

Hirewolf: The pitfalls of hiring filters - unignorant
http://www.hirewolf.com/blog

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cruise02
This strikes me as a bit of a straw man story. Who judges a candidate based
only on their education? Experience counts for more than education in any
place I've ever worked or interviewed. (At my last interview _none_ of my
interviewers noticed that I'm back in school for a Master's degree, despite
the fact that it's listed at the top of my education section.) If Bob has open
source projects to his credit, he can put them on his CV.

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dlevine
I agree with you here. This is a contrived example - I would expect a bit more
from an "article" voted to the front page of hacker news.

Sure, you shouldn't hire a developer merely because he went to the right
schools and did well, but I can say with some certainty that if you compare
candidates who went to good schools and got good grades with candidates who
went to lesser schools and got poor grades, the former will as a whole be much
stronger.

While you will hire some bad candidates and skip some good candidates if you
work this way, your strategy will be pretty close to optimal. Some very
successful companies have been using this strategy for many years.

With that said, if this company thinks they have a better way to do things,
they are welcome to give it a try. If they can improve hiring even a little
bit (either in improving the positive or negative filter), I'm sure there is
money in it for them.

~~~
kabdib
> This is a contrived example

Nope. I know developers who don't even have degrees that you'd be /crazy/ to
ignore.

On the average you will do pretty well with your "good school, good grades"
strategy. However, I believe you will miss out on the occasional truly
extraordinary candidate, the one that was bored with school and quit to do
Neat Stuff.

But (you may argue) these people are prima-donnas, or easily-distracted
flakes, or won't fit in culturally, or they don't bathe. Or something.

Look at their track record /outside of school/ and see if they did indeed do
anything Really Neat. If not, they were fooling themselves. But if there's
evidence to the contrary, you're crazy to ignore it.

Frankly, I don't even look at the education history any more. It doesn't tell
me anything. I'm far more interested in what projects they've done and their
exposure to computer science and software engineering than what dorm they had
an opportunity to occupy.

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aidenn0
The people who do things Really Neat are first introduced by some means other
than a resume.

~~~
kabdib
Very good point.

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tomx
Sounds like creating a new filter based on open source participation levels
and quality. Potentially this is a pitfall, you're excluding brilliant
developers who push all their energies into their (non open-source) day job.
Although perhaps this is the idea.

I wonder what percentage of say, Google engineers have public open source
projects?

~~~
tzs
Also excluded would be developers who push their non-work energies into
improving themselves technically.

After a hard day of work coding, I'd much rather, for instance, spend the
evening reading Russell and Norvig's AI book and working on the problems
therein to learn in depth the things that were covered in an introductory
fashion in the online Stanford AI class, than dabbling in some open source
project (and the often associated social drama).

I've got a lot of books besides that one that need more attention.

~~~
ajross
You lost me. I'm not understanding how you think contributing to an open
source project is not a way to improve yourself technically, but reading a
book is. In my experience you learn far more doing the former than the latter.

And in any case the subject at hand is identifying good developers. They
aren't paying you to read books, they want to know if you can produce
software. If you want to show them that you can, then _producing software_ is
an awfully good way to do that.

~~~
tomx
I think whether an open source project improves you, technically, depends on
the scope of each project. For example, you could make 100 simple CRUD web
applications in the same way, and not learn anything from it.

For the projects I tend to work on, reading 100s of pages of documentation is
necessary. To create a good solution, I must understand the domain well. I
spend many evenings reading books on kernel construction, networking,
algorithms and so on. This is improving me technically. When I go into work,
the knowledge then helps to make better software.

~~~
ajross
Isn't your point just agreement with mine? You're reading books (or wikipedia
or whatever) as a necessary task in a focused effort to develop software.
Clearly you didn't take me to mean that you should never read, right?

But the GP post seemed to be arguing the opposite: that focusing your effort
and learning on a practical goal was _not_ a way to "improve yourself
technically". And that's the part that lost me.

~~~
kabdib
I don't budget books. (Well, the actual budget has to do with available shelf
space and how much of the floor my wife is willing to let me pile books on).

About ten years ago I read a bunch of books on MPEG2/4 and some other video-
related stuff. I wasn't doing much in the field, it just seemed interesting.
Eight years later it turned out that the project I was on needed this type of
expertise, so I was able to contribute on stuff that people hadn't expected me
to be able to. It was fun.

You can't easily foresee this kind of thing. I'll probably never need to know
the details of how Vax/VMS did its free page management, but I might run into
a related problem, so reading that OS book 25 years ago might pay off.

What I see from people who /just code/ is that their skills rot far faster
than people who like to learn stuff. If all you do is code, after ten years
you have another 100KSLOCs of Java or C++ or SCHLOPBOL under your belt . . .
and who cares?

I like to learn stuff and hopefully get a chance to apply it. Otherwise I'm
just a garage mechanic who fixes bicycles in my spare time.

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chrisbennet
It sounds like a great idea. I wish you well.

While you seem to be targetting startups (which often have little money and
maybe, just maybe, think they don't need the outside help), I'd consider the
rest of the employer spectrum right up to the BDM's (big dumb companies). You
could pitch it as similar to a background check but instead of looking for
criminal history, you're digging into past performance.

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sequoia
"Find a Job!" When I click this button I do not expect to be told "we'll be in
touch", so I'm disappointed when I click it. "Join the Beta" or "Request
Invite" might be more suitable language.

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anandkulkarni
We're using Hirewolf to help in our hiring already.

Our biggest hope is that Hirewolf will be able to help highlight candidates
that our other recruitment channels aren't picking up -- not just great coders
from great schools, but killer coders with unknown pedigrees.

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pavel_lishin
> to quantify candidate action and accomplishment so that companies can make
> better hiring decisions.

How long before a startup named Hiresheep figures out how to game their
metrics, and sells it as a service?

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agentultra
This is exactly the kind of tool I think the hiring process needs. I'd met a
few HR people a couple years ago to discuss a tool like this. They all said it
would be invaluable.

So good luck!

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djb_hackernews
Hirewolf is a great idea, but I don't know how it's going to capture that I am
an apache project committer, or all the code I have in Hudson/Jenkins from my
github profile (where none of this activity happens).

Definite room for improvement but I'd hate to be passed over because a
potential employer doesn't have a complete picture.

~~~
cruise02
Check out Stack Overflow Careers. It allows you to associate your github
account so potential employers can see your activity.

<http://careers.stackoverflow.com/>

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mey
Show me a sample output of what you expect a trail to look like and how your
analysis is more then a google/git/linked in search.

Basically, why should a hiring company use you over tools all ready available?

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dsolomon
The best strategy is to keep HR and recruiters out of the hiring and decision
making process. Problem solved.

