
The Way We Hire Is All Wrong - mhr_online
https://medium.com/backchannel/the-way-we-hire-is-all-wrong-3e19e2051f3e?source=email-f986ab8482fd-1422374905623-daily_digest
======
FLUX-YOU
>Staffup Weekend put the lie to Stein’s pronouncement. As Nicholson later
wrote me, “The fact that people stayed for 48 hours to work on something put
them head and shoulders above the thousands of applications we receive,
because the participants are people who show up and see things through.”

And this event is an attempt to make showing up for a 48 hour 'work trial' a
norm. This favors the younger, single population, and while you're working on
whatever this event is, you are not putting more resumes out. There's the
potential for abuse in getting free work out of applicants from other people
mimicking this event.

(How long until we're tossed into an arena with bows and arrows only to
survive and rewrite every algorithm from a CS degree on a whiteboard?)

Although the 46% percentage figure was shown in this thread to be wrong/bad,
even if you consider hiring as a coin-toss, your success still depends on how
many resumes you can put out there. You have to balance the time it takes to
tailor your resume to the company versus moving on and finding the next
company to submit a resume to. At the extremes, some people don't tailor at
all and throw their resume and cover letter at everyone in a suit. Others will
do deep-dive research and make 27 drafts of a resume/cover to the point where
they already know more about the company than the person who may hire them. I
still think there's significant coin-tossery going on: if the companies are
having to filter everyone because there is so much volume, then you must at
least do as much as you can to increase your own output. The 'trick' then is
to just know someone who can put in a good word (and it really has always been
an option)

This may work for some job sectors as a novel hiring process (it's certainly
overblown for retail/fast food) but if it scales up, you'll end up taking
significant bargaining power from individuals. To say nothing if companies
start replacing their current employees with the winners from these kinds of
events.

~~~
lifehug
"One reason is that employers can easily be flooded with hundreds, or
sometimes thousands, of applications"

We're told our immigration policy has caused a drought in programmers, yet
employers are flooded with applications from the nonexistent workforce.

~~~
coralreef
It's not that companies can't find programmers, it's that they would rather
find elite programmers than develop lesser ones.

------
whiddershins
What a bizarre and compelling story. Glad to have read it.

Meanwhile I think the hiring problem/solution is staring us right in the face.

What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work
were the default?

Isn't it perhaps weird that there is an assumption companies and employees
should bind their fates together, and, if it doesn't work out, one or both
parties is pretty screwed because of an investment of time and money which
will likely result in a person being unemployed and/or a company paying a
person far beyond when they are providing value.

This is like getting married after one date. Every time.

If employees were assumed to be exploring many things simultaneously, both
sides would have plenty of chances to gather meaningful data about the
employer/employee relationship, and if it is really a great fit, a long term
employment arrangement could be worked out, with a contract that reflects
mutual responsibilities revolving around this shift to an all-eggs-in-one-
basket situation for the employee - and likely a corresponding move to much
more critical functions being performed for the company.

I cynically suspect the current concept of full-time work evolved to suit
employers, it allows them to manipulate and scare employees, especially when
(for example) health insurance is at stake. Employers naturally have more data
about salaries and so forth, in general most employers have many employees,
while most employees only have one employer. That is inherently asymmetrical.
Now that certain skill sets are harder to hire for, it is hurting everyone.

But the situation was never that great from the beginning, let's figure out a
way to make it better for everyone.

~~~
pluma
> What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work
> were the default?

That's actually one of the reasons I find the idea of a guaranteed basic
income so promising. The biggest thing making an "everybody freelances" world
a dystopia rather than a eutopia (sic) is that it would eliminate any
semblance of income stability.

Static long-term contracts would still be an option because of the reliability
they offer to both sides, but it would give employers the benefit of at will
employment without the drawbacks that normally has for the employees.

Of course I don't really see it happening in the US -- at least not in a way
that's good for the employees. A lot of the welfare system in the US is still
based on the idea of traditional long-term employment, even with Obamacare and
all that decoupling it a bit.

~~~
tessierashpool

        a dystopia rather than a eutopia (sic)
    

This is an awesome typo. "Utopia" is a transliteration from Ancient Greek
meaning "No place." The same rules of transliteration would make "eutopia"
mean "good place."

"Utopia" came into English through a satire, the meaning being that nowhere's
really paradise, but today we mostly use it without that edge, i.e., as if it
really were spelled "eutopia."

~~~
joshuacc
FYI, St. Thomas More, who coined the term Utopia, seems to have been
intentionally ambiguous about whether the term was a transliteration of
eutopia (good place) and outopia (no place).

