The Way We Hire Is All Wrong

https://medium.com/backchannel/the-way-we-hire-is-all-wrong-3e19e2051f3e?source=email-f986ab8482fd-1422374905623-daily_digest

by mhr_online • 11 years ago

168 140 11 years ago

medium.com

bsder• 11 years ago

While I do agree that the interview process is arbitrary, I think that having a 50% success rate indicts far more than that.

If "success" is a coin flip, that means that EVERYTHING inside a company failed--interviewing, hiring, training, management, everything. If even one of those things was working, the success rate should be better than a coin flip.

annnnd• 11 years ago

I think the part about the coin flip is misleading on two counts:

1) if you chose randomly from the pool of job applications, does OP really think you have 50% chance to fail / not fail? (probability doesn't work this way)

2) what does it mean that the hire "failed"?

EDIT: I do agree with the general sentiment of the article though.

skolor• 11 years ago

I'm a little unclear what "success" is. Does the quote just mean within 18 months 50% of employees have left the company? Surely it doesn't mean that 50% of employees are getting fired after 18 months. A median employment length of 18 months seems low but ultimately within a reasonable range to me.

ecaradec• 11 years ago

You can't deduce that because oncologist patients often die in 18 month, oncologist are lesser doctors. Patient died because they were so sick when they arrive that there wasn't a lot of hope left.

50% success rate doesn't indicate that recruiting is like throwing a coin flip. If there are only 10% of people that can do the job across interviewee, then throwing a coin would get you just 10% of people able to do the job.

However if there was a pool were 80% of people are able to do the job, getting 50% would be worse than picking anyone randomly.

Bayesian logic :)

biot• 11 years ago

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859199 for a great discussion (329 comments) on Brooke Allen's APL hiring story.

namelezz• 11 years ago

How to tell if you are incompetent?

fsloth3• 11 years ago

If this is about populations, I would say incompetence is a poor metric. I would measure competence, so that sorting in order of competence just leaves some individuals in the end - in the scope of the metric. They are then least competent.

It's way easier to point out to competence than incompetence. I would use as a prime measure of competence finishing things (projects, software, assignments). While failure to complete things can be due to various facts (including the possibility that the deliverable was impossible to complete in the first place) completion, delivering, is a clear, logical measure.

So, to me, true artists ship, shipping is a good measure of competence but lack of deliverables does not prove incompetence, it just means lack of evidence for competence.

"Incompetent" as a word has a really nasty sound to it. Also, people learn, so several failed projects can actually lead eventually to a success and delivery, if the person is able and willing.

whiddershins2• 11 years ago

What a bizarre and compelling story. Glad to have read it.

Meanwhile I think the hiring problem/solution is staring us right in the face.

What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default?

Isn't it perhaps weird that there is an assumption companies and employees should bind their fates together, and, if it doesn't work out, one or both parties is pretty screwed because of an investment of time and money which will likely result in a person being unemployed and/or a company paying a person far beyond when they are providing value.

This is like getting married after one date. Every time.

If employees were assumed to be exploring many things simultaneously, both sides would have plenty of chances to gather meaningful data about the employer/employee relationship, and if it is really a great fit, a long term employment arrangement could be worked out, with a contract that reflects mutual responsibilities revolving around this shift to an all-eggs-in-one-basket situation for the employee - and likely a corresponding move to much more critical functions being performed for the company.

I cynically suspect the current concept of full-time work evolved to suit employers, it allows them to manipulate and scare employees, especially when (for example) health insurance is at stake. Employers naturally have more data about salaries and so forth, in general most employers have many employees, while most employees only have one employer. That is inherently asymmetrical. Now that certain skill sets are harder to hire for, it is hurting everyone.

But the situation was never that great from the beginning, let's figure out a way to make it better for everyone.

crdoconnor2• 11 years ago

Many companies hire contractors and then turn them into permanent employees.

aswerty• 11 years ago

While that sounds like a reasonable hiring approach most of the contractors I know (in the UK and Ireland) wouldn't take permanency because contractors earn significantly more. Maybe it's a bit different in the US though.

fuzzygroup• 11 years ago

I'm a startup founder and while this had been our initial approach to evaluating new engineers, our payroll company, PayChex, has specifically advised us to NOT do this. Why? Because it sends a red flag to the IRS to come after us for taxes for the period when they were a contractor.

Crazily enough PayChex has told us that the real solution here is for us to "sign" the person over to a contracting company so we can hire them thru the contracting company for the evaluation period. Yes we'll pay more for them since we have to pay that company's markup but we won't get gone after by the IRS. And, yes, it adds another layer of BS / paperwork. End result? We've hired no one because of this - its too hard to vet engineers without seeing their work. Sigh.

datashovel• 11 years ago

I don't know if I'm convinced "making contract work the default" is the right solution. But I do agree the lines should be blurred in terms of how companies approach their "hiring process". Companies won't change unless they perceive the change as bringing benefits to the company (ie. saving or making money). I think there will need to be some major success stories before we see widespread adoption of dramatically new hiring policies.

fsloth3• 11 years ago

"I cynically suspect the current concept of full-time work evolved to suit employers, it allows them to manipulate and scare employees, especially when (for example) health insurance is at stake. "

Before, getting paid _daily_ was the norm. Getting money for the whole month at a time is way more predictable.

Employers typically are financially much better suited to weather out economic slumps than individuals are.

On the average, it's to the employees benefit temporary employment is not the norm.

"employers naturally have more data about salaries and so forth, in general most employers have many employees, while most employees only have one employer. That is inherently asymmetrical."

This is very true. Unions are a one such leverage balancing mechanism.

johan_larson2• 11 years ago

Another option would be to hire fairly leniently, but prune ruthlessly and early.

