
The Best Hiring Tip - alizaki
http://zakimahomed.posterous.com/the-best-hiring-tip
======
mixmax
_"CV's (people lie) and reference checks (everyone knows 2 people they like)
"_

Marissa Meyer was asked on the Charlie Rose show about Google's hiring
process, and she answered that they had done the numbers and the only
correlation there was between the hiring process and how well new employees
worked out was their CV. People that had prior experience in the area they
were hired for did better than people who didn't. Except for that there were
no significant correlations to be found.

I believe Marissa Meyer over Zaki Mahomed(the author of the article)

~~~
timwiseman
You have a good point and in my (much more limited than Ms. Meyer) experience,
the CV is a very strong indicator. But there are times it does not work:

1\. The candidate has to be truthful or you have to actually verify. Also, its
worth being very careful about exactly what is said. I have met someone who
genuinely had 4 years as a Senior DBA. It was true, and his former boss loved
him. But when I proved for details, he was the senior DBA because he was the
only DBA in the small company and mostly maintained a system consultants had
set up earlier. He did not seem ready to do new development or manage a major
system to me after a thorough interview.

2\. The candidate is straight out of school. While there are exceptions, most
people don't have much of a resume at that point.

3\. The candidate is making a career change. Similar to being straight out of
school (in fact they may be straight out of school for the second time) they
won't and can't have a lot of experience in that particular field.

Of course, 2 and 3 might indicate you don't want to hire them for a senior
position anyway, but it does make using the CV as the primary determinant
challenging.

~~~
awa
Regarding 1) the interview questions and a little research/verification on the
CV should be able to flush that out.

------
timr
So, the "best hiring tip ever" is a question that's easy to bullshit once
you've heard it, and that puts people whose proudest achievements relate to
their careers in the uncomfortable situation of inventing a response that
dresses up the importance of their hobbies? Brilliant.

Advice like this makes me realize why employers believe that qualified
applicants are so hard to find. If this is the garbage that passes for best
practice in interviews, they might as well be sacrificing chickens to the gods
of employment.

~~~
viraptor
I'd say it's a very easy to verify question. If someone is experienced in
interviews (you can usually tell that's the case) they might talk a lot about
the stuff they did, but they will have nothing to show. Usually when you're
excited about something you will have _some_ proof, or will know enough
details that it's easy to confirm. For almost all people I work with, it's
enough to google their name to find their projects / blogs / ... everything
the employer would be interested in.

~~~
timr
Now you're hinging your hiring decision on your ability to verify a person's
hobby?

It seems to me that it would be both simpler and more effective to spend your
energy trying to determine if the candidate can do the job for which you're
hiring. Leave their hobbies out of it.

~~~
viraptor
Of course. I didn't say that is a good question, or that the answer should be
taken into consideration when hiring. I just don't agree that it's easy to
talk BS in that situation if the person asking it really wants to know the
truth. (i.e. they don't ask it just because it's on the list)

Personally - I think it's a good question to decide which person you'd rather
spend half the day with, if you have 2 equally good candidates.

------
aminuit
> "lame excuses like charity work"

Buzz off. How is this at the top of the front page on HN?

Also, it's idiotic to to perpetuate the "rock star programmer" meme. All the
great developers I have ever known would never consider themselves rock stars,
however most of the biggest assholes I've ever known did consider themselves
rock stars. As a developer, I'd never work somewhere that looked for rock
stars, ninjas, or what have you. It clearly shows they don't understand
programmers and programming.

edit: language.

~~~
alizaki
did you read the article? "lame excuses like charity work (most likely they
spent one night feeding the homeless and are bragging about it since),"

most people do very little charity, and brag a lot about it. If you have hired
people and seen otherwise, i'd love to stand corrected.

~~~
aminuit
Yes I read your post. That's why I was able to quote from it. If you want to
hire a good programmer, ask them about programming. It's that simple. Set up a
few scenarios and let them talk and whiteboard their way out of it. Ideally
you'll be able to come up with a range of problems that range from familiar to
totally unknown. The familiar scenarios will tell you if they are
bullshitters, and the unfamiliar scenarios will tell you how quickly they can
adapt to new environments.

While it is true that people who program outside of work tend to be good
programmers, it is not true that all good programmers program outside of work.
And your note about charity work is outright insulting to anyone who has spent
their free time helping those in need.

~~~
chrischen
I think there's a lot of validity in the assumption that if you are extremely
technically capable (a good programmer), then it is also extremely unlikely
for you to not have come up with an idea (and thus be passionate about it) and
committed to its realisation. That is, if you truly are good, it's pretty
unlikely that you never implemented something on your own.

But also keep in mind it's a tip for hiring into startups, and startups at the
early level require a certain amount of passion that usually comes with
programmer who actually love to program (and if you love to program you've
probably done it outside of necessity before).

------
city41
I just got done doing a 4 hour long programming problem as the first start in
the interview process at a company. In my long history of finding jobs, this
is the way to go. It was a well thought out, challenging problem, and the
solution really flexed a lot of different aspects of what a good programmer
should be able to do.

It has the added bonus of me thinking this might be an above average company
and I'm more interested in them than any of my other prospects.

------
gruseom
My experience has consistently been that the only reliable way to tell how
good someone is is to work with them on a real project. Since that actually
works, and nothing else does, I'd say it's the interview and hiring processes
that are broken.

~~~
pgbovine
would there be a way to try out a new hire for a 'trial period', maybe on like
a 3-month starter project paired with someone more senior? then after the new
hire has proven him/herself over those months, a formal offer could be made.

~~~
timwiseman
There are ways to do that, but there are a lot of complications.

First, most truly good workers, especially in the tech industry, aren't
sitting idle for a long time, so they are often either being hired away from a
job they already hold and possibly being asked to relocate. A lot of those
good people will not make a commitment like that to you and disrupt their
lives if you aren't ready to make something of a commitment to them. So, this
might work well for entry level positions but probably less so for senior
people.

Then there is the cost of dealing with them for three months or until you
figure out if they are right. While this is much less expensive than keeping
the wrong person on for a long time, it is still very expensive. Most managers
want to try very hard to find the right person the first time not go through a
whole series of short term hires looking for the right person.

In some situations this is a great idea (and what many companies actually do),
but there are many occasions it is impractical.

------
dotBen
Meta point: There's mixed views on HN'ing your own stuff, but I think it's
pushing what's "decent" to use such subjective headline as "The Best Hiring
Tip".

Even if that's the title of the post on your own blog, I think most HN'ers
enjoy a bit of objectivity.

------
leftnode
You probably shouldn't even have to ask a passionate person this; at some
point in the interview, they probably would've told you what they enjoy doing
outside of work.

Regardless, there's no perfect way to interview someone for a development job.
It's equal parts experience, your feeling about them, how they fit into the
existing organization, and a ton of other variables.

------
esja
In my experience the "Best Hiring Tip" is actually: ask the person to do the
thing that you are hiring them to do (or a representative exercise), and see
how well they do it, or how much potential they demonstrate.

------
ax0n
I wholeheartedly agree with this man. Of course, I'm currently unemployed and
would receive heavy bias from a person using this technique.

------
tyn
What 85 years worth of research says about who to hire:

[http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/selecting-
tal...](http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/selecting-talent-the-
upshot-from-85-years-of-research.html)

------
sruffell
Although what about the people who, misguided though they may be, haven't done
anything outside of work because their passion is their work?

~~~
mbrubeck
If someone's interviewing for a job, there must be _something_ they want that
they aren't (currently) getting from their employer.

