
Why Hiring Exclusively for Experience Doesn't Make Sense - cera
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/230842
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raganwald
You can write a blog post explaining why _any_ repeatable, empirical hiring
method is flawed. I'll repeat that: If you can produce a repeatable, empirical
method of hiring, you can also demonstrate flaws in the results.

The only way to write about a process and not get shot down is to wave your
hands very furiously while talking about things that can't be measured or
repeatably selected like "attitude" or "fit." Things that sound good but upon
inspection, cannot be quantified or turned into a repeatable process.

In the end, what you use are a bunch of heuristics that you hope have the
right balance between minimizing false positives and false negatives, and you
accept that fact that your system is going to miss out on some good people and
from time to time hire the wrong person.

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joshyeager
I would also add that (at least in heavily knowledge- and team-driven
endeavors like software development) the right balance is that you should
minimize bad hires as much as possible, even at the cost of missing out on
many good people.

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marcosdumay
I'd completely side with the blog here, and arguee that hiring for experience
time on a specific technology is a great way to increase the chance of a bad
hire.

Both you and raganwald are right, but the industry standard is a practice that
looks like it was created to do exactly what it should avoid. No amount of
generic complaining can offset that.

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raganwald
My own experience with "X years of Foo" hiring is that for a time, I was quite
knowledgable about Java and the JVM, having worked on some very successful
Java development tooling.

But all too often, I met with resistance when looking at Java opportunities
because my résumé didn't have the right buzzword bingos for the gating
process. I found it difficult to even get an interview with some companies!

Thankfully, things ended up working out in my favour.

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kfk
Can I also add don't hire solely by github? I know you people are makers and
all, but building stuff alone is hard. Why not mentor people with empty
githubs and fish employees from that pool? Set up a cool open source project,
ask people with no experience to join, ask them to team up, then mentor them
through, make them work for free but mentor them, then hire who you like and
offer recommendations to other good programmers that you can't hire.

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solve
Europe (every country I've experienced) is obsessed with hiring based on
online profiles (github, linkedin, websites, etc.) I have a feeling that
they're going to learn about this the hard way.

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logfromblammo
From anecdotal observations, experience and optimistic attitude are nearly
mutually exclusive.

Some people I know are to the point where they refresh their resumes and start
being more alert to opportunities if a _competitor_ company announces a layoff
or merger. Paranoia has become a survival trait.

This very week, I had a phone screen where the interviewer said "hit the
ground running" and I knew at that moment that it wasn't going anywhere. So I
spent some time plying him about other parts of the business, and he passed my
candidate info off to someone else in a different business unit. Maybe that
guy will be more interested in aptitude than experience.

Unfortunately, I have a pessimistic attitude, so he probably won't call.

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soneca
Captain Obvious title. Hiring _exclusively_ for anything doesn't make sense.

Imagine hiring _exclusively_ for Attitude, Commitment to release or Aptitude.

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semerda
Shouldn't the title of this article be "Why Hiring Exclusively for Keywords
Doesn't Make Sense".. Hiring should be based on Achievements. And that comes
from some sort of Experience. Yes there are many folks that sit in a job
"attending" it and after 10 years will put on their resume 10 years of x. What
have they achieved in that time? Can they demonstrate it "today" if asked to
get into a technical or product debate using that experience/skills? I don't
think there is a single "this is how your hire" approach. It is a combination
of factors inc yours as the hiring manager to get a feel for the candidate.

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coldcode
The article undercuts its point by stating "Essentially we are looking for
developers that supremely value timelines, budgets and meeting scope
requirements." Sounds like you want automatons to me not versatility.

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squozzer
It's a good thing the military and NASA (or other space agencies) didn't hire
solely on experience with rocketry. Sure, von Braun and the other Germans had
experience, but most of the American / Soviet engineers and scientists did
not.

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manishsharan
Can someone please post links to sites that provide online aptitude and
attitude tests for candidates ? It would be nice to know if the candidate had
aptitude for the kind of isues that our department handles.

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dfox
Okay, I usually really don't see HN comments about UX and usability of linked
sites as constructive, but breaking arrow keys for scrolling is perfect reason
why I obviously won't read the article.

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gms7777
Odd, arrow keys work just fine for me in three different browsers.

