing over a few good applicants than letting
in some bad ones.

If you don't like it thats something we need to talk about changing in our
industry, not just shooting ire at a single company. Mentorship is not common,
and we consider 5 years of experience sufficient for a 'senior' position.
Until that changes they are going to have to find some way to limit their
hiring. (note: I don't 100% agree with these new practices, but I do
understand where Mayer and Yahoo! are coming from)

~~~
ktsmith
If they are really rejecting candidates that don't come from a prestigious
university they should be ineligible to apply for H-1B visas.

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smurph
So her response to the criticism regarding missing out on good people because
they did not have degrees from top universities is to say "Why can't we just
be good at hiring"? Seriously? Your employees are trying to tell you how to
improve your decisions and be more flexible, and your response is to tell them
"No, actually you just need to do as I say, but do a better job at it."

Did Mayer spend 25 years as a military officer? That seems to be her
management style.

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reso
Good for her. I look forward to a day when "I work for Yahoo" will again be a
phrase that can be said with meaning.

~~~
nawitus
In the future it'll mean "I got the job because I have a piece of paper from
certain universities, not because I showed my talent in other ways".

~~~
seivan
I genuinely wonder if they ask the question "What have you built, and may we
look and go through the source together".

Doesn't that seem better than papers? I mean as a software engineer, design
and product side of things.

Open source, API's, client side apps and etc.

~~~
fieryeagle
For non-open source stuff, those pesky NDAs say "You shall not pass !!!". I
think it's a very good idea, still.

My two cent is, the reverse can be applied by showing the interviewee some
source codes/designs/product.Good programmers definitely cringe at the sight
of bad code and excite at sight of good stuff. Same can be said for designers
with...well, designs. Rather low cost consulting too for the company who does
that. Win-win situation.

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dvt
To me this whole "new Yahoo!" thing is all backwards.

1\. Yahoo! is in trouble. We need someone to take us out of this rut? But who?
Enter Marissa Meyer: an executive with little top-level leadership experience
and even less experience making desperate companies like Yahoo! relevant.

2\. We need more productivity and creativity. Umm, lets get rid of work-from-
home. That should do it. But we'll give out free food in company cafeterias.
It's what Facebook does, right?

3\. Our HR department sucks at hiring. Should we fix it? Nope. Just contrive
some draconic hiring practices -- we're only going to look at people from
engineering programs at UC Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, Caltech, MIT, Harvey
Mudd, and, of course, all the ivies. This kid went to CMU and has had already
had a couple of floundering start-ups? Nope, don't even consider him. This is
what Google does, isn't it?

So, in short, every single strategy is backwards. Instead of fixing the ACTUAL
problems (leadership, HR, productivity, creativity), Yahoo! constantly
misfires. Productivity is a side-effect of an already-positive company image.
Good hires are a side-effect of an already-healthy corporate image.

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spikels
First no remote working and now hiring based on credentials. Is Meyer moving
Yahoo into the future or the past?

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timo614
Her lack of trust with their HR department worries me more than any silly
restriction on the candidates they hire. I mean if she's going to sit around
and personally review every single person that comes to apply at Yahoo then,
yeah, she better restrict the number of recruits reaching her. By forcing this
restriction she's upping the average quality of the people reaching her and
lowering the number of candidates she needs to toss out.

I'd imagine once she felt the HR department was capable of hiring the type of
employee she personally finds to be exceeding she'll likely consider removing
this restriction in favor of having those candidates take an active part in
the hiring process. Also with her HR department trained on what candidates she
considers good it'll make it harder for them going forward to settle on
someone who fits the position but doesn't fit into Mayer's vision.

Who knows though -- I think it's a dumb idea but I'm also not the CEO of Yahoo
with whatever knowledge she has on hand to justify this as an area of concern.

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simmons
I'm all about merit/talent-based hiring and working from home, but it's hard
for me to be too judgmental of extreme measures taken in an effort to
resurrect a declining company. Yahoo is the patient on the operating room
table being defibrillated with 1000 volts -- a desperate act that would be
absolutely crazy to perform on a healthy person just for good measure. As
others have suggested, maybe Yahoo has some deeply embedded cultural faults
that can only be worked around with these measures.