~~~
tessierashpool
ah, my bad, I think you're right.

------
auggierose
I didn't even read the story after this gem: "In 2012, for example, consulting
firm Leadership IQ announced it had tracked 20,000 new hires over time and
discovered that 46% of them had failed within 18 months. In other words, most
recruiting practices are about as effective as a coin toss." Now, what's wrong
with this reasoning? :-)

~~~
brohee
Yeah they fail to understand that should the recruitment be a coin toss, 80%
would fail.

This is because the good candidates resume are hidden in a forest of bad
resume, from people submitting resume for jobs they are obviously unqualified
for.

Pretty well explained in
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDevelopers.html)

------
exo762
> In 2012, for example, consulting firm Leadership IQ announced it had tracked
> 20,000 new hires over time and discovered that 46% of them had failed within
> 18 months. In other words, most recruiting practices are about as effective
> as a coin toss.

This does not take into account amount of candidates that have been rejected.

~~~
aaron695
Yes, it's a nonsense statement.

Like the Google stories, which also are not true.

Shame, the Staffup Weekend in itself would have been an interesting writeup.

------
VLM
"We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess."

Something overlooked is the millions (billions?) of non-productive labor hours
that go into the failed traditional hiring process, when even the smartest
guys in the room have to admit that upon statistical analysis its all a waste
of time. That's an enormous staggering financial drain on the economy.

Overall, across the entire economy, the overall minimum cost mode of hiring
would appear to be a union work hall. So employer shows up and the dude who's
been sitting there unemployed the longest is hired.

This would require incompetent people to admit their own incompetence, so its
never going to be implemented, we're all above average here and just because
no one else can do traditional hiring correctly doesn't mean I won't be the
first to ever get it right because I've been told since birth I'm a special
snowflake and I have the participation trophies to prove it, etc.

I'm not saying we have to unionize (whole nother topic) but stealing the union
work hall "technology" would seem a very wise idea.

~~~
jia_min
From the NYT's article quoting Laszlo Bock: "Years ago, we did a study to
determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring."

Google made the classic mistake of using the interviewer as the predictor of
interest. Meanwhile, decades of research has shown it's not who does the
asking but how and what you ask. For example, structured interviews are about
50% more predictive of job performance (r = .51) compared to unstructured
interviews (i.e., the way almost everyone interviews; r = .38).

So why did Google run this experiment when they had an army of
Industrial/Organizational Psychologists who already knew the research? They
wanted to collect their own data and test the theories on their own employees,
which I encourage and applaud.

~~~
wnissen
Do you have a cite for this? I thought Google looked at interviewers and found
that no particular interviewer did any better than any other, except,
literally, one guy in a narrow sub-specialty. That's quite a lot different
than concluding a 50% success rate is no better than chance, which I agree
would be problematic at best, flat wrong at worst if the expected occurrence
was low.

~~~
jia_min
Here's the NYT article where Laszlo mentions the "random mess" they found when
they used the interviewer as the predictor and then subsequently mentions how
they use structured interviews now instead:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-
hunting-b...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-
data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html)

The interview correlations I cited are from Schmidt and Hunter, 1998:
[http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...](http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf)

My point is, it doesn't matter who does the interviewing - looking for people
who are "good interviewers" is a unicorn chase because the vast majority of
people don't have a magical ability to guess who's going to be a good
performer pre-hire. Unfortunately, Amazon is making the same mistake with
their "bar raisers": [http://firstround.com/article/Mechanize-Your-Hiring-
Process-...](http://firstround.com/article/Mechanize-Your-Hiring-Process-to-
Make-Better-Decisions)

Geez, you engineers don't seem to like to learn from each other.

~~~
deciplex
But Google doesn't do structured interviews. Not always, at any rate.

~~~
jia_min
The company line is that they use structured interviews. What actually happens
in practice is often a different story.

------
biot
See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859199](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859199)
for a great discussion (329 comments) on Brooke Allen's APL hiring story.

------
lultimouomo
Published 2 days ago, link to previous thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8947958](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8947958)

------
barrkel
It's not clear what the author of the story did. Mr Programmer did the
programming and Ms UX did project management and UI.

She's an "ideas person", isn't she.

------
iolothebard
The way people hire is all wrong in my opinion too, this is even worse.

~~~
owennoah
May I ask why? And more what you feel is a good third way?