In most jurisdictions, there is a trial period of sorts, typically 60 to 90 days, during which it is easy to fire an employee, before various rules about dismissal kick in. As far as I know, most companies don't really make use of this, except in really serious cases.

But assuming it is in fact easy to fire during this period, we could hire somewhat loosely, and then carefully evaluate the progress of the employee at the 60-day mark. And just dismiss the ones who aren't making good progress. We might dismiss half the hires early.

jarek• 11 years ago

How long until you run out of applicants willing to take the risk of having to restart their job search after they've settled down?

raving-richard2• 11 years ago

If I were ever in charge of hiring for many types of position (whether programming, or writing, or such), I think I would do something similar. The advertisement will say "looking for full time X (must complete initial contract period of Y weeks)" or similar. The best way to see if you like someone's work, is to see it. So, hire them for up to three months (telling them that this is what is happening, and why, and being completely upfront about it), and if it works out, hire them full time. Then, why not hire multiple people? If you have a program that needs work done, then hire six people to work on those parts for a couple of weeks. See who's work you like, then hire them full time.

This requires a change in both thinking, and how programming is done. You want to have nice chunks of work that can be completed by new people in a short period of time. But, I'm sure it's possible.

(Where I'm from, the way to get a full time job in many fields is: get casual work, get short term contracts, get longer term contracts, someone else dies or retires, you get offered a full time job. This is partly due to too many people looking for too few jobs. This is not an ideal situation, but does mean that by the time people are hired for the full time job, the people hiring them know them already, and the quality of their work.)

bad_user• 11 years ago

No, that's not similar. There's a huge difference there ...

Good consultants / freelancers have higher hourly rates than normal employees, to cover their expenses and the periods of inactivity. Plus really good ones are much more expensive simply because they can deliver value that can't be delivered by average employees, so they are expensive because there's demand for their skill-set.

Your solution for example would not get me hired by you. Because I hate probation periods. Because getting hired for only X weeks is a risk for me that has to be worth it. So either you're a really sexy company for which I'm dying to work for, or you must pay me enough for those 3 weeks to be worth it.

And furthermore, the relationship between a consultant hired for a limited amount of time and an employee on probation is very different, going beyond just price. A good consultant gets hired based on (initial) trust in that consultant's skill-set, wheres a probation period signals exactly the opposite.

JackMorgan• 11 years ago

Very few people would leave a job for a "chance" at another. So you'll limit yourself to only people currently without work, which is a much smaller pool and likely to be filled with a disproportionate number of recently fired people.

anon4• 11 years ago

That's pretty much how it works here. Labour contracts include a provision that you can be fired for any reason at any point during the first three months with the company (they still have to pay you for all the days you're with them, of course). Conversely, they also include the clause that you can leave at any point during those three months without advance notice. After that, both parties must give a full month's advance notice to the other before terminating the relationship.

pluma5• 11 years ago

What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default?

That's actually one of the reasons I find the idea of a guaranteed basic income so promising. The biggest thing making an "everybody freelances" world a dystopia rather than a eutopia (sic) is that it would eliminate any semblance of income stability.

Static long-term contracts would still be an option because of the reliability they offer to both sides, but it would give employers the benefit of at will employment without the drawbacks that normally has for the employees.

Of course I don't really see it happening in the US -- at least not in a way that's good for the employees. A lot of the welfare system in the US is still based on the idea of traditional long-term employment, even with Obamacare and all that decoupling it a bit.

mseebach• 11 years ago

The concept you're looking for is "savings". Contractors and freelancers charge a premium to compensate for the lack of income stability. If that premium is saved up, you get stability.

ansible2• 11 years ago

Don't forget health care. That plus a basic living stipend would be quite a revolution to the economy. We'd start to price activities more sanely, and use automation more effectively.

The people still driven by status will still work their asses off to get ahead, and in general I think things would still get done. With the energy resources and automation we already have, we can do this now.

notahacker• 11 years ago

What's the weekly rate of the average freelance software developer? And how does that compare with that of a freelance bartender, nightwatchman or refuse collector?

Relying on a BI (at any feasible level) for even a fairly brief period of time is going to represent a severe drop in income for most skilled contractors, and thus people paying mortgages on their condos in SF are going to be just as worried about income instability as before.

tessierashpool2• 11 years ago

    a dystopia rather than a eutopia (sic)

This is an awesome typo. "Utopia" is a transliteration from Ancient Greek meaning "No place." The same rules of transliteration would make "eutopia" mean "good place."

"Utopia" came into English through a satire, the meaning being that nowhere's really paradise, but today we mostly use it without that edge, i.e., as if it really were spelled "eutopia."

shit_parade• 11 years ago

It's a beautiful idea but the problem is implementation.

The government of most countries is already a powerful and corrupting force, giving it even the additional power and discretion to 'hand out' a basic income is terrifying to consider.

mattlutze3• 11 years ago

I don't particularly enjoy the hiring process. It takes a lot of time, which is time I can't be building.

I think I would really, really not enjoy having to potentially hire a brand-new crop of people, or renegotiate every contract on my team, every time we hit a gatecheck, major deliverable, project checkpoint, etc.

The current concept of full-time work means I as an employee don't have to worry so much about not having a job in a week (it takes time to hire a new me, too), and also that the people I hire likely aren't going to disappear on me in a week, as well.

Moving to a "everyone short-term contracts" model means I have less security that this team I've spent a lot of my time trying to build may end up not being here in 6 months. It means my team members have less security that the coworker of theirs who is specializing in ____ will be here in 6 months.

Probationary periods in new hire contracts exist for that "this isn't a mutually good fit" issue.