Whether it will work or not, I couldn't say. I find it a little sad to see
companies wait until they're past the point of no return before looking for a
savior. (See: Palm and Jon Rubinstein).

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HunterV
To me, it just sounds like Mayer is trying to implement Google's structure to
Yahoo! without everyone calling it that.

You'll see it mentioned in articles concerning the similarities between her
new structure and Google. But they're quickly dismissed usually by flaky
differences such as in this one where she's not implementing Google's
independent work program, which I'm pretty sure isn't a thing at Google
anymore.

She's smart, she doesn't want to reinvent the wheel, she knows what Google is
doing works. She just doesn't want to be known as the one who "Google-ized"
Yahoo!.

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greenyoda
I'm surprised that nobody has yet pointed out that an emphasis on what college
a job candidate attended only makes sense when you're hiring kids fresh out of
school who have no real accomplishments they can be judged by. Even if you're
hiring someone with just five years of work experience, what they've
accomplished during their years of employment is much more relevant to their
success at your company than where they went to school and what grades they
got. Is Yahoo hiring anyone over the age of 25?

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greenyoda
" _Mayer insists on personally reviewing every new recruit, a practice that
supporters say brings needed discipline to the company._ "

For a company the size of Yahoo (or any company that's bigger than a small
business), having the CEO review every hire is the worst kind of
micromanagement and sends the message to her managers that she doesn't trust
them to do what they're paid to do. It also means that Mayer is spending less
time doing the things that really _are_ her job as CEO.

~~~
KNoureen
Micromanagment is not always a bad thing, and Steve Jobs is one shining
example of this. Of course not everyone is good at it, but time will tell how
this ends up.

My guess is that current management have become stale, comfortable and
somewhat corrupted. Recruiting favors those with connections within the
company, not the ones with experience, knowledge or brilliance. She could of
course outright fire managers, but that could lead to worse consequences than
micromanagment would.

Anyway, time will tell.

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bcoates
Mayer's weird actions make more sense in if the later context the article
provides is true: that Yahoo is in a de-facto hiring freeze. If Yahoo were
trying to grow it would be madness, but they aren't.

I think is her plan to limit managers ability to build empires by only
allowing them to replace employees out of a tiny pool hand picked by Mayer. I
wouldn't be surprised if it worked, but it's a stunning vote of no-confidence
in the entire company structure...

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pavs
I am really rooting for Mayer. I hope that she not only turns around Yahoo but
also give Google a real run for their money in every way it can.

There will be bumps along the road and ugly mistakes, but at the end of the
day I have a feeling that She is really going to turn things around for yahoo.

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cantastoria
It's funny whenever I hear someone say "We only hire people who went to X" I
always just assume that person is insecure about their own abilities. Hiring
based on credentials doesn't require you to be good at the job yourself.

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HunterV
If I were to simplify the problem:

Google: Search Facebook: Newsfeed Yahoo!: ???

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Macsenour
All this makes sense to me. To change a culture you must make big turns. You
can't change a company's future by adding a single web product or updating a
website. She's putting the company in a positon to do something big that
700,000 people will see.

Keep going!

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alekseyk
Have fun getting top engineering talent while requiring a degree from a top
university.

To me this screams 'only hire engineers that are like me because they /must/
be the best engineers'.

Sad thing is none of the EXPERIENCED engineers with those degrees will touch
Yahoo! with a 10 foot pole.

And I don't care where you graduated from, without experience and good
guidance you will be producing mediocre shit and get out performed by a kid
who has several years of experience under his belt without any degree.

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camus
Blame it on low level employee , classic ... lol... but if you want "top
level" university people and have requirements like in top financial
institutions , you need to offer them a top level gig.

Can Mayer afford that ? without a product or a strategy ? what yahoo is about
? a brand but what else ?

