Helping the People Who Don’t Get Hired

http://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-ATWORKB-2407

by vonnik • 11 years ago

87 68 11 years ago

wsj.com

reeco• 11 years ago

Great article! It is inspiring to see and experience people helping other people especially when it comes to jobs.

jniuhiuhiuh• 11 years ago

Amazing!

rwhitman• 11 years ago

Very interesting story.. weird how this WSJ article references an HN thread

I feel like a group panel interview would skew candidates in a different way than a one on one. There's some psychology around how people act in groups at play that might really mask the viability of a candidate.. for instance in group social settings, wouldn't whoever's the most dominantly confident (or just loud), going to have an outside advantage in impressing the interviewer?

golergka• 11 years ago

It's a second time today I see people talking about discussions on HN that significantly influenced their life (the other was about freelancing).

worldvoyageur• 11 years ago

Where I work, we make extensive use of group simulations in our hiring decisions. With a well designed scenario, defined roles for group members and contentious issues that must be resolved, you really learn a lot about how people add value, or subtract it, in a group setting.

The hiring team forms a circle at a discrete distance around the group and each of us has an assigned person to watch. That way we can catch body language etc. When doing this, it is remarkable how some people can in a low key, quiet way, bring missing information into the discussion, sway the group or bring it to a constructive consensus. We love those people and they have a high success rate when we hire them.

It is pretty normal that a very impressive candidate one-on-one looks very different in the group setting, and vise versa. We tend only to hire the people that do well in both the one on one and the group.

Oh - the loud dominant strategy is very hard to pull off successfully in a group context. There is too much risk of it being obvious (to the hiring team watching) that it subtracted value.

rhizome• 11 years ago

Do you work for The Landmark Forum?

jpg0rd0n2• 11 years ago

The bigger question is whether this experiment will inspire others to try something new and different. If most companies do not adopt such an approach, will the adopters have a competitive advantage?

owennoah9• 11 years ago

"The ability to make good decisions regarding people represents one of the last reliable sources of competitive advantage, since very few organizations are very good at it." ~Peter Drucker

ufmace2• 11 years ago

What I wonder about this idea - it sounds like they started out with a open house for everyone who applied, regardless of qualifications, instead of phone screens. So how many really qualified candidates are going to be interested in travelling out to the company for an "open house" with everyone else who applied for the job?

From a candidate's perspective, the phone screen lets you prove yourself to the company and get to know them a little before taking the commitment of actually going there - usually during business hours, possibly disrupting any job you're currently working at. I feel more comfortable taking time off to go there when they've already proven that they're serious about me and I know that they've evaluated me well enough to know that there's at least a good chance I'm a fit for the position.

kremlin• 11 years ago

also it likely disproportionately selects for people who do well in those kinds of situations, which may be completely orthogonal to the position they're being hired for.

That being said, I also really like the idea.

vonmoltke• 11 years ago

What I wonder about this idea - it sounds like they started out with a open house for everyone who applied, regardless of qualifications, instead of phone screens. So how many really qualified candidates are going to be interested in travelling out to the company for an "open house" with everyone else who applied for the job?

Probably not many, but as was discussed recently in the context of TripleByte[1] some qualified people have "bad" resumes and may struggle to get phone screens. Go through enough resume-level rejections and you might welcome such an open house, if for no other reason than to network with people you might not otherwise be able to meet.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9507089

jpg0rd0n2• 11 years ago

it sounds like they started out with a open house for everyone who applied, regardless of qualifications, instead of phone screens.< I'm the CEO in the story. Oversimplifying a bit, we didn't invite everyone who responded to our ad to come to the open house, but put the responses into three buckets: those who get an invitation immediately (the "positive" email), those who get a second chance to say something interesting (the "negative" email), and those who were basically ignored because their background matched those who didn't do well in the past. As we have iterated and refined the approach, we emphasized the value of speaking to us in the first communication and dropped the negative email.

I understand your point about the phone screen, but found that this is a trade-off. The phone screen was very ineffective for us in letting people know who we are, our size, our location, what we do on a daily basis. The open house format lets the prospective employees see us as we are, where we are. Inevitably, people drop out of the process, and it's fine with us, as it opens up slots for those who like what they see. In an open house format, the candidates ask questions as a group, which means that any particular person benefits from the questions that others ask. They see our existing staff and can decide if this is a group they want to work with.

We are upfront with the candidates that we can't hire all of them, and therefore it seems like a fair exchange to do something for the "unchosen" as a bonus for coming in. Brooke and Noah have helped by providing guidance for them, and we have all tried to create a community of the unchosen.