Ultimately it feels like an "everyone is a contractor" default will end up increasing overhead for the company, reducing productive time available for people involved in hiring (my developers have to interview a new hire, as well), and less security for both the contractor and the employer.

mooreds2• 11 years ago

This.

The solution to overhead of hiring isn't "let's do more hiring". It's figuring out how companies can de risk the hiring process. Certainly moving everyone to contracts would do some de risking (definitely around 'parting ways'), but more revolutionary would be to figure out a way to de risk the 'finding talent' part of hiring.

ErrantX2• 11 years ago

What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default?

I've heard this line a lot. The interesting thing is that there are areas, even inside tech, that this is the default. And it's nto necessarily better. For example, steelworks or the oil industry. A pretty significant portion of the employees in these fields (including IT sectors) are contractors. They have minimal job security and limited motivation to excel (even in the steel industry where perks are fairly decent).

I know this empirically because whenever we have a job opening there is a queue of people from these industries looking for a more stable role, even if it means a pay cut. Which somewhat gets to the heart of it - this is about job security!

What you are describing works well when you look at the top 0.5%, or maybe less, of employees. For the rest, the current system has evolved to favour the employee and provide stability for them month-to-month.

Now don't get me wrong; it's imperfect, and we need to evolve the system again! But short-term working is not a coverall solution IMO.

visakanv• 11 years ago

Agreed. I'm guessing there should be (in the realm of possible solutions) some sort of intermediate arrangement, or a whole spectrum of intermediate arrangements. These may previously have been too complex to manage, but might now be plausible.

(Can't help but feel like there's some sort of parallel between this and conventional attitudes towards marriage! Just because marriage is a little bizzare doesn't mean that the only alternative should be bachelor life forever.)

kyllo2• 11 years ago

But short-term working is not a coverall solution IMO.

Indeed. A coverall solution would be a basic income for all permanent residents, coupled with a nationalized healthcare program. People want stable employment because freelancing is so risky without the benefit of any guaranteed regular paycheck or insurance. If the government actually provided a minimum subsistence income and insurance program for working adults, there would be much less incentive to get "married" to a corporation, and the labor market would be much more fluid, fungible and efficient as a result.

santacluster• 11 years ago

What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default?

It appears to be what we are moving towards, and so far it ain't looking pretty. Sure, "our kind of people" profit from it, but mostly workers are being ruthlessly exploited on a massive scale without the protection offered to employees in most civilized countries outside the US.

avoutthere• 11 years ago

What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default?

The problem with this arrangement is the cost of health insurance. Currently, the insurance market heavily favors employer-paid coverage; it's much more expensive for freelancers to buy their own insurance.

nissimk• 11 years ago

With the ACA, this is no longer true, at least in NY. When I was an employee in 2013, my premium healthcare plan cost ~2400 / month for my family. I only paid half of that, but my employer was pying the other half. Now I am contracting and I bought the best plan in the NY exchange which costs ~1700 / month. It has less choice of doctors, but higher % coverage, and the in network list is pretty large. Also, the plans offered to corporate groups have changed a lot and the plan I was on in 2013 is no longer available.

normloman• 11 years ago

If everyone was a freelance employee, and could be replaced at any time, what motivation would companies have to invest in their employees (training, etc)?

JumpCrisscross• 11 years ago

Ronald Coase won a Nobel Prize in Economics for asking and answering why individuals choose to form companies over contracting out their work.

In a frictionless, efficient market it is always cheaper to contract out work. But the world isn't frictionless. There are transaction costs. Search, information, bargaining, maintaining confidentiality and enforcing agreements all cost time and money. Meanwhile, overhead costs and the management error grow as in-house functions increase. Balancing labour transaction costs and management scaling inefficiencies results in an optimal firm size. This firm will outcompete less agile and well-integrated small firms and distended behemoths.

http://www3.nccu.edu.tw/~jsfeng/CPEC11.pdf

engendered• 11 years ago

What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default?

Many of the replies thus far have quite rightly pointed out that the predominate contract/freeland/short term model actually puts even more power in the employer's hands, and is often used in an abusive, diminishing way. It is full-time employment made worse -- all of the problems and detriments, with fewer of the benefits.

There is an alternative model, but it is extremely hard to make a success. I build systems for financial services, and have a long, proven track record (one of the products I built half a decade ago, barely changed since, was just acquired by another company for big money). I decided to go solo, set up a corporation, and pitch my independent services for short term engagements. The premise is that it amplifies my own motivations, focuses my work, and intrinsically improves my rewards.

A surgeon ready to swoop in and remove the cancer -- focusing on my specialty and utilizing my somewhat unique set of talents -- leaving a well-documented, working, tested, proven solution for your organization to pick up and run with. This can be for load sharing, for capacity extensions, or because certain talents don't exist on the team. It allows me to specialize in a way that I couldn't do in one engagement, and I don't end up whiling my days away reading Reddit (which is the case for a significant percentage of full-time workers pretty much everywhere).

It is extremely difficult to get businesses to buy into this model. The first problem is the illusion of a "learning curve" -- if you have a learning curve in what you do (the classic "employees can't be productive for the first n months), you probably don't actually know what you're doing. I saw this in one firm where everyone was sure it couldn't work because their mystical financial calculations were so complex it would take months to understand them. Only they weren't actually complex whatsoever -- everyone was just blissfully in the dark about how to calculate simple things like IRR, so it seemed like some sort of unique, in house mystery meat.

A bit of a rant -- I could go on for pages -- but honestly most firms can't utilize the contract style employee because their own processes are so broken, their projects so tightly coupled and intertwined and undocumented, that they can't imagine how to separate something out.

phkahler• 11 years ago

"...most firms can't utilize the contract style employee because their own processes are so broken, their projects so tightly coupled and intertwined and undocumented, that they can't imagine how to separate something out."

