

The Way We Hire Is All Wrong - steven
https://medium.com/backchannel/the-way-we-hire-is-all-wrong-3e19e2051f3e

======
lmartel
A couple things bother me about this article.

First, in the author's story about her project she mocks "Ms. Red Dress" but
seems to provide no more value herself. I guess the author brought extension
cords and snacks? What did she contribute to the project? Hackathons don't
seem like a good way for nontechnical and non-design folks to showcase their
skills.

More importantly, though, the hackathon-as-interview concept itself has
problems. Requiring a lot of time from your candidates is disrespectful, and
ensures that no one with other (likely better) options will talk to you. It
also biases the hiring process towards people who thrive at hackathons, which
are notoriously biased toward presenting over producing as well as toward
typical "hacker culture" types (remember that titstare app from techcrunch?)
over minorities.

~~~
vonnik
FutureAdvisor recruiter here:

The author is saying that she brought the tools required to work, which is
more than her former team-mate did. The idea and domain-specific knowledge
about making amends was hers. That's not everything, but it's a good start.
The other two people volunteered to join her, which means they thought her
idea was good.

There were clear flaws to asking non-technical people to participate in a
hackathon. But it wasn't the end of the world. Some groups needed to generate
copy for the web sites they mocked up, and the writers and editors in the room
were useful. In addition, the page flow and decision trees of some apps were
clearly superior because experienced people with no coding or design
experience had helped determine their structure.

Your second paragraph begs the question. The point of this whole article is
that the interview-as-interview concept has problems. The main problem is that
interviews don't teach recruiters or hiring managers jack about the
interviewees. They are literally useless in gathering information about
candidate potential.

The hackathon-as-interview is an attempt to let interviewees transmit the only
information that is of any use in hiring: can this person get a job done? do
they work well with others? The hackathon is actually great at showing who is
capable, committed and professional.

The whole "you're asking for too much time" also misses the point. These
events are designed for people who cannot get hired by other means, because
their resumes do not present well. Those are precisely the people who DO have
time for this sort of event. And despite its flaws, many of them got something
out of it.

I congratulate the people who have no time for Staffup Weekend. Their lives
are easier than mine. I am still looking to fill several positions, including
UX designer and infrastructure engineer. (Those are not the roles I sought to
fill with Staffup.) I may have to pay a contingency-based recruiter $35,000 to
find them. Is that a good solution? Not really...

~~~
fsk
Even if you're targeting candidates who are unemployed and desperate, you can
still find a way to screen them without requiring them to waste 1-2 days for
the chance of maybe getting an interview.

For example, asking someone to switch from a full-time job to contract-to-hire
won't work. If the candidate is unemployed, you can hire them for 1-10 days if
you want to "try before you buy".

Would this process be less valuable if you paid the candidates $10-$20/hr each
for the time they spent? When a good candidate costs $10k-$20k+?

~~~
vonnik
The 1-2 days _was_ the interview. And what people had was the chance to build
something they chose, something that they felt mattered. People who feel
that's a waste of time probably wouldn't be the right fit for us.

Everyone in California is employed on at "at-will" basis. That means they are
on trial before their employer everyday. 10-day trials don't change the
situation or derisk it for employers. It's already derisked.

This weekend was free to anyone who attended, in a good space, and we provided
free coffee and drinks. My employer FutureAdvisor bore a burden of several
thousand dollars. It's up to candidates to make some effort, too.

------
Klockan
So, a method which involves making applicants do a ton of useless free work,
costs the employer a ton of money and led to a total of zero long term hires
is better than what we currently have? How?

~~~
geebee
Everything you've pointed out is a legitimate criticism.

That said, yeah, I think this might be better, because what we currently have
is really bad. Recruiters scan resumes for buzzwords. Candidates are contacted
and asked to code fizbuzz, or are given 10 java questions. If it's clear
they're not a total waste of time, they're brought in for several hours at the
whiteboard. They might be asked data structures and algorithms questions (the
kind you get from the back of a 2nd year CS textbook), otherwise they might be
quizzed on the intricacies of a programming language. If they pass the exam,
the process may move toward "culture fit", more soft interviews with various
managers and directors. Other variants on this involve homework assignments
that can take the candidate a full work day (but reduce the amount of time a
company has to spend interviewing them).