The core concept being promoted here is that the current recruitment system is broken, and it is the fault of all of us who unquestioningly perpetuate it. My response is to experiment with different ideas until we find a model that works for all parties involved. I don't have a magic wand to provide the solution, but do keep notes on what hypothesis is being tested, what seems to work, what doesn't work and what possible improvements we should try.

ufmace2• 11 years ago

Thanks for the additional details. I suppose the usefulness of this depends a lot on how many positions you're looking to fill, and at what level of skill. It sounds like you're using it to fill multiple entry-level positions, where it makes more sense. I suppose the people there know that there are multiple positions, so don't feel quite so much like they have to compete with everybody else to get hired. And if it's relatively entry-level, then maybe most of the candidates don't have full-time jobs already to be disrupted at, and would appreciate help if they didn't get hired?

I admit that I tend to think of things initially in terms of myself and what I would be looking for, more of a single position for someone with experience and marketable skills, and currently holding a full-time job. There's probably some room for improvement in the process for that too, but I don't think the open house idea would be a good fit.

fredt• 11 years ago

The best organizations and their people make it a joyous, exciting process. It brings out the best in applicants and all involved. It also leads to friendships, whether the person is hired or not. This is how lifetime relationships develop.

MichaelCrawford15• 11 years ago

It would be very helpful not only to me, but to people like me, were potential employers to comply with the labor laws. Specifically, the various state laws regarding age discrimination - in Oregon, one may not discriminate for reasons of age against people over forty. There is also the US Americans with Disabilities Act. I am dead certain that I lose work because I link to two essays about my mental illness right at the top of every page of my website.

My Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder was diagnosed in 1985.

I started my first salaried coding job in 1987.

I was hired as a Product Development Manager in 1990.

I graduated with a BA in Physics in 1993.

In 1994, I invented a novel, unobvious lossless bitmap graphics compressor.

In 1995, I was hired as a Senior Engineer at Apple Computer, where I worked as a "Debug Meister".

In 2000, I was married to a woman who knew all about my illness. We purchased a nice house with money I earned as a consultant.

In 2015, I can't get a job because I have grey hair, and I am openly public about being mentally ill.

dsacco2• 11 years ago

> There is also the US Americans with Disabilities Act. I am dead certain that I lose work because I link to two essays about my mental illness right at the top of every page of my website.

With respect, why do you do this? How can you possibly think this is a good idea?

I sympathize that you have a mental illness, but you're being stubborn by complaining that you can't get a job when one of the primary obstacles is clearly in your power. Don't advertise that you have a mental illness. No matter how you would like the world to work, it does not work in such a way that advertising mental illness is in any way conducive to searching for a job.

Here is another example, to take away the stigma of mental illness: I'm a hiring manager, and I just found out that you have cancer on your blog. This was directly in the navigation of the blog.

This is bad. I don't want to not hire you because you have cancer. I don't want to discriminate against you. But you've suddenly become much more complicated and emotionally loaded than this other person who doesn't have cancer. Worse, you display no regard whatsoever for social cues by advertising this so bluntly.

If your mental disorder has anything to do with you not getting a job, it's really just because you're sending horribly unattractive social/communication signals to potential employers.

There is an idealized world we'd all like to see, and there is a world we actually live in. It's not like you're a woman being discriminated against here. Your mental illness does not need to literally be the first thing people see about you when they look at your online identity.

Sorry if any of this was harsh. I wish you the best in your search, but please consider not being quite so "loud" about your problems. Reframing who you are to potential employers could do wonders.

MichaelCrawford15• 11 years ago

The ADA is intended to protect people who self-identify. If some chooses not to hire me because they see my essays at the top of my online resume, then they are violating Federal Law.

owennoah9• 11 years ago

Dylan, Noah here from the article.

Let's put Michael's specific situation aside for a moment. The truth is, neither of us knows WHY he isn't finding work. We each might have our own inklings as to why but there are surely some causation/correlation flaws we have no insight into. (And I will get to this)

So let's take him out of the equation and create a fictional person having a hard time finding work-- call him Bob. Maybe Bob went to a poor school-- or no school-- or blogs about satanism or who knows what. Bob's getting passed on and he doesn't really know why but can only suspect. You or I certainly cannot know why either sitting where we are so we really shouldn't speculate, even on the reasons this fictional person claims are the reason. That's because only the hiring managers passing on him know and their reasons might be different from what he thinks AND each other. This is not to mention that they might not even be able/want to verbalize it. Maybe some are bigoted and don't like his nationality. Maybe he smells funny when he walks in the room. Maybe they are all just assholes. Maybe he is terrible at what he does and doesn't know it (I went to school with someone like this who thinks the world has it in for him but he's really just very uncomfortable to be around and he can't help it and can't be made aware of it for whatever reason.) Sometimes these things are "gut" feelings-- right or wrong-- and they make hiring a particularly inexact science-- especially for the job seeker trying to reverse engineer it.