I frequently find it frustrating that an employer can have meetings and make specific plans for a rented person doing a one time project, but they generally don't know how to organize or make their own people more effective. It's like the employees are a given, but this outside thing needs special approval and funding so it needs to be handled well.

vonmoltke3• 11 years ago

if you have a learning curve in what you do (the classic "employees can't be productive for the first n months), you probably don't actually know what you're doing

Either that or you have a crapload of self-imposed complexity.

That said, some roles really do have a major learning curve due to the amount of background domain knowledge required.

tveita• 11 years ago

I cynically suspect the current concept of full-time work evolved to suit employers,

The reason there is a difference between full-time employment and contract work is regulations put in place to limit the power companies wield over its workers.

Companies like FedEx try to pass of its employees as "contract workers" to circumvent employee protections. I guarantee this is not done to benefit the employees.

stormbrew• 11 years ago

People have kind of touched on this a bit, but I just want to say this as explicitly as possible, because I think this is a thing that's been kind of forgotten over time: Forcing employers to commit to their employees on some level was one of the most significant achievements of the labour movement.

Most people don't really want to have the 'flexibility' of working, because that also comes with having to find work on a regular basis. In some post-scarcity or at least post-austerity society this might be something people are willing to do, but most people aren't working because that work is something they have a passion for, they're doing it so they can do other things like have a home and a family.

Employers of this kind of labour would love nothing more than to schedule you whenever they felt like, have more part time employees at lower wages, and let you go if you miss even one shift.

dropit_sphere3• 11 years ago

Preach it, brother.

Committment forces cultivation of talent rather than frontrunning.

xorcist• 11 years ago

I've done a bit of both, and I can honestly say that the biggest problem with freelance work is that your work is short term and well defined.

I don't know how many times I could see client's problems, which weren't always what they thought they were, without any mandate to fix it. Sometimes they even hire you to do something that completely fly in the face of what they need. That's not fun.

If you're in it for the long haul you can allow yourself to take bigger risks, even if it's officially outside your responsibilities. What are they going to do? Fire you for fixing stuff? It is simply a more fun way to work and to interact with your peers, even if it may not be as financially rewarding.

lordnacho• 11 years ago

One thing I've wondered is why companies hire people one at a time.

Barely anyone works alone on anything, yet to decide whether to hire someone, you invite people individually through a funnel process and expect them to be able to work together. The best teams are not necessarily the ones with the most Ivy Leaguers on them.

Why don't more companies let the applicants self-organise, and then hire the best teams?

jib• 11 years ago

Because often you are not hiring a team, you only have so much work/budget. And if you do, odds are you will need to break up the team a short while afterwards for some other needs. And you want to merge them into existing teams anyways, to not lose institutional knowledge.

I think almost all "hire a team" hirings happen as aquihires - if the team has proven that they can deliver something over time - great, buy their company.

I dont see how ability to organise as a team could be done in a short enough time that you could evaluate them on anything other than "is someone in the group good at organising a team". At which point I'd probably just want to hire that guy anyways, because I know I can split them off and have him organise another team too.

onion2k• 11 years ago

One thing I've wondered is why companies hire people one at a time.

Because people leave one at a time.

fsloth3• 11 years ago

"Hiring a team" is typically called outsourcing or consulting.

obiefernandez• 11 years ago

Extreme case: Hire the A-team of programming http://atsytp.strikingly.com/

mooreds2• 11 years ago

They're available, and have been for 6 months (?).

Also, negative points for not using the original A-Team in their background image.

mattlutze3• 11 years ago

I want to build my own team, not have to take a "best of what I can find" pre-built team.

ibejoeb• 11 years ago

A lot of pre-built teams work that way because they have naturally developed the rapport required to operate so effectively. You can't force people to like each other and work well together. I'd hire a team in a heartbeat.

JonnieCache• 11 years ago

Isn't that what acqui-hiring is about?

dasmoth• 11 years ago

To a certain extent, isn't that what an acqui-hire is doing?

(with some extra costs involved...)

darkmarmot• 11 years ago

That's exactly what my company did! My team's last boss was dropped from our company. He got a new job and we all quit and were hired en masse to work for him again. Since we already had great team cohesion, we hit the ground running and won Dev Team of the Year for our city. I think it's an awesome way to go -- kind of like an aqui-hire but you get more loyalty I think...

exo762• 11 years ago

In 2012, for example, consulting firm Leadership IQ announced it had tracked 20,000 new hires over time and discovered that 46% of them had failed within 18 months. In other words, most recruiting practices are about as effective as a coin toss.

This does not take into account amount of candidates that have been rejected.

aaron695• 11 years ago

Yes, it's a nonsense statement.

Like the Google stories, which also are not true.

Shame, the Staffup Weekend in itself would have been an interesting writeup.

lultimouomo• 11 years ago

Published 2 days ago, link to previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8947958

auggierose• 11 years ago

I didn't even read the story after this gem: "In 2012, for example, consulting firm Leadership IQ announced it had tracked 20,000 new hires over time and discovered that 46% of them had failed within 18 months. In other words, most recruiting practices are about as effective as a coin toss." Now, what's wrong with this reasoning? :-)

brohee• 11 years ago

Yeah they fail to understand that should the recruitment be a coin toss, 80% would fail.

This is because the good candidates resume are hidden in a forest of bad resume, from people submitting resume for jobs they are obviously unqualified for.

Pretty well explained in http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...

jia_min5• 11 years ago

You might be interested in this utility app that calculates the probability of a successful hire created by an I/O Psychologist: https://morgan.shinyapps.io/utility_calculator/

It takes the base rate of successful performance into account.

askinakhan• 11 years ago

I strongly believe that hiring should be based on data. Based on the following 5 factors:

1.Intellect 2.Values 3.Motivations 4.Behaviours 5.Experience

With these factors you can determine a persons Cultural Fit and predicted future performance. In fact, you could automate this through technology.