------
askinakhan
I strongly believe that hiring should be based on data. Based on the following
5 factors:

1.Intellect 2.Values 3.Motivations 4.Behaviours 5.Experience

With these factors you can determine a persons Cultural Fit and predicted
future performance. In fact, you could automate this through technology.

For example, for predicting future performance we could test the high
performers in our company then we have a template for what motivations and
behaviours high performers are likely to exhibit. Based on this we can then
assess new comers and map them against high performers. The more highly
correlated they are, the more likely you should be to hire them.

For culture, if you currently like the culture of your company you could
simply assess the values of all your employees, average them and assess new
applicants against this and depending on correlation, hire them or not. This
could be done through a CFT (Cultural Fit Tool)

But this is just one suggestion. Software that enables this could work quite
well IMO.

~~~
baudehlo
I have no idea why this comment got so downvoted. This is exactly the software
I've spent the last year building and it works incredibly well for our
customers.

~~~
themoonbus
I think it's the "software" part that is getting down voted not the 5
attributes... I'm legitimately curious, how do you measure those things
quantitatively?

~~~
baudehlo
You measure them relative to those who achieve high performance.

~~~
themoonbus
How do you quantify values, motivations, etc. to begin with, though?

------
BrookeTAllen
[https://medium.com/@BrookeTAllen/give-us-your-tired-your-
poo...](https://medium.com/@BrookeTAllen/give-us-your-tired-your-poor-your-
overly-automated-b08e067ca18e)

------
wink
Is it me or is there no author name? I mean, it could be deliberately
anonymous but then that's usually noted.

It was a really interesting read but I am probably just being grumpy and not a
fan of medium.

~~~
fecak
It's in the "footer" of the page continuously as you scroll the entire
article. Name is Deborah Branscum.

~~~
wink
Oh my, thanks.

On a different monitor now I see the light gray "WRITTEN ON JAN 26 BY" on
white background.

------
lordnacho
One thing I've wondered is why companies hire people one at a time.

Barely anyone works alone on anything, yet to decide whether to hire someone,
you invite people individually through a funnel process and expect them to be
able to work together. The best teams are not necessarily the ones with the
most Ivy Leaguers on them.

Why don't more companies let the applicants self-organise, and then hire the
best teams?

~~~
obiefernandez
Extreme case: Hire the A-team of programming
[http://atsytp.strikingly.com/](http://atsytp.strikingly.com/)

~~~
mooreds
They're available, and have been for 6 months (?).

Also, negative points for not using the original A-Team in their background
image.

------
BrookeTAllen
This is awesome; I am so thrilled you are talking about this.

I am preparing a response to Deborah’s article; working title:

A Hackathon Cannot Fix a Broken Hiring Process. But the Right Experiences Can.

You see, in 2004 my life changed when I started caring about the people I did
not hire. You discussed that here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859199](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859199)

But the thing you probably don’t get, and I didn't get until much later, is
that I did not create a hiring process.

And it sure wasn't a contest with a job at the end (as many of you think).

It was an experience.

For the people who engaged with the experience it was life-changing. For those
who didn't it wasn't.

Certainly for the people I hired it was life changing.

Changing jobs will change your life – what would be the point otherwise?

And certainly going from unemployment to employment changes your life; how
could it not?

And working for me will definitely change your life because I grok this better
than almost anyone you’ll ever meet.

But I want to change everyone’s life whether they work for me or not because I
never wanted to be a programmer, or an analyst, or a hedge fund manager or all
those other things I have had the accidental good fortune of becoming.

All I've ever wanted to be since the sixth grade is a teacher. See this:
[http://internationalfamilymag.com/IFarchives/archives/sep07/...](http://internationalfamilymag.com/IFarchives/archives/sep07/stories.htm)

Most of the attendees experienced a hackathon because they couldn't figure out
how to experience anything else. After all, this was held in the Bay Area in
2014.

The exact same thing could have been held in London in 1842 and yet nobody
could have possibly experienced a hackathon back then.

When you read her article, notice that Deborah poses a question but doesn't
answer it. She talks about her experience of the other attendees but doesn't
offer to introduce any of them to readers who might be hiring. She ends the
article with a really good suggestion that someone should create Smartup
Weekend to slap some sense into employers. She asks, “Who wants in?” But she
doesn't even buy the domain name. Doesn't she know that you shouldn't mention
a domain name you don’t own in a coffee shop anywhere near San Francisco
because the guy next to you will buy it and then try to sell it to you for
$10,000. And NEVER EVER do that in print. (Of course, as soon as I read her
piece I snapped up SmartupWeekend.com and I offer to transfer it to anyone who
can convince me they will actually build something rather than just talk about
it. I’ll give it to you for free on condition that if you don’t do much with
it then I get it back.)