All in all, I'd rather spend a couple days building a fun app than spending a
day reviewing my old data structures and algorithms textbook and reading up on
ruby syntax to make sure people believe that I've actually be using it as a
programming language for the past few years, followed by a couple of days of
technical grilling.

I don't think hiring is an easy problem to solve. It's very difficult to
evaluate programming talent, even if you're a programmer. None of this would
be objectionable to me if employers weren't so adamant that there is a
shortage of programmers (the bit about paypal was particularly hard to take -
at one point, we're hearing about how desperate silicon valley companies are
for programmers, next, we hear that a programmer was rejected from Paypal
because he used the word "hoops").

~~~
iolothebard
The answer is to stop using recruiters.

Post your jobs to the typical sites. Manage the resumes yourself (for the
position you're hiring).

People say hiring is one of the most important things you do, then they turn
it over to the car salesmen of the IT industry and can't figure out why
they're getting shitty results.

How this is so hard for companies/people is beyond me.

~~~
geebee
I agree with you about recruiters, but that would still leave the rest of the
chain in place. So instead of getting your candidates through recruiters, you
put out job ads and get candidates. This might improve your success rate in
getting good candidates in for that first interview…

But after that? If an employer is still doing fizz buzz, adding branches to
binary trees, seeing if they can write an outer join, quizzing them about ruby
syntax - the approach is still pretty bad. Just not quite as bad as when they
start with a recruiter.

My goal is to never do another technical interview again. The way I'm trying
to do this is by expanding my contacts - and I don't mean exchanging business
cards, I mean open source projects where I work technically with a large and
wide spread group of people in a number of different organizations. People
think you need to be some "rock star" to do this, but really, you don't. Keep
in mind, it doesn't need to be the equivalent of being a major contributor to
rails or the apache server. They can be business apps with a smaller install
base and maybe a dozen or so developers. The key is, at any given moment,
there are several dozen developers at perhaps 6-12 organizations that wouldn't
need to ask you about binary tree traversal because _they have already worked
extensively with you_. You've done presentations and code reviews, you've made
contributions to the code base, you've fixed bugs. If they had a question
about certain tech issues, they'd probably call or email you.

Unfortunately, this still describes a relatively small number of jobs. Most
orgs aren't willing to make their own code base open source (reducing hiring
opportunities for developers), and almost by definition most people doing this
already have jobs (reducing hiring opportunities for employers_s who want to
get away from the unpleasantness of the hiring process. Get involved in
meaningful open source projects, and develop a good reputation for your work.
Blog about your technical breakthroughs. See if you can speak at conferences.