For example, for predicting future performance we could test the high performers in our company then we have a template for what motivations and behaviours high performers are likely to exhibit. Based on this we can then assess new comers and map them against high performers. The more highly correlated they are, the more likely you should be to hire them.

For culture, if you currently like the culture of your company you could simply assess the values of all your employees, average them and assess new applicants against this and depending on correlation, hire them or not. This could be done through a CFT (Cultural Fit Tool)

But this is just one suggestion. Software that enables this could work quite well IMO.

skj• 11 years ago

Any system that classifies people who have knowledge of the system will be gamed. eg the endless battle between Google search quality and SEO hackers.

pjc50• 11 years ago

1.Intellect 2.Values 3.Motivations 4.Behaviours 5.Experience

All of those are extremely subjective. And trying to replicate your existing staff will give you an unimaginative company of yes-men.

baudehlo3• 11 years ago

Because our current processes have resulted in such diversity in the workspace? /s

baudehlo3• 11 years ago

I have no idea why this comment got so downvoted. This is exactly the software I've spent the last year building and it works incredibly well for our customers.

themoonbus2• 11 years ago

I think it's the "software" part that is getting down voted not the 5 attributes... I'm legitimately curious, how do you measure those things quantitatively?

qodeninja• 11 years ago

I didnt even know you could downvote on here!

jia_min5• 11 years ago

You, I like. That's exactly what the 85 years of research on hiring tells us are the strongest predictors of job performance and employee turnover.

Source: http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...

FLUX-YOU• 11 years ago

Staffup Weekend put the lie to Stein’s pronouncement. As Nicholson later wrote me, “The fact that people stayed for 48 hours to work on something put them head and shoulders above the thousands of applications we receive, because the participants are people who show up and see things through.”

And this event is an attempt to make showing up for a 48 hour 'work trial' a norm. This favors the younger, single population, and while you're working on whatever this event is, you are not putting more resumes out. There's the potential for abuse in getting free work out of applicants from other people mimicking this event.

(How long until we're tossed into an arena with bows and arrows only to survive and rewrite every algorithm from a CS degree on a whiteboard?)

Although the 46% percentage figure was shown in this thread to be wrong/bad, even if you consider hiring as a coin-toss, your success still depends on how many resumes you can put out there. You have to balance the time it takes to tailor your resume to the company versus moving on and finding the next company to submit a resume to. At the extremes, some people don't tailor at all and throw their resume and cover letter at everyone in a suit. Others will do deep-dive research and make 27 drafts of a resume/cover to the point where they already know more about the company than the person who may hire them. I still think there's significant coin-tossery going on: if the companies are having to filter everyone because there is so much volume, then you must at least do as much as you can to increase your own output. The 'trick' then is to just know someone who can put in a good word (and it really has always been an option)

This may work for some job sectors as a novel hiring process (it's certainly overblown for retail/fast food) but if it scales up, you'll end up taking significant bargaining power from individuals. To say nothing if companies start replacing their current employees with the winners from these kinds of events.

ansible2• 11 years ago

Totally agree. Sounds like each applicant should be getting paid or something. Even so, dropping the rest of your life for two days stinks.

You have to balance the time it takes to tailor your resume to the company versus moving on and finding the next company to submit a resume to. At the extremes, some people don't tailor at all and throw their resume and cover letter at everyone in a suit. Others will do deep-dive research and make 27 drafts of a resume/cover to the point where they already know more about the company than the person who may hire them.

You know, there should be an app for that. Something where you can just put in everything, and then when sending out one resume to a particular company, it would help you customize it for them.

Maybe you could feed in the job ad, and the app uses some fancy NLP to then select which topics you should emphasize on your resume.

It should also keep track of what version you've sent out to whom, so that you can view it when talking to the potential employer on the phone.

droopyEyelids• 11 years ago

And then the app checks if you were asked to interview, and can analyze how to successfully customize resumes for each employer...

lubujackson2• 11 years ago

My first real job interview in 1999 worked exactly like this. A pool of candidates came in and were given the same 2 day coding assignment. We were paid for our time and worked on site. It was a great experience, but I tend to like working on interesting problems (which I guess is a valuable trait in itself).

It especially made sense at this company because they were using an obscure coding platform and needed to train everybody from scratch. So you were actually learning the language a bit while performing the test. Mentors went around and asked you your thought process as you worked an gave some helpful nudges.

I did get the job and to this day it was the best office environment of my life. I wish all tech companies were as well run as that one.

odonnellryan• 11 years ago

I had something similar, 2 days, took me 12 hours of thinking/programming/etc.. time. Didn't get the job, didn't get paid for it!

Someone1234• 11 years ago

I think the key part of that is: Getting paid.

I'd happily do that type of interview as two days of money coming in is still great in its own right when you're unemployed.

Plus it seems like an utterly fair way of evaluating candidates that I don't really feel like trick questions, riddles, and high pressure whiteboard challenges accomplish.

One question/concern I have is: How much paperwork is involved in paying someone for just two days? For example, do you now need to file tax stuff (both state and federal), and how do you physically pay them (e.g. set up bank transfers, cash, etc)?

