How Not to Hire

http://moron4hire.tumblr.com/post/60891800011/how-not-to-hire

by moron4hire • 13 years ago

31 32 13 years ago

moron4hire.tumblr.com

dpanah• 13 years ago

Top notch!

moron4hire5• 13 years ago

thanks!

jlebron22• 13 years ago

That could be 15 years of hiding behind far more competent teammates at a company that has a pathological problem with not firing under-performers

Funny that you mention that. It turns out it costs the company a pretty penny to replace "under-performers" so they just keep them around instead.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/labor/report/2012/11/...

moron4hire5• 13 years ago

This doesn't seem to account for anti-productivity at all, i.e. people who create more work by the end of the day than they complete. It's hard to quantify anti-productivity, let along get anyone reviewing work to admit that anti-productivity has occurred. Our work culture tends to value activity over all else, so the common sentiment is that a warm butt in the chair is better than nothing, even if that warm butt is making more work for everyone else.

I'm hoping that my method will actually ameliorate much of this. By starting the person part-time, perhaps their familiarity with the project builds "faster" over a unit-work-time than it would otherwise (I've personally found my comfort level with a project to be in some part a function of calendar time). In this way, I'm also not spending a lot on the candidate search itself.

The idea is to spend less time on much-higher-yield methods of finding people who are better suited to the job crossed with people who are happier with the environment of the job. It is about avoiding turn-over, but not in this perverse way of "ignore the problem because the alternative is worse", but by trying to avoid the hiring of a bad worker in the first place.

In this system, you'll never see a job notice from me. You won't know I have a need for an employee unless I ask you to come work for/with me. You'll only ever get a job offer from me if A) I know you're not an idiot, and B) I know you're available. Yes, that means I have to know the person very well already. If I have an opening that needs to be filled and I don't currently know of someone that fills it, then it is likely to be a long time before it gets filled, if I do nothing.

But then again, it's not like sifting through resumes is providing quality applicants. The resume and job interview are so poor of a selection process that I'm willing to try just about anything else.

There is also an element of respect for the worker involved in what I'm doing. I don't think I have a right to monopolize a person's time. I think people should have the time to be engaged in many pursuits. I want it to be up to them to choose how much they work. I want them to have the ability to find other work as well. The idea being, people who are happier in their work-life balance will be more productive.

Of course, we'll see.

busterarm7• 13 years ago

Much respect for what you're doing. I think this is exactly the right approach to take.

I might be willing to take a little bit more risk than you would but I'm also a lot more willing to fire people early (see here: http://www.defmacro.org/2013/07/10/firing.html)

So many companies and their HR departments desire to just fill seats for the short term needs of the company rather than invest in efficiency and protect the long-term needs of the business.

jlebron22• 13 years ago

Great points, I definitely agree. Anti-productivity of one employee can become a plague and affect numerous employees and the resume and job interview process is indeed broken. Good luck with your system and look forward to hearing how it turns out.

muhuk• 13 years ago

Spot on. Job boards need to fail more than they successfully place people, so that employers and job seekers keep trying. Similarly it's not in the dating sites best interest if everybody finds their soul mate. They need losers. Losers with money to spend. Same is true with your personal trainer in the gym, she/he only wants you to keep training safely and continuously.

In all these examples the incentives with the primary actors and the middlemen doesn't align.

robotcookies• 13 years ago

Can anyone else verify the '2 out of 600 applicants could actually do the job' statement. I've heard something like 1 in 100 but I just can't believe numbers like these.

sokoloff4• 13 years ago

Sadly, it's more true than you can probably imagine.

Realize though, that the pool of people actively applying to jobs is, on average, FAR worse than the total population. Even companies who are pretty bad at hiring can make some kind of selection for quality, and great engineers get fired way less than terrible engineers, so in theory, the very worst engineers in the world would continually apply for jobs and never be hired, or would be quickly fired.

My experience suggests that it's very rare to get a superstar from any passive method (that finds active job seekers). That pool is just to dilute with talent. To get the strong candidates, you have to be active (to have a shot at the passive candidates) or extremely lucky.

It's no surprise to find only 1 in 100 of unemployed engineers are truly good. If you just post openings, you're unlikely to interview even a representative sample of the population, let alone an above-average sample.

kunil• 13 years ago

If that is true, I can relate the HR or hiring people. It must be bad when majority of applicants are not suitable to job at all.

~2 months ago I started searching for a new job. I only applied that actually suits to me and I am capable. I only applied 3 places and all interviewed me, in the end I got 2 offers (I am starting next week!). I guess that is just me.

busterarm7• 13 years ago

My experience suggests that it's very rare to get a superstar from any passive method (that finds active job seekers). That pool is just to dilute with talent. To get the strong candidates, you have to be active (to have a shot at the passive candidates) or extremely lucky.

It's a two-part problem though. Some companies don't have a management structure that allows superstars to thrive. Large companies that need to passively hire active job seekers often don't give any kind of ownership over your own work. Responsibility and accountability, I find, are really key to both nurturing high-performing employees and weeding out the ones that try to hide.

Still other companies have a culture where being a superstar paints a target on your back. Offices are filled with petty bullshit.

moron4hire5• 13 years ago

Well, it's an anecdote from several years ago of which I have only rough numbers. The "2 people who were good" and the "67% fired" numbers are correct, for one particular project we had hired 6 people and eventually fired 4 of them over the course of two years. I'm guessing at 50% acceptance rate for the offer (it probably wasn't that low, but it wasn't better than 75% either), and the two 10% numbers to get to 1% applicant acceptance rate. It's a rough guess to give an idea of the magnitude of things, and as such it's not an order of magnitude off.

ams61102• 13 years ago

It's likely close to true. The reason: all the good people already have jobs.

busterarm7• 13 years ago

We have a pre-employment screening test for all employees at my company that I do the scoring on.

