There is steady, day-by-day interest here on Hacker News in what the best hiring procedures might be for technology companies. Some of us are in a position to be hiring workers, and many of us have been in the position of applying for jobs. The fundamental error in hiring procedures the author of the submitted article identifies is putting biographical data about the job applicant, which is just one thing to look at in a hiring procedure,
in too crucial a role in hiring procedures. Don't screen out people on the basis of biography until you know what they can do for you. A job applicant's biography may possibly tell you what the applicant did for other employers, but it is a demonstrably low-validity way to find an applicant who can and will do a lot for you. The best hiring procedure is to give your applicants a work-sample test.
Because I posted the latest revision of my detailed FAQ for Hacker News on company hiring procedures
just yesterday, I won't repeat all those keystrokes here. If you would like to know more, read the FAQ and follow the links to the references included in the FAQ.
But the bottom line is that most companies in most countries use stupid hiring procedures, because their managers are too lazy to do even elementary research on the HUGE prior literature on what hiring procedures are most effective (and most legal in countries that have laws about hiring procedures). In the United States, if you are looking for the "best candidates for jobs" that the submitted article here talks about, you had better be using a work-sample test as part of your hiring procedure.
Is there any literature on portfolio-based hiring? That's basically how people are hired into most research positions: hiring managers evaluate the research you've done, and invite you to interview based on it.
Interviews still are important, but they're usually not about assessing the technical ability of the candidate - that's already been established from their prior work. Rather, it's more: do I want to work with this person?
The github-is-my-resume meme is rather similar to this approach, I believe. I don't believe that one's github account is a resume, but it is a portfolio.
Anecdotally, I can say that IBM Research does well by hiring former interns. (I did two internships as a grad student before being hired.) That's exactly a work-sample scenario, and I know that it's often the easiest hiring decision for managers: they already have worked with the candidate, and have observed what they can do.
> Is there any literature on portfolio-based hiring?
From the world of higher learning, the emphasis on portfolios is well-known. The interesting thing to emphasize is that the focus is on long-term development - e.g. have you become a better researcher or teacher over time.
Remember, we don't want someone with 7 years of experience if those 7 years were spent doing the same thing, not getting better/learning more skills.
I think this is something that checklist-based interviewing fails to uncover. Behavioral-based interviewing (e.g. STAR) does better but it forces the candidate to know that this evidence of programming maturity over time is what is being probed for (if it is). Whiteboard-based interviewing is probably the best but it requires dedicated interviewing by engineers and there are flaws to it (emphasis on reducing false positives v. false negatives)
> "In the section where I describe the various courses I have taught, I include several sentences that detail how both my successes and my failures in one course led to improvements in subsequent semesters. I refer to this development in my statement of teaching philosophy as well, but in the teaching portfolio I can point directly to the evidence of those improvements in sample syllabi." [1]
> "In some ways, it's like a two-year-long take-home exam," says A. Mitchell Fraas, a graduate student in Duke's history department. When the system was introduced, in 2005, he and his peers could opt to complete either a portfolio or the traditional exams. Mr. Fraas chose the portfolio, he says, because it offered a measure of control and a permanent record of his progress.
"I liked the sense of being able to see in a tangible format everything I was doing working up to exams," he says, "rather than blurting stuff out in a four-hour oral and never seeing it again, or scribbling something down on a 24-hour exam."
Felicity M. Turner, a fifth-year graduate student in the department, says the portfolio gave her an opportunity to revise her papers and think through an issue until she was happy with the result. In the portfolio model, she says, "the responsibility is on you to formulate your own argument, so the process of creation is yours." [2]
Let me give you a hint, look for big fish in a small pond. Seriously, there is so much unappreciated talent out there simply because a person has graduated from a university that is less than top-ten, or even, way lower. There are people out there who are smart who haven't traveled the tradition route to get there who are ignored and even ostracized just because they aren't from a top ten school.