In an ideal world you'd just have people in for two days and hand them a small wad of cash at the end. But with the laws on the books and complexity of employment in general, something tells me the overhead of such a thing would be problematic.

sriram_sun• 11 years ago

Agree! I am tempted to show up with my 18 month old and have him run amok :)... or better still have the others take care of him while I show off my coding skills!

lifehug• 11 years ago

"One reason is that employers can easily be flooded with hundreds, or sometimes thousands, of applications"

We're told our immigration policy has caused a drought in programmers, yet employers are flooded with applications from the nonexistent workforce.

coralreef• 11 years ago

It's not that companies can't find programmers, it's that they would rather find elite programmers than develop lesser ones.

joshuacc2• 11 years ago

To be fair, that's not a self-contradictory position. It is quite possible that there could be a lack of qualified programmers, while employers are flooded with applications from unqualified programmers. The obvious solution to that problem is, of course, for companies to spend the time and money on training.

ryguytilidie• 11 years ago

Just because there are lots of applicants doesn't mean there are lots of qualified people.

dropit_sphere3• 11 years ago

Indeed, the dwarves are for the dwarves.

wink2• 11 years ago

Is it me or is there no author name? I mean, it could be deliberately anonymous but then that's usually noted.

It was a really interesting read but I am probably just being grumpy and not a fan of medium.

fecak• 11 years ago

It's in the "footer" of the page continuously as you scroll the entire article. Name is Deborah Branscum.

wink2• 11 years ago

Oh my, thanks.

On a different monitor now I see the light gray "WRITTEN ON JAN 26 BY" on white background.

barrkel• 11 years ago

It's not clear what the author of the story did. Mr Programmer did the programming and Ms UX did project management and UI.

She's an "ideas person", isn't she.

VLM• 11 years ago

"We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess."

Something overlooked is the millions (billions?) of non-productive labor hours that go into the failed traditional hiring process, when even the smartest guys in the room have to admit that upon statistical analysis its all a waste of time. That's an enormous staggering financial drain on the economy.

Overall, across the entire economy, the overall minimum cost mode of hiring would appear to be a union work hall. So employer shows up and the dude who's been sitting there unemployed the longest is hired.

This would require incompetent people to admit their own incompetence, so its never going to be implemented, we're all above average here and just because no one else can do traditional hiring correctly doesn't mean I won't be the first to ever get it right because I've been told since birth I'm a special snowflake and I have the participation trophies to prove it, etc.

I'm not saying we have to unionize (whole nother topic) but stealing the union work hall "technology" would seem a very wise idea.

jia_min5• 11 years ago

From the NYT's article quoting Laszlo Bock: "Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring."

Google made the classic mistake of using the interviewer as the predictor of interest. Meanwhile, decades of research has shown it's not who does the asking but how and what you ask. For example, structured interviews are about 50% more predictive of job performance (r = .51) compared to unstructured interviews (i.e., the way almost everyone interviews; r = .38).

So why did Google run this experiment when they had an army of Industrial/Organizational Psychologists who already knew the research? They wanted to collect their own data and test the theories on their own employees, which I encourage and applaud.

wnissen• 11 years ago

Do you have a cite for this? I thought Google looked at interviewers and found that no particular interviewer did any better than any other, except, literally, one guy in a narrow sub-specialty. That's quite a lot different than concluding a 50% success rate is no better than chance, which I agree would be problematic at best, flat wrong at worst if the expected occurrence was low.

joncrocks2• 11 years ago

What's important here is that what you have here is only one side of the coin.

If you're looking at the performance of only those who make it successfully, what you don't know is how the people who didn't make it through the process would perform on a comparative basis.

For example.... There's a pool of candidates, 90% weak, 10% strong (weak and strong if they were measured post-hiring). If your recruitment process took that ratio and ensures you hire 50% weak and 50% strong, that's obviously not completely wasted effort.

iolothebard• 11 years ago

The way people hire is all wrong in my opinion too, this is even worse.

owennoah3• 11 years ago

May I ask why? And more what you feel is a good third way?

vonnik2• 11 years ago

Nicholson here.

I sponsored Staffup Weekend, brought Brooke Allen to SF, and helped Deborah Branscum write her story for Medium. I did it because I'm the in-house recruiter for FutureAdvisor (https://www.futureadvisor.com), and recruiting is a mess.

FutureAdvisor hired me to do PR. But after we raised our Series B last year, our main problem was converting capital to talent, so that's what I did. I didn't choose recruiting; recruiting chose me. Just like it will choose many of the hackers on this thread who become entrepreneurs. I hope they can learn from our story.

The first thing a new recruiter notices is that recruiting is incredibly wasteful. It wastes time, emotion and money (contingency-based recruiters charge employers about 25% of a hire's first year salary, so they're paying an extra $35K to hire a software engineer at $140K). It wastes them for both the candidates and the hiring managers. Many of the flaws of the process arise from that wastefulness.

The problem at the heart of recruiting is how to gather good information about strangers in order to make a long-term commitment. It's basically the same problem you have when you're dating.

And, just as in dating, there's a lot of noise in the market. Everyone's beautiful with a little Photoshop. It takes a long time to get to learn who they really are, and what they can do.

To illustrate how wasteful the job market is, just imagine that both candidates and recruiters are sending out very similar, only slightly tailored information to every person on their list, day after day. If someone bites, then you escalate commitment and do a preliminary phone call.

I, as a recruiter, take the call with the candidate, because we don't know how good they are yet, and I cannot waste my engineers' time. We are strapped. That's why we need to hire people. (Non-technical recruiters get a lot of hate from technical candidates who do not understand this.)

If the candidate answers all the questions right that I have been instructed to ask, then I pass them on to the engineers for two technical interviews. If those go well, we invite them in for an onsite visit. In 90% of all cases, the onsite visit results either the company or the candidate rejecting the other. At that point, almost all the information they have gathered about each other is thrown out and never thought of again. (Sure, Glassdoor has some reviews and tips, but they're minimal.) That's the waste.

Those rejections do not necessarily imply that the company or the candidate is bad, or unsuitable to work with at all, just that they're not quite the right fit. It's just like dating. Sometimes the chemistry ain't right. That doesn't mean anyone's a bad person.