About 1 in 30 even gets passed on to HR to look at their resume. We get about 400-500 applicants a day (I don't personally look at all of them; a handful of us have this responsibility). Most people cheat, don't read the instructions or just give plain crap answers. A pretty significant number don't even try to get good answers - I wonder if they just have to show an attempt for unemployment money. We struggle to get even 2 strong answers out of all 5 questions. 2 strong answers will basically guarantee an interview. 1 - 1 1/2 answers will get passed on to HR with a "maybe".

Of those that interview, I think about 1 in 15 gets hired into our training group. Usually about 1/5-1/3 of these realize that they can't do the job in training and stop showing up or they get recommended no-hire. Usually by this time HR tells us it's too late to fire them but occasionally it will happen (we had a hairdresser who was coached by a very senior employee through the hiring process. she had absolutely no technical ability whatsoever and was fired).

Our turnover rate for people in their first two weeks is high. I'm not going to lie, we're a very difficult company to work for and we don't have the best conditions for our employees (I can't change that).

Ultimately though, we have a staff of about 600 all of whom I interact with on a regular basis. I get about 1500-2200 tickets escalated to me personally each month, so I do deal with almost everyone. I could say that at present maybe 10 people can completely do their job effectively and maybe another 50 who can do most of it and have areas where they're significantly weak. The people who are very effective eventually get promoted to my team though.

For our newest hires, we've given up on recruiting technical skill completely and hire based on phone skills and business sense. The hope is that they can be trained to be effective. Our training department sucks and I have absolutely no hope for this plan to work, but we need butts in seats to meet SLA on our new contracts.

OP's numbers are very believable.

sokoloff4• 13 years ago

You're averaging a ticket escalation to you every 5 working minutes, and you have another job to do on top of those escalations?! I can believe you about the not the best conditions for your employees bit, yourself included...

jackschultz2• 13 years ago

I'm currently in the job hunting situation out of college and, along with sending out resumes, I'm working on a bunch of different side projects to try to show that I can a) actually execute, and b) learn new things.

Not sure if it's the best way to work on getting hired, but I don't want to practice "interview questions". I know I don't do as well in interview because of my lack of specific preparation, but I feel like I'd be a better candidate than someone who just prepares for an interview. Curious to see how that might affect potential employers.

vinceguidry2• 13 years ago

You don't need to "show" that you can learn new things, you just need to learn new things. And keep doing it. At first you have to do it on your own, but eventually you'll get paid to do it.

The biggest trick to getting there is inspiration. You need to be excited about the possibilities. You'll get ten times farther in an interview if you can enthusiastically tell your interviewer how much fun you're having with Angular.js. Or that project that kept you up til 3am because you just couldn't put it down.

You need to stop looking at your career as some set of criteria you have to fill and start looking at it as the most fun you're going to have, like ever. Seriously, building shit is fun.

jackschultz2• 13 years ago

I think you have to show that you can learn new things. How else can someone justify hiring someone if they haven't demonstrated that they're capable of picking up a new piece of technology? I was trying to say that I wanted to show my value by producing actual things rather than being able to write code on paper.

It's also funny that you mentioned Angular since I wrote launched a little app using it today.

polemic2• 13 years ago

"He will know exactly what I charge the client and what I give to him out of that."

In my experience this is exactly how traditional engineering firms work. It seems to work for them, I'm not sure why a software consultancy would work differently. Do they?

Regardless, if you give people the power to manage their work, to bill their clients appropriately, to take ownership for the work, then the right people will thrive and the rest will find it far too transparent to hide behind.

ams61102• 13 years ago

I've worked as an employee of a consultancy a few different times, and I've never been informed about the rates at which I was billed to clients.

moron4hire5• 13 years ago

Yes, neither have I. On a few occasions, I accidentally stumbled on the numbers and was quite shocked to see that it was whole-number multiples over what I earned. Large, whole-numbers. Especially on government contracts.

busterarm7• 13 years ago

Both my brother and I have done a fair bit of IT consulting and have always either been told or found out along the way.

Anytime I've been employed to provide services, it has always helped me do my job to know exactly what value we were providing to both our customers and our business.

It has always been my experience that the more business-minded employees are significantly better at doing their jobs and that the ones who tend to waste company time/money also have the poorest business-sense.

The companies that don't want you to know this don't want you to have enough information to ask for what you're really worth. It also tends to negatively affect the client as well. I don't want to work for any company that behaves like this.

zura• 13 years ago

I was getting a significant share of what each client was paying, along with a regular salary. So yes, I was informed.

educating• 13 years ago

So we will see. This could be a complete failure...

There you go guarding yourself from a possible bad decision.

The trick in hiring is to trust your gut. Your gut might be wrong, but it is often better than everything else.

A simple up, down, or sideways (which is usually down) vote by the interviewers without having to give a reason is much better than trying to rationalize and enumerate the pros and cons. It isn't perfect, because an interviewer could be a racist, sexist, etc. but the cultural fit is much more important than what is on paper to hire and it is hard to judge much else during the interview, other than the ability to interview well.

I'm a big fan of the 90-day trial period. If the person coming in knows right away it is a bad fit, they'll be looking for a job right away to avoid being laid off on the 90th day.

How Not to Hire

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