What I have found working with the un-, under- and mal-employed is that a lot of times the reason they suspect they aren't finding the work they want-- and the reasons third party observers suspect-- is not really the case. Put on top of it the fact that hiring organizations often refuse to say why they didn't hire someone to shield themselves from lawsuits and that compounds the problem. Sometimes candidates walk into job interviews they had no chance of getting even before they walked in through no fault of their own-- I wrote about this here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140917152632-29657051-make-...

So what's the solution? Well, there is no perfect solution but there's also know obvious answers either. Coming back to Michael for a moment, in my experience, a lot of times people don't look at personal webpages so-- even if his suspicions about the mental illness affecting his job chances are right-- I highly doubt it has lost him EVERY single opportunity. Which, to be fair, it doesn't seem he is suggesting. What does that mean? Well...

tl;dr: there's something going on none of us knows and/or cannot know that's at play here.

Lesson: STOP DECONSTRUCTING THE JOB SEARCH! It's stupid. It's like trying to figure out why someone doesn't want to date you. What are you going to do? Argue with them?

Yes, sometimes these practices are inane, frustrating, even illegal-- though the burden of proof is so high it's probably not worth most people's time.

And yet-- and yet-- there's SO MUCH WORK TO BE DONE in the world, SO MUCH, and money is so cheap-- SO CHEAP-- creative job seekers with a modicum of skill can usually find meaningful work if they circumvent the traditional job search process. Indeed, these jobs are often better. I wrote about this as well: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140912054444-29657051-explo...

Only three questions matter when screening a candidate: can he/she do the work, does he/she want to do the work and do you want to work with him/her? The current process of resumes and keywords and personality-based interviewing biases toward the last question-- in my mind the least relevant. Lots of people didn't want to work with Steve Jobs because he was a certified maniac-- but so what?

Certainly you don't want to hire unnecessarily disruptive people but I'd suggest companies be wary of passing on candidates too quickly for reasons we SUSPECT (key word) will make them poor fits-- including matters of which probably only trained medical personnel are qualified to speak about, even if to do so makes us feel safe.

In my mind there are two types of organizations-- growth-focused organizations and risk-averse organizations. Generally speaking, risk-averse organizations will accept almost any reason not to hire someone if they don't fit a pre-determined mould (the right profile, the right background, the right look-- yes, the right school, etc) and depending on the firm's market position and corporate strategy that may make sense. This is the opportunity for the growth-based organizations.

The market for people who are good at getting jobs is fierce and tight. If you can find these candidates on LinkedIn with the right keywords, they will be expensive and possibly flight risks anyway because they are very liquid in terms of marketability.

But if you are looking for people who can and want to do the work, the market is wide open. And the benefit will be to the organization that sees this inefficiency and exploits it. 80% of people are in the wrong job or don't have one, per Gallup and gov't statistics. If that's not an opportunity for any enterprising organization, I don't know what is.

whybroke2• 11 years ago

Your advice would surely help him and every one who reads it find a job. And if everyone did it, there would not be anyone on the web who posted about even minor treatable mental issues such as depression. Many, maybe millions, who might be helped by that wouldn't be. After all, each such post easily reaches thousands who have not found treatment yet.

It might also be wise for job seeks over 35 to dye their hair or beards, for women to use gender obscuring name choices, for Jewish people to hide their religion and gays to hide that fact. Not only will this not solve any problems it will make a much worse future world.

So while individuals may solve their particular problems by simply giving in to a broken system (I myself am posting here semi anonymously after all), it sure makes things worse in the long run and impossibly harder on people who can't hide these things (eg race).

slfnflctd• 11 years ago

As I see it, the more people do this, the less discrimination will be acceptable. No, I wouldn't ever personally advise someone to behave this way if they were seeking to further their career. However, if I were to advise humanity in general, I would suggest that we need everyone with such conditions to start doing it in order to force change.

It's nearly the same thing as racial discrimination, except that it's based on something unseen. Rosa Parks didn't move civil rights forward by avoiding the negative consequences of acting how she believed she should. Sometimes the only way to get closer to that idealized world we'd all like to see is by acting like we're already there. Money isn't everything.

DanBC2• 11 years ago

But you've suddenly become much more complicated and emotionally loaded than this other person who doesn't have cancer.