There are a couple ways that we, singly and collectively, can try to solve this problem. And they all have to do with how the information is processed. Employers who trust each other could join together in a cross-referral system where they share candidates who were talented but not quite the right fit. FutureAdvisor is part of a couple of those networks, like YC, and they work OK. Their main purpose is to get total strangers one step further toward entering the circle of trust.

Candidates could do the same for each other. It would be a sort of viral networking, where within a circle of trust, everybody's contacts become everyone else's contacts. In both cases, information that one candidate or employer has gathered at great cost to themselves can be shared, rather than thrown away.

Another aspect of the job market is that companies and candidates are asking for the wrong information. Google used to ask for GPAs and Ivy League pedigrees, both crappy metrics. The great thing about professions like programming and design is that you can show your stuff. (Bizdev and middle managers, as a counter example, have a much harder time providing a portfolio of what they do.)

With makers, at least there's a baseline. All hiring managers need to do, after they look at your Github, is figure out whether you are in fact the person who coded it, and how much time it takes you to solve similar problems. Another way of saying this: The only thing that correlates with performance is performance. And that's all that good companies should care about.

So how do they obtain that information in an efficient way?

Batch processing. Staffup Weekend was an attempt at batch processing. We wanted to see a lot of people work at the same time. We made the event free. We asked people to create something they cared about. The ones that came, did so voluntarily. Whether they got a job or not, they walked away having done something they wanted to do. It was a pretty good experience.

But it could have been a lot better. I wish that other employers had been involved, to make it more valuable for the candidates who attended (we invited other companies, but got little response.) I could have given better feedback on the work people did.

On a meta level, teams were invited to create tools to fix the job market. One group created a Chrome plugin called Contactr.io, which shows you the emails of company founders when you visit their corporate website.

There are probably a lot of other ways to fix things. I hope someone on Hacker News will found something that makes hiring and getting a job easier. That person will become rich, famous and universally loved.

I also hope that someone reading this post is an infrastructure engineer with AWS, Linux, Bash and Ruby under his or her belt. If that's you, please write: chris dot nicholson at futureadvisor dot com. Only you can save us, Obi-Wan.

https://boards.greenhouse.io/futureadvisor/jobs/26313#.VMkv_...

JamesBarney• 11 years ago

It sounds to me like FutureAdvisor might have a problem with low compensation. Previously you mentioned making 8 offers at this event, and only one accepted. And these are candidates who specifically had 2 days free to work on receiving a job, so they have lower compensation requirements then an average dev of equivalent skill, and still 7 of the 8 rejected your offer.

This doesn't seem to me to be a problem of market efficiency, but just trying to use the inefficient state of the market to find the best candidate for the lowest price.

Also to reduce the work of interviewing candidates that won't take your offer when you make it have you tried telling your candidates what the expected compensation is?

vonnik2• 11 years ago

That would be fair to surmise, but incorrect. While most startups cannot pay Google salaries, we are competitive with our salary-equity mix. It took us a while to learn what the market price was for various types of roles, and we offer that.

We made 8 interview offers. 7 people either chose not to continue or were rejected by my teams further down the line.

Some of those who chose not to continue were not devs, but client-service specialists. This was not a purely technical hackathon. Many of those people decided they did not want to deal with the math involved in financial services.

You have to remember that SF is a very competitive job market. Devs are choosing jobs that fit their salary expectations, but also their lifestyle choices and their passions. We meet those needs for some people, but not all, since they are idiosyncratic.

BrookeTAllen4• 11 years ago

https://medium.com/@BrookeTAllen/give-us-your-tired-your-poo...

BrookeTAllen4• 11 years ago

This is awesome; I am so thrilled you are talking about this.

I am preparing a response to Deborah’s article; working title:

A Hackathon Cannot Fix a Broken Hiring Process. But the Right Experiences Can.

You see, in 2004 my life changed when I started caring about the people I did not hire. You discussed that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859199

But the thing you probably don’t get, and I didn't get until much later, is that I did not create a hiring process.

And it sure wasn't a contest with a job at the end (as many of you think).

It was an experience.

For the people who engaged with the experience it was life-changing. For those who didn't it wasn't.

Certainly for the people I hired it was life changing.

Changing jobs will change your life – what would be the point otherwise?

And certainly going from unemployment to employment changes your life; how could it not?

And working for me will definitely change your life because I grok this better than almost anyone you’ll ever meet.

But I want to change everyone’s life whether they work for me or not because I never wanted to be a programmer, or an analyst, or a hedge fund manager or all those other things I have had the accidental good fortune of becoming.

All I've ever wanted to be since the sixth grade is a teacher. See this: http://internationalfamilymag.com/IFarchives/archives/sep07/...

Most of the attendees experienced a hackathon because they couldn't figure out how to experience anything else. After all, this was held in the Bay Area in 2014.

The exact same thing could have been held in London in 1842 and yet nobody could have possibly experienced a hackathon back then.

When you read her article, notice that Deborah poses a question but doesn't answer it. She talks about her experience of the other attendees but doesn't offer to introduce any of them to readers who might be hiring. She ends the article with a really good suggestion that someone should create Smartup Weekend to slap some sense into employers. She asks, “Who wants in?” But she doesn't even buy the domain name. Doesn't she know that you shouldn't mention a domain name you don’t own in a coffee shop anywhere near San Francisco because the guy next to you will buy it and then try to sell it to you for $10,000. And NEVER EVER do that in print. (Of course, as soon as I read her piece I snapped up SmartupWeekend.com and I offer to transfer it to anyone who can convince me they will actually build something rather than just talk about it. I’ll give it to you for free on condition that if you don’t do much with it then I get it back.)