In short, so far Deborah has reported on her experience, but hasn't fully
ENGAGED WITH IT.

Deborah’s experience of Staffup Weekend is only beginning now. I am confident
that someday she will see that weekend as a pivotal point in her life.

I’m less sure about the rest of the attendees because I have seen no evidence
they have engaged with the experience as anything but a contest they have
lost. After all, Deborah organized a 1-month reunion and nobody showed up.

There is still hope if these folks reflect on what happened, refer to their
notes (surely they took notes), then refactor the whole thing and reflect on
what they can still learn.

But even if they don’t do that, I’m sure every one of them could be excellent
employees under the right circumstances because, as Woody Allen says, 80% of
success is showing up and they did way more than that. You can see everyone
here: [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’d like to meet any of them then let me know. I’ll gladly make the
introduction.

~~~
owennoah
I'm Noah, Brooke's partner in crime at Staffup Weekend. To me this has always
been an emperor-has-no-clothes situation. People seem to think in terms of
"hackathons" whereas we more simply think of things as "doing the work." Since
when did resumes and brain teasing interview questions and all this nonsense
become MORE obvious and sensical than DOING THE WORK. Let people DO THE WORK
that needs to be done and you can save dozens of person-hours, lots of
frustration and heartache AND get a better hire than the "traditional" method.

~~~
BrookeTAllen
I agree but I think we must make it clear that the work we ask people to do
should be similar to the work the employer wants done, but not work the
employer would benefit from. I believe it is important to pay for work done
for my benefit. When I've been the hiring manager, once I need to determine if
the candidate can do the particular work I need done I'll pay them to do it.
Often one day for $150. Usually they offer to do it for minimum wage but the
difference is trivial. Many offer to do it for free but again I won't let
them.

On the other hand, I tell job seekers to get to work doing things for others
whether for pay or not. This is perfectly legal because you are working for
yourself and the only person who can pay you less than minimum wage is you.

