Why Hiring Exclusively for Experience Doesn't Make Sense

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/230842

by cera • 13 years ago

35 17 13 years ago

entrepreneur.com

soneca• 13 years ago

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

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

squozzer• 13 years ago

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.

dfox• 13 years ago

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.

gms7777• 13 years ago

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

kfk• 13 years ago

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.

solve• 13 years ago

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.

yummyfajitas• 13 years ago

Do I need to keep holding their hand after I hire them as well? Building stuff alone is often part of the job.

coldcode• 13 years ago

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.

logfromblammo• 13 years ago

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.

raganwald3• 13 years ago

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.

joshyeager• 13 years ago

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.

marcosdumay• 13 years ago

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.

raganwald3• 13 years ago

For the sake of a constructive argument... If you woke up one day and decided to "hack" that problem by making it low-cost to do bad hires, what would you do?

Would you run a company like open source, perhaps, with a lot of remote people? Would you pay feature and bug fix bounties instead of salaries? Would you change the way communication and knowledge is shared so that getting up to speed isn't a huge burden on the people who are productive?

I think that the way most companies work, you're absolutely right that false positives are terrible. But that seems like a problem well worth tackling!

semerda2• 13 years ago

Hire fast, fire fast.

manishsharan• 13 years ago

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.

semerda2• 13 years ago

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.

Why Hiring Exclusively for Experience Doesn't Make Sense

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