In short, so far Deborah has reported on her experience, but hasn't fully ENGAGED WITH IT.

Deborah’s experience of Staffup Weekend is only beginning now. I am confident that someday she will see that weekend as a pivotal point in her life.

I’m less sure about the rest of the attendees because I have seen no evidence they have engaged with the experience as anything but a contest they have lost. After all, Deborah organized a 1-month reunion and nobody showed up.

There is still hope if these folks reflect on what happened, refer to their notes (surely they took notes), then refactor the whole thing and reflect on what they can still learn.

But even if they don’t do that, I’m sure every one of them could be excellent employees under the right circumstances because, as Woody Allen says, 80% of success is showing up and they did way more than that. You can see everyone here: http://staffupweekend.org/2014/11/22/report-on-staffup-san-f...

If you’d like to meet any of them then let me know. I’ll gladly make the introduction.

owennoah3• 11 years ago

I'm Noah, Brooke's partner in crime at Staffup Weekend. To me this has always been an emperor-has-no-clothes situation. People seem to think in terms of "hackathons" whereas we more simply think of things as "doing the work." Since when did resumes and brain teasing interview questions and all this nonsense become MORE obvious and sensical than DOING THE WORK. Let people DO THE WORK that needs to be done and you can save dozens of person-hours, lots of frustration and heartache AND get a better hire than the "traditional" method.

BrookeTAllen4• 11 years ago

I agree but I think we must make it clear that the work we ask people to do should be similar to the work the employer wants done, but not work the employer would benefit from. I believe it is important to pay for work done for my benefit. When I've been the hiring manager, once I need to determine if the candidate can do the particular work I need done I'll pay them to do it. Often one day for $150. Usually they offer to do it for minimum wage but the difference is trivial. Many offer to do it for free but again I won't let them.

On the other hand, I tell job seekers to get to work doing things for others whether for pay or not. This is perfectly legal because you are working for yourself and the only person who can pay you less than minimum wage is you.

I wrote about how to do this legally, morally, and ethically here: http://www.noshortageofwork.com/pages/2286

dropit_sphere3• 11 years ago

I came across your (or Chris's?) ad on craigslist, emailed, wanted to attend, and then, uh, completely spaced it.

I think you're onto something, but I don't think it can scale. I also think that that is not necessarily a bad thing. Would you prefer Staffup Weekend to have a nationally-recognized brand and attract people who "heard it was a good way to get a job/find good candidates" without much caring about whether they helped other attendees?

Anyway. Glad someone out there is doing this.

BrookeTAllen4• 11 years ago

This can scale but not without a lot of people doing a lot of work that they want to do. And they need to care about the people on the other side; whether they are job candidate you don't hire or employers you don't want to work for.

You cannot care about a resume (because a resume is not a person) or a corporation (because although a corporation is person in the eyes of the law it has no soul). That is why the default way we hire is inhumane and beyond reform.

Caring about strangers is about the most soul-satisfying thing you can do; much better than going to another ball game with your kids. That is why I've taken my kids to my hiring events. (And I am glad to know that at least one job seeker at our Staffup Weekend brought a kid and everyone took turns babysitting.)

Even if you only care about the problem but not the people, once you get going on this approach you'll start caring about people because you cannot help yourself. There is something addictive about that, and addictive things tend to scale whether they are a good idea or not.

This one just happens to be a good idea.

dlwj• 11 years ago

The thing I didn't realize about the hiring process before going through it a couple times is that it's not an inherently evil process or system.

It's just that no one knows what the hell they are doing. It's Hanlon's razor.

The initial filtering is done by HR people only looking for keywords and looking for canned answers to basic questions.

They can also be done by recruiters hired by a hiring manager who hired every recruiter, thus inundating themselves with resumes by their own fault thinking more would be better

The phone screen will check you for "status". Having an Ivy League education will help because even if you fail completely the hiring manager won't lose face. If he takes a chance on a non-ivy league he will be roasted for wasting company resources. You will also have to claim to be very very passionate thus over-promising and in a position of constant not-good-enough-its-an-honor-to-work-here.

After they decide to bring you in, random people are chosen based on their free time to interview you. The list will usually include an extroverted person who tries to be buddy-buddy too soon and feels stiffed unless the other person has a similar personality. A puzzle lover who looked up an answer to a riddle before-hand and uses it to gauge your IQ. A new person who googled some good questions to ask just a few minutes before and makes sure he knows the answer. An H1B employee who doesn't speak that clearly and assumes you are an idiot when you ask a simple question to be repeated. Finally a boss type will come in and make a final decision. The process is semi-democratic in that her yes cannot go against many no's but her no can veto the yes's.

----

Nowhere in this chain do people actually care. People are just trying to do their jobs. The hiring manager is trying to fill in slots b/c a project manager is behind schedule and needs and excuse. The interviewers want to "have beers with you" thus gauging your integrated-ness into american culture.

Startup hiring is also fundamentally different and confusing. Young 20s make the best friends in their college days and often seek that same level of camaraderie in colleagues. However the resume process doesn't lend itself to that. You are essentially blind dating. Startups escape the large system failures of large companies and so can focus on product rather than system management, but they also have to relearn many thing or else follow a heuristic script in semblance of a skeleton system. (e.g. top schools only)

----

Broadly speaking however, jobs are becoming more and more sparse because tools allow one person to do the job of many. One very very smart person that is. It's already happening with many developer positions. Good tools for IT allow developers to do IT work, creating a merged "devOps" position. Easier web frameworks allow designers and developers to be merged. Good testing tools and frameworks gets rid of QAs. The merged positions reduce the amount of time required for these tasks but the new tool-user has to be super qualified.

The Way We Hire Is All Wrong

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