You mean than this other person who might be lying to hide their cancer from you.

Your bigotry has made you say that you would prefer dishonest liars to people who are honest but with a mental illness.

Don't you see how utterly fucked that attitude is? It's disgusting and you should feel ashamed.

MichaelCrawford15• 11 years ago

"When Hitler attacked the Jews I was not a Jew, therefore I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and was not concerned. Then Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church - and there was nobody left to be concerned." -- Pastor Martin Niemöller

Some things are more important than work: Hitler put the mentally ill in concentration camps long before he put the Jewish people there.

MichaelCrawford15• 11 years ago

I edited the header on my site to make my intentions more clear: it is more important to me to educate the public about mental illness, than it is to have a job.

Even so, it would be nice to have a job, and not to be faced with discrimination.

Consider that most today revere the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior as a saint. But during his lifetime, he was not permitted to stay in hotels during his travels, and so had to sleep in his car. He wrote once about how that really got him down.

http://www.warplife.com/

Edit: Suppose I did get a job. What problems would that solve? In the US, the mentally ill are legally permitted to wear their own clothes, as well as to manage their own financial affairs while we are in mental hospitals. Even so, the hospital staff either is unaware of these facts, or refused to abide by them.

This is the case even if one is on an involuntary hold.

If I got a job, would that enable some other mentally ill webmaster to pay for his domain renewal, so he doesn't lose his livelihood?

MichaelCrawford15• 11 years ago

"When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say. If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course, you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners.

As a practical matter, a mere failure to speak out upon occassions where no statement is asked or expect from you, and when the utterance of an uncalled for suspicion is odious, will often hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. Try to raise a voice that will be heard from here to Albany and watch what comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend of your father's, offering you a place at his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if you any of young gentleman have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations, and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well.

I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. "In a few years," reasons one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then I shall use my powers for good." Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought, his ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time."

    John J. Chapman
    Commencement Address to the Graduating Class of Hobart College, 1900

ChristianKletzl• 11 years ago

I am hopeful that helping your non-hires ultimately becomes a fixed part of a company's recruiting process (especially in SV where companies compete on the craziest hiring perks).

Applicants spend a significant time to prepare and come on-site, even though in many cases this only leads to a rejection. A company's brand and culture should (by a candidate) also be evaluated by how they treat the candidates they don't hire, just how a person should be evaluated by how they treat their waiter.

We've created smarthires.io for this reason. Companies can refer candidates they liked but didn't hire and we'll introduce these candidates to other companies in the same network. Many times a candidate who's not a great fit for one company could be the perfect fit for another.

orionblastar10• 11 years ago

I am disabled and mentally ill, which is why I don't get hired for a job. I didn't used to be this way and developed it from a lot of stress while working.

I can still do tech work and program, just that everyone can pick up I am mentally ill and discriminate against me for it. I'd have to find the right company that can accommodate a mentally ill person as an employee. I'm often accused of having autism in the way I talk and write.

I am also over 40 now, so age is a factor.

booruguru• 11 years ago

I am disabled and mentally ill... I didn't used to be this way and developed it from a lot of stress while working.

I vaguely understand that workplace stress can be debilitating, but I don't have a clear understanding of this issue.

Would you mind shedding a bit of light on your story?

orionblastar10• 11 years ago

Sure I worked for a law firm for four and a half years. I received pay raises and promotions and had a very good salary. I worked in a team, and debugged Visual BASIC code and ASP VBScript code. Problem was I was picked on and bullied by some members of management and some coworkers and I didn't know why. The work kept piling on, more programs to debug.

It used to take months to debug a program to get it right with quality and security checks. Management suddenly wanted it done in weeks instead of months. Most programs were written in spaghetti code, with no comments, no documentation, and I had to fix all of that. I was moved into a new position called legacy software and any program that was messed up became legacy software.

I worked extra long hours, I took some work home to try and make the deadlines. I was under a lot of stress and I even had dreams about the code. I had problems sleeping, and had to go to work while I was sleepy. On June 2001 I experienced my first delusion. I thought I heard two airliners crash into our office tower one after the other. I freaked out and had a panic attack. Went to a mental hospital after others didn't hear the plane crashes. I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and placed on short-term disability. I was told that the stress at work had triggered a stroke and caused some damage and I developed this mental illness that is rare (Less than 0.5% of the population has it). On September 11, 2001 while I was recovering at home on short-term disability I saw the two planes crash into the WTC and it sounded just like my delusion. I was scared, and the people at my work must have been scared that I heard two planes crash into our building, and then 911 happens a few months later.

