
Hiring Sucks - guyshachar
https://medium.com/swlh/making-the-first-hires-in-a-startup-the-hard-truth-fa7dbf37160f
======
MsMowz
I know hiring is hard, and the truly qualified candidates for any posting are
sparse, but startups throw out way too many potentially-decent candidates
before giving them a real look. Bigger companies can afford to use more blunt
heuristics than startups can. When that "elite 1%" only makes up .1% of your
applicants, you have to be willing to use a finer comb.

I can't speak to the general case, only my personal experience as an applicant
and early employee at 3 startups, but I can't count how many times I've been
told that I wasn't a good fit (pre-interview) because I didn't have experience
with parts of their tech stack, even though any developer worth hiring for
those early positions should be able to pick up a new stack and run with it.
Very little development experience is actually "irrelevant" to any given
opening.

~~~
alexandercrohde
Absolutely. In my experience it's the non-technical (or pseudo-technical)
internal recruiter who's the most common issue.

------
s3nnyy
> "Not to mention HR companies which in my opinion are during this stage, a
> complete waste of time and money. But mostly time."

Well, most recruiters are promising you that they are "experts" in their field
and will bring you the best engineers. And then nothing happens for weeks or
you get spammed with crappy CVs which is even worse (waste of time).

I am a former programmer, now running coderfit.com in Zurich. I am doing tech
recruitment for a couple of very early stage startups here.

I am switching to a retainer-based model where the company prepays me a third
of the fee before I start working. Especially for hard to fill roles, for
instance, no-name startups, this is a better strategy than just working on
pure commission. So, if working with recruiters at all look for the ones that
will offer this.

Also ask: "From ten profiles you send us, how many will we approximately
hire?" When they can't answer, that is a bad sign.

------
rplnt
What's with the use of female pronouns? I've seen it third time this week I
think, referring to an imaginary/unknown developer as a woman. Isn't the norm
to use "they" if one wants to avoid using specific gender?

~~~
uoaei
>Isn't the norm to use "they"

In theory, yes, but in practice we see "he" used way more. The subtext is that
it is a lot more noticeable when people use "she" precisely because the
opposite is used so often in typical writing. It is a response to
underrepresentation, only made more salient because of the recent political
conversation surrounding women in employment.

Your reaction seems to prove the point.

~~~
jhgb
> Your reaction seems to prove the point.

I don't think it does. Markedness is much more universal in language and not
merely affecting grammatical gender in indeterminate contexts. If "the point"
in question is some kind of job underrepresentation, it would be more
plausible that this pronoun thing is some kind of symptom of it if this
indeterminate gender issue were isolated and recent, but the indeterminate
gender is ancient (older than any jobs, in fact), and markedness in general is
pervasive, so I'm not sure what it could prove about recent job issues.

~~~
uoaei
>If "the point" in question is some kind of job underrepresentation

Still seeing the forest for the trees.

The point isn't job underrepresentation in meatspace, the point is that the
underlying assumptions about gender roles in employment are expressing and
reinforcing themselves whenever the English language is written with a
determinate gender as in TFA. And that determined gender seems to be
disproportionately male to any perceptive reader. This betrays that the forces
that engender (pun intended?) discrimination are operating in the writer and
are reinforcing the worldviews of those who still hold such prejudices.

The causal relation between using this language and discriminating against
women is not a direct one, but it's intellectually dishonest to assume on the
flipside that no relation exists in anybody who does habitually use gendered
pronouns in their writing.