I wrote about how to do this legally, morally, and ethically here:
[http://www.noshortageofwork.com/pages/2286](http://www.noshortageofwork.com/pages/2286)

~~~
owennoah
Right. Good clarification.

------
vonnik
Nicholson here.

I sponsored Staffup Weekend, brought Brooke Allen to SF, and helped Deborah
Branscum write her story for Medium. I did it because I'm the in-house
recruiter for FutureAdvisor
([https://www.futureadvisor.com](https://www.futureadvisor.com)), and
recruiting is a mess.

FutureAdvisor hired me to do PR. But after we raised our Series B last year,
our main problem was converting capital to talent, so that's what I did. I
didn't choose recruiting; recruiting chose me. Just like it will choose many
of the hackers on this thread who become entrepreneurs. I hope they can learn
from our story.

The first thing a new recruiter notices is that recruiting is incredibly
wasteful. It wastes time, emotion and money (contingency-based recruiters
charge employers about 25% of a hire's first year salary, so they're paying an
extra $35K to hire a software engineer at $140K). It wastes them for both the
candidates and the hiring managers. Many of the flaws of the process arise
from that wastefulness.

The problem at the heart of recruiting is how to gather good information about
strangers in order to make a long-term commitment. It's basically the same
problem you have when you're dating.

And, just as in dating, there's a lot of noise in the market. Everyone's
beautiful with a little Photoshop. It takes a long time to get to learn who
they really are, and what they can do.

To illustrate how wasteful the job market is, just imagine that both
candidates and recruiters are sending out very similar, only slightly tailored
information to every person on their list, day after day. If someone bites,
then you escalate commitment and do a preliminary phone call.

I, as a recruiter, take the call with the candidate, because we don't know how
good they are yet, and I cannot waste my engineers' time. We are strapped.
That's why we need to hire people. (Non-technical recruiters get a lot of hate
from technical candidates who do not understand this.)

If the candidate answers all the questions right that I have been instructed
to ask, then I pass them on to the engineers for two technical interviews. If
those go well, we invite them in for an onsite visit. In 90% of all cases, the
onsite visit results either the company or the candidate rejecting the other.
At that point, almost all the information they have gathered about each other
is thrown out and never thought of again. (Sure, Glassdoor has some reviews
and tips, but they're minimal.) That's the waste.

Those rejections do not necessarily imply that the company or the candidate is
bad, or unsuitable to work with at all, just that they're not quite the right
fit. It's just like dating. Sometimes the chemistry ain't right. That doesn't
mean anyone's a bad person.

There are a couple ways that we, singly and collectively, can try to solve
this problem. And they all have to do with how the information is processed.
Employers who trust each other could join together in a cross-referral system
where they share candidates who were talented but not quite the right fit.
FutureAdvisor is part of a couple of those networks, like YC, and they work
OK. Their main purpose is to get total strangers one step further toward
entering the circle of trust.

Candidates could do the same for each other. It would be a sort of viral
networking, where within a circle of trust, everybody's contacts become
everyone else's contacts. In both cases, information that one candidate or
employer has gathered at great cost to themselves can be shared, rather than
thrown away.

Another aspect of the job market is that companies and candidates are asking
for the wrong information. Google used to ask for GPAs and Ivy League
pedigrees, both crappy metrics. The great thing about professions like
programming and design is that you can show your stuff. (Bizdev and middle
managers, as a counter example, have a much harder time providing a portfolio
of what they do.)

With makers, at least there's a baseline. All hiring managers need to do,
after they look at your Github, is figure out whether you are in fact the
person who coded it, and how much time it takes you to solve similar problems.
Another way of saying this: The only thing that correlates with performance is
performance. And that's all that good companies should care about.

So how do they obtain that information in an efficient way?

Batch processing. Staffup Weekend was an attempt at batch processing. We
wanted to see a lot of people work at the same time. We made the event free.
We asked people to create something they cared about. The ones that came, did
so voluntarily. Whether they got a job or not, they walked away having done
something they wanted to do. It was a pretty good experience.

But it could have been a lot better. I wish that other employers had been
involved, to make it more valuable for the candidates who attended (we invited
other companies, but got little response.) I could have given better feedback
on the work people did.

On a meta level, teams were invited to create tools to fix the job market. One
group created a Chrome plugin called Contactr.io, which shows you the emails
of company founders when you visit their corporate website.

There are probably a lot of other ways to fix things. I hope someone on Hacker
News will found something that makes hiring and getting a job easier. That
person will become rich, famous and universally loved.

I also hope that someone reading this post is an infrastructure engineer with
AWS, Linux, Bash and Ruby under his or her belt. If that's you, please write:
chris dot nicholson at futureadvisor dot com. Only you can save us, Obi-Wan.

[https://boards.greenhouse.io/futureadvisor/jobs/26313#.VMkv_...](https://boards.greenhouse.io/futureadvisor/jobs/26313#.VMkv_MbZvTA)

~~~
JamesBarney
It sounds to me like FutureAdvisor might have a problem with low compensation.
Previously you mentioned making 8 offers at this event, and only one accepted.
And these are candidates who specifically had 2 days free to work on receiving
a job, so they have lower compensation requirements then an average dev of
equivalent skill, and still 7 of the 8 rejected your offer.

This doesn't seem to me to be a problem of market efficiency, but just trying
to use the inefficient state of the market to find the best candidate for the
lowest price.

Also to reduce the work of interviewing candidates that won't take your offer
when you make it have you tried telling your candidates what the expected
compensation is?

~~~
vonnik
That would be fair to surmise, but incorrect. While most startups cannot pay
Google salaries, we are competitive with our salary-equity mix. It took us a
while to learn what the market price was for various types of roles, and we
offer that.

We made 8 interview offers. 7 people either chose not to continue or were
rejected by my teams further down the line.

Some of those who chose not to continue were not devs, but client-service
specialists. This was not a purely technical hackathon. Many of those people
decided they did not want to deal with the math involved in financial
services.

You have to remember that SF is a _very_ competitive job market. Devs are
choosing jobs that fit their salary expectations, but also their lifestyle
choices and their passions. We meet those needs for some people, but not all,
since they are idiosyncratic.

~~~
palere
Funny, I've actually been thinking about this problem recently and can totally
relate to your dating analogy as I see it similarly. As you know, there are
several steps in the hiring pipeline, from introductions (getting to know one
another), to qualifying (what you're talking about and which has n > 1
iterations- phone screen to inhouse to multiple inhouse depending on level),
to on boarding, etc. You initially want to apply a speed dating filter to weed
out the few of interest (a guy/girl can walk into a bar and within 30 secs
tell which individuals is of interest to them. You want to get there!)