I return to work in November 2001, my cubical is gone, they move me to this open space near a bookshelf and give me even more work. I had another panic attack and was told by my boss to "Snap out of it or you are fired!" and I couldn't snap out of it so security escorted me out of the building and I was fired.

After that it has been hard finding work, when I apply I am 'overqualified' even if the company makes a public statement that they can't find qualified people and have to hire H1B Visa workers to fill jobs. If I did get hired, they keep me on only to debug their programs and get them to the next level and then fire me.

I don't understand why I was treated that way, and I've always been nice to people and helping them out.

But I ended up on disability in 2003 because I am unemployable, can't find a job that would be willing to work with me through my mental illness and keep me on.

fsk• 11 years ago

Don't this guy too seriously. He made people take a long APL course as part of their job interview process.

BrookeTAllen2• 11 years ago

I agree that nobody should take me too seriously. I often take myself too seriously and it is exhausting and thankless work.

On the other hand, I disagree with your assertion that I made people take a course as part of a hiring process. I simply said that I’d hire someone if they knew some things and 27 of my candidates who didn’t know those things asked if I would teach them for fee. I agreed to offer a three-week course on condition they wanted to learn for its own sake and that they were NOT doing it to get a job because I wasn’t guaranteeing anyone would get hired and, besides, the chance any one person would get hired was perhaps 4%. In the end a bunch of them proved to be superb and I hired two instead of one as I’d originally hoped. And I got a few others jobs elsewhere. I didn’t have to do that, but I did. And they didn’t have to learn what they did, but they did.

You can accuse me of being biased in favor of people who like learning things for its own sake and who know how to do the job I need done. But if you are going to accuse people of forcing time-consuming education on candidates then I’d hope you’ll spend time going after employers who force you to have an irrelevant degree from a costly university before they will even let your resume past some idiotic filter.

vonnik• 11 years ago

Nicholson here. I posted this and my startup, FutureAdvisor, invited Brooke to come to the Bay last fall for an event like the one reported here.

Here are two previous HN threads on Brooke, Noah, Staffup Weekend and their method:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8958290 https://www.futureadvisor.com

P.S. We're looking for an infrastructure engineer.

BrookeTAllen2• 11 years ago

BROOKE HERE (the guy from the article).

Some thoughts on this discussion…

ON PREJUDICES: Often I don’t get what I want because other people have inaccurate judgments concerning me. But what can I expect; who has the time to really do due diligence. And who am I to judge their judgments of me? If I were a judge at court I’d have to recuse myself because I am way too close to my own case.

This is not to say prejudice doesn’t exist. It does. And it is not to say it isn’t harmful. It is. Prejudice harms us all and the prejudices that harm me the most are my own; they keep me from being all I can be.

When I overlook good candidates because I judge them on irrelevant characteristics then I am constraining my options and that does me no good. Although it would be wonderful if the world was perfect I’ve found it most fruitful to concentrate on the problems closest to me and interestingly they usually involve something about me I could improve upon or resign myself to. I’m happier and more productive when I spend so much time trying to be part of a solution (and not the precipitate) that I don’t have time left over to theorize about what people beyond my influence should be doing.

ON MENTAL DISABILITIES: If you spend any time with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders I’m sure you can find yourself and everyone you know in there. It seems to me that strengths and weaknesses of the mind should be considered only if relevant just as with things in the physical realm. I’m not sure where to draw the line, however I rue the day when sociopaths cannot be discriminated against. In any event, I’ve concluded that life is a terminal spectrum disorder we just have to deal with as best as we can (until we don’t have to any more).

ON SELF-DISCLOSURE: As a practical matter, if you have an obvious disability the best time to bring it up is right before it becomes obvious. For example, if you have a stutter and you ask for forbearance at the beginning of an interview then you can win people’s hearts and they will be rooting for you. But if you don’t then often they cannot wait for the conversation to end. If your disability is not obvious but might require accommodation later on then probably the best time to disclose it is after you get a job offer and before you accept.

If you choose to go public with your issues and make them a cause célèbre then in order to win broad support it will need to be clear that you are doing it for the benefit of people in your circumstances and not just as cover for your own failings. Even then, the recognition you deserve might only come posthumously, but that is irrelevant unless it is recognition that you seek.

PEOPLE I’D LOVE TO HEAR FROM: Although this discussion is interesting I wonder if any of you out there would like my help improving how you hire people. If so, please contact me.

I am retired and don’t need to do this, but I want to. If you are stinking rich I can be expensive and if you’re sincerely broke then I can be free. Either way, you have to tell me who you are. I’m at BrookeAllen.com.

Helping the People Who Don’t Get Hired

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