

That wild ass recruiting idea - davecheney
http://dave.cheney.net/2014/06/22/that-wild-ass-recruiting-idea

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shutupalready
I'm going to offer the contrary advice that hiring by employee referral is not
a good approach, for these reasons:

1\. Your genius employee does not necessarily know lots of other geniuses. In
fact, he might not know anybody. Yes, there are brilliant programmers and
engineers who are well-connected, but there are ten times as many brilliant
programmers and engineers who are solitary, independent types. If you press
them for a referral, you'll get a referral to his brother-in-law who took some
computer courses or the guy that was nice to him in university but hasn't
found a job yet.

2\. Friends hiring friends leads to cliques. For a startup, two or three
friends working together is ideal. But for a larger enterprise, you want to
avoid that. Of course, cliques will form by themselves, but why create them
from day 1.

3\. It's very cynical to say this, but chances are that your employee is not
going to recommend someone smarter or harder working than he is. Why make
himself look bad? (One of Paul Graham's articles says that this is true of
mediocre programmers, but not of the top ones. Perhaps when you're starting
out, you want to work in a room full of geniuses, but what if you are the top
dog in the room? Are you going to bring in someone that can obviously show you
up?)

Many hiring methods lead to negative quality direction. Example: Making all
your hires from Monster.com would be a negative trend. But a lot of people
seem to believe that hiring based on employee referral is a positive. I'm sure
it's not the worst way--and it's probably much better than relying on
Monster.com for instance--but I think that employee referrals lead to quality
_loss_ over time.

~~~
moomin
I still don't think he's got the point that every last one of his expanded
suggestions are likely to result in a mediocre monoculture.

And yay for sending your employees to places they can meet more young white
straight guys.

~~~
bengale
Why young white straight guys?

Honest question. Is this an issue at conferences?

~~~
moomin
Honest questions deserve honest answers:

Even conferences aren't particularly diverse. If they were, you probably
wouldn't have had things like the PyCon incident.
([http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/PyCon_2013_forking_and_do...](http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/PyCon_2013_forking_and_dongles_incident))

(Note that here the conference organizers were trying to be diversity aware,
but the backlash from people who didn't want them to be was huge.)

More on the state of women's employment in the tech industry:
[http://aboutfeminism.me/](http://aboutfeminism.me/)

When I started paying attention to this, I thought there was an issue, but it
wasn't that serious. The more I learn, the more serious I think it is.

I don't know as much about race and sexuality as I do gender, but I get the
impression isn't all dancing through the flowers there either.

------
jzwinck
We should acknowledge the second edge of this sword. When a company invests in
its employees' networks, it not only expands its ability to recruit more
people directly, it also expands its employees' ability to find new jobs.

This may still be a net win for everyone, but it's complicated. Imagine you
run a company and have identified a few bad employees. Surely you should not
reward them by sending them to conferences, right? But wait, maybe you should,
because then not only might they spend time learning, recruiting, and doing
other things that might be more productive for your company than whatever
they're currently screwing up, but they might also find a new job which is
both better for them and solves your problem of how to get rid of bad
employees without undue liability.

So send your best, most loyal, most enthusiastic employees out into the world
to meet other people and spread the word about your company. And send your
worst ones too!

~~~
georgemcbay
If you can identify legitimately bad employees, fire them; they are not just a
waste of money but an anchor around the neck of the employees who aren't bad.

Of course, this assumes a lot of things such as that you have USA/California
style "at will" employment, you are capable of determining that the
employee(s) in question are legitimately bad and not just hamstrung by stupid
process or demoralized due to reasons you could reasonably fix, etc.

------
was_hellbanned
Here's a wild ass idea: have you engineers do all the resume reviews,
screening calls, and interviews. Leave HR and most of management entirely out
of it.

Then just hire people who can intelligently speak to a relevant resume, and
who get along well with your group. If they don't work out, fire them.

People spend entirely too much time obsessing over how to hire people, usually
mumbling some nonsense about how they'll destroy their team or be sued out of
existence by a bad hire. Personally, I think it's a combination of desperation
to cover one's own ass at all costs, and providing an illusion of control. If
they'd focus on improving the workplace and their own communication rather
than fretting about voodoo hiring theory, they'd be much better off.

~~~
bengale
Thats what we do. We give HR a spec, they handle talking to recruiters etc.

We get a stack of CVs. We break them into a pile that sound OK and we give
each a telephone interview.

If the telephone interview sounds good we send them a scenario that should
take a couple of hours, we have a few tailored for different specialities. If
we get a good sample back from them we move onto face to face.

Face to face tends to be about an hour with a couple of senior developers and
a more management type.

Seems to work well so far.

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lukasm
Cronyism is the main problem. How do you solve it?

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDevelopers.html)

Employee referrals: may be slippery when wet

~~~
mathattack
Yes. This is great for improving the quality of the immediate next hire, but
not great for the diversity of the system.

------
jonathanjaeger
Seems like a poor prescription to ONLY go off of referrals. The bigger the
company gets, the more likely people will not want to bring in talent that
they might view as competition. I know that's cynical, and perhaps placated by
referral bonuses, but it could happen. Also, what about people straight out of
college that find you on LinkedIn and apply to a job posting (which I did in
NYC since I knew no one), and end up getting trained to be a senior employee?
There are just too many scenarios where you're limiting your pool of
prospective employees, why not try everything and double down on what works
without discounting new opportunities to bring talent in.