Moving on to the _initial_ qualifying state, I think the one mistake you're
making is assuming that only your company can validate this unknown person. To
truly scale, we need to figure out a trust scheme (we sort of have it already
with our belief in top ranking schools - you mentioned it is a crappy metric,
which I agree, but this has historically been the baseline). We need sort of
an SSL certificate like system where some third party(ies) can qualify
individuals for your company. Again we sort of have this (on the technical
front) with top coder scoring, online tests, SO rating, Git Hub Repo, etc. We
need to come up with a standard "reputation" service, most likely related to
skill, that can be applied in scale.

If anyone cares to bat around some ideas, I'd be an interested party.

------
namelezz
How to tell if you are incompetent?

~~~
fsloth
If this is about populations, I would say incompetence is a poor metric. I
would measure competence, so that sorting in order of competence just leaves
some individuals in the end - in the scope of the metric. They are then
_least_ competent.

It's way easier to point out to competence than incompetence. I would use as a
prime measure of competence finishing things (projects, software,
assignments). While failure to complete things can be due to various facts
(including the possibility that the deliverable was impossible to complete in
the first place) completion, delivering, is a clear, logical measure.

So, to me, true artists ship, shipping is a good measure of competence but
lack of deliverables does not prove incompetence, it just means _lack of
evidence_ for competence.

"Incompetent" as a word has a really nasty sound to it. Also, people learn, so
several failed projects can actually lead eventually to a success and
delivery, if the person is able and willing.

------
dlwj
The thing I didn't realize about the hiring process before going through it a
couple times is that it's not an inherently evil process or system.

It's just that no one knows what the hell they are doing. It's Hanlon's razor.

The initial filtering is done by HR people only looking for keywords and
looking for canned answers to basic questions.

They can also be done by recruiters hired by a hiring manager who hired every
recruiter, thus inundating themselves with resumes by their own fault thinking
more would be better

The phone screen will check you for "status". Having an Ivy League education
will help because even if you fail completely the hiring manager won't lose
face. If he takes a chance on a non-ivy league he will be roasted for wasting
company resources. You will also have to claim to be very very passionate thus
over-promising and in a position of constant not-good-enough-its-an-honor-to-
work-here.

After they decide to bring you in, random people are chosen based on their
free time to interview you. The list will usually include an extroverted
person who tries to be buddy-buddy too soon and feels stiffed unless the other
person has a similar personality. A puzzle lover who looked up an answer to a
riddle before-hand and uses it to gauge your IQ. A new person who googled some
good questions to ask just a few minutes before and makes sure he knows the
answer. An H1B employee who doesn't speak that clearly and assumes you are an
idiot when you ask a simple question to be repeated. Finally a boss type will
come in and make a final decision. The process is semi-democratic in that her
yes cannot go against many no's but her no can veto the yes's.

\----

Nowhere in this chain do people actually care. People are just trying to do
their jobs. The hiring manager is trying to fill in slots b/c a project
manager is behind schedule and needs and excuse. The interviewers want to
"have beers with you" thus gauging your integrated-ness into american culture.

Startup hiring is also fundamentally different and confusing. Young 20s make
the best friends in their college days and often seek that same level of
camaraderie in colleagues. However the resume process doesn't lend itself to
that. You are essentially blind dating. Startups escape the large system
failures of large companies and so can focus on product rather than system
management, but they also have to relearn many thing or else follow a
heuristic script in semblance of a skeleton system. (e.g. top schools only)

\----

Broadly speaking however, jobs are becoming more and more sparse because tools
allow one person to do the job of many. One very very smart person that is.
It's already happening with many developer positions. Good tools for IT allow
developers to do IT work, creating a merged "devOps" position. Easier web
frameworks allow designers and developers to be merged. Good testing tools and
frameworks gets rid of QAs. The merged positions reduce the amount of time
required for these tasks but the new tool-user has to be super qualified.

------
bsder
While I do agree that the interview process is arbitrary, I think that having
a 50% success rate indicts far more than that.

If "success" is a coin flip, that means that _EVERYTHING_ inside a company
failed--interviewing, hiring, training, management, everything. If even _one_
of those things was working, the success rate should be better than a coin
flip.

~~~
ecaradec
You can't deduce that because oncologist patients often die in 18 month,
oncologist are lesser doctors. Patient died because they were so sick when
they arrive that there wasn't a lot of hope left.

50% success rate doesn't indicate that recruiting is like throwing a coin
flip. If there are only 10% of people that can do the job across interviewee,
then throwing a coin would get you just 10% of people able to do the job.

However if there was a pool were 80% of people are able to do the job, getting
50% would be worse than picking anyone randomly.

Bayesian logic :)