I also would say that this isn't at all easy, and that people with this sort
of ability are likely to find other opportunities outside software development
with better pay and greater career prospects.

~~~
iolothebard
I agree completely. You need a "rockstar" if you're doing a rockstar project.
99% of projects don't even approach that level of need.

I found simply talking to people about development gave me more than enough to
know whether they could develop or not. It's hard to fake out someone else
that's knowledgeable. Now when you have managers who haven't been engineers
doing the interviewing, they have to focus on other shit because they have no
idea how to differentiate. I've dealt with that so much in my career I've
pretty much given up.

------
army
"46% of them had failed within 18 months. In other words, most recruiting
practices are about as effective as a coin toss."

I guess I'm not quite clear what this is claiming - you could read it as
saying that tossing a coin would be as effective as current recruiting
practices, or you could read it as saying that current recruiting practices
just aren't as effective as hoped. I think the author meant the second thing,
but it's pretty confusing.

If it's the first, then you were selecting candidates completely randomly,
then the percentage of successful people you hire would be the same as the
percentage of successful people in the applicant pool. There's no reason to
think that ~50% of the candidate pool will be successful - I'd think less.

------
fsk
Oh, this is the same guy who made everyone take a couple day APL course as
part of the job interview process.

------
jimbokun
She never said what her contribution to the project was, beyond the "idea".

------
BrookeTAllen
Hey guys, this is Brooke Allen, the fellow Deborah was talking about. And yes,
I am the guy who changed how he hired in 2004 and wrote about it in How My
Life Was Changed When I Began Caring About the People I Did Not Hire. (On:
[http://BrookeAllen.com](http://BrookeAllen.com))

And I am the guy who offered to all takers a free three-week course in a
little used language called APL, and I am the guy who helped the folks who did
really well find jobs elsewhere if I couldn’t hire them.

I am also the guy who talked about how I learned APL in "I owe EVERYTHING to
some funny symbols" (also at:
[http://BrookeAllen.com](http://BrookeAllen.com)). In that I describe how in
the spring of 1972 I was just falling in love with programming language when
the semester ended and they took it off the mainframe and so I convinced a
book author to give me 11 copies of a textbook that used the language and I
rounded up 10 students for the summer and I got IBM to waive the $10,000
licensing fee and I got the computing center to put the language up for the
summer and waive the CPU and connection fees. That is how I came to teach a
class all summer for free to a bunch of eager young people all because I
wanted to learn a language a chapter ahead of my students. I got so much for
free and gave so much for free and luckily there wasn’t Hacker News then so
none of us had to defend ourselves against people with keyboards, opinions,
and too much time on their hands.

I am also the guy who, in 2009 became sick and tired of my unemployed friends
at a finance industry conference bellyache about how there is no work. I was
sort of annoyed that half of them helped engineer our financial collapse, but
I still told them about how I used to believe that crap about “no work” until
the morning of May 6, 1982 when I was unemployed and the first speaker at a
conference I attended began by saying, “Never ever in the history of human
endeavor has there been a shortage of work, and when the money dries up the
work piles up.” He said I should forget about finding a job but look for
worthy work and roll up my sleeves and start doing it. I started doing stuff
for free but within two weeks I was working for pay at Morgan Stanley and that
is how my career in finance got started. I’ve been unemployed for about a week
in 1993 but I’ve worked as much as I’ve wanted to ever since. I have gotten
rich because I believe that money is the soil, not the spoil, and if you have
a choice do something of value for others and "what's in it for you" will take
care of itself.

So in 2009 I started
[http://NoShortageOfWork.com](http://NoShortageOfWork.com) where our motto is,
“Even when you’re not doing something for pay, do something anyway.” I invited
a few dozen unemployed people from the conference for a dinner and instructed
them to all get to work for each other. Within a few weeks they were all busy
and soon thereafter they were landing paying jobs left and right.

It is obvious to me that if you want to get work you should never fall out of
the habit of working, even when nobody is looking or paying you a bribe to do
it. But boy did I attract the cranks and complainers who criticized my message
– one woman even told me I shouldn’t build my website for free until I got
someone to pay me to do it. I told her I’d respond if she sent me $50 and I
have heard nothing from her since.

Eventually I couldn’t take it so I created
[http://HumongousShortageOfWork.com](http://HumongousShortageOfWork.com) where
the motto is, “No teaching without tuition. No learning without grades. No
work without pay.” Sometimes people have no idea how ridiculous their
complaints sound until you get them to make the case for what they want
instead of against what they don’t.

The default way people hire sucks for most people. I’ve innovated how I hire
and helped others do the same and many of the ways I’ve come up with suck for
some people too. They are especially unpleasant for the kind of people I don’t
like working with, which is fine, because there are plenty of bosses who hate
their work and hate working with people who do, so these complainers should go
hang out with them.

My favorite complaint is how my approach advantages people who are unemployed.
Actually it only advantages kind-hearted generous curious hard-working
unemployed people who wish they weren’t discriminated against because of their
hard luck. But so what; the employed shouldn’t bemoan the fact that someone
doesn’t care about them if they don’t care about loving work. Or, if you love
your job then congratulate yourself and let someone else try for the job I'm
offering.

I love to work and I love to work with people who love to work and I don’t
like working with people who won’t do anything – no matter how interesting or
valuable to others – unless they know what’s in it for them.

Now, any of you out there going to Burning Man?

This is what I’m working on:
[http://brookeallen.com/pages/archives/1329](http://brookeallen.com/pages/archives/1329).

Nobody is paying me to do it and I’m not looking for anyone to be impressed
and hire me as a consequence. I do what I do because anything is better than
daytime TV (and posting complaints on blogs) and if any of you out there feel
the same then I hope to meet you on the Playa or at a Staffup Weekend – they
are both one and the same in spirit if not in dustiness.

~~~
BrookeTAllen
I almost forgot. You can see all the people who finished Staffup Weekend at:
[http://staffupweekend.org/2014/11/22/report-on-staffup-
san-f...](http://staffupweekend.org/2014/11/22/report-on-staffup-san-
francisco-nov-1-2-2014/)

If you are looking to hire someone just let me know. I cannot vouch for their
skills but I can attest to their grit. As Woody Allen says, 80% of success is
showing up and these folk did way more than that.