There seems to be a binary relation to hiring. Either you graduated from a top-ten school or you dropped out. There are plenty of disadvantaged people who couldn't get into those top-ten schools for various reasons but are the big fish in their small pond who you may want to look towards.
My sense is that many of the complaints about a "skills shortage" are in fact thinly veiled boasts about the selectivity and eliteness of the complainant and his organization. It's my observation that most of the actual hiring still happens through informal networks and social contacts rather than through the official, formal hiring process.
While a "skills shortage" complaint is an obvious status seeking behavior, it does not take away that there is an actual and severe skills shortage for many position.
There are normal software developer jobs where it is nearly impossible to find anyone qualified even when one has no significant price sensitivity. We know such people exist because we have some on staff but expanding the pool has proven to be difficult.
For some segments of the market, the skills shortage is legit.
>There are normal software developer jobs where it is nearly impossible to find anyone qualified even when one has no significant price sensitivity.
Well, if you're looking for someone with a year's experience at a start up with decent JS/jQuery skills, some experience on iOS and ruby and hobby stuff on the side...
Have a look at my profile. I'm a pretty bright guy with a track record of learning stuff that most people struggle with, but so far have had an unsuccessful job search in SF for 2 months due to pretty much everybody wanting an expert.
Edit: If you're looking only for those who already possess "expert", "ninja" or "rockstar" skills, then please don't email me.
Most hiring happens in the formal way. Now, if you actually have a network of highly skilled associates, then maybe that's not true. But such networks exist in tiny pockets as in SV.
It could also be location-dependant. There's apparently a skills shortage in the South Bay and Peninsula, but there's a jobs shortage in the North Bay.
Then there's the fact that recruitments for managers and lead engineers outnumber those for junior-level programmers and testers, and nobody is taking the effort to train junior-level employees up to the skill level that they are looking for.
A company could also have obscene contract terms that highly skilled employees with good job prospects will turn away from. Things that I've seen or heard about include non-compete clauses that are broad enough to force you out of the industry for up to three years after leaving the company, NDAs broad enough to prevent you from blogging about your whole industry or even mentioning that you work for the company, surrendering all copyright to everything you have ever developed or would develop independantly of your work at the company (California law allows you to have personal projects regardless of contract terms so long as they're unrelated to your work), and pledging to never sue the company under any circumstances no matter what they do to you (objecting to that one cost me my last job). Word can get around about these things, and the most skilled employees with the most job freedom can afford not to bother applying to certain places.
I came close to rejecting an interview with a company after a recruiter pushed back my resume, and I'll tell you why:
What I saw was either a noticeable discrepancy in adequately communicating to the recruiter (who for full disclosure, has the title: "Technical Recruiter" in their email signature) what they wanted out of a candidate for the role, the hiring manager not having any actual understanding of what the role entails, the recruiter greatly misunderstanding the intentions and requirements from the hiring manager -OR- a devastating combination of all three.
I say this, because the recruiter rejected my resume twice for a role that I am highly interested in based on the notion that I did not adequately explain my experience with text files and Microsoft Excel. Now, if you're a technical recruiter, hiring for a data analyst position and you make a point of looking at a resume that lists database administration experience, modeling, forecasting and technical analysis of clearing house data and fail to forward a resume for a job that would entail all three because I didn't say in clear terms "I used Notepad.exe and excel.exe" something is very, critically and fundamentally wrong with your recruiting process.
That would be like asking a nuclear trained submarine electrician with 14 years experiance, 6 in the service field, with things like programming multigenerator plc control systems, can you show me more experience on wiring?
Maybe the recruiter was looking for somebody who used a specific tool rather than someone who knows the fundamentals and could use any tool. In the early 00's, I was turned down from a web job after they found out in the interview that I developed web sites using notepad, vim, and text files instead of Dreamweaver. The same thing might have happened to you.
If it turns out to be the case, I'll still go to the interview but never work with that recruiter again. We've reached a point in tech now where processes are (nearly) tool agnostic; and to focus on that given the context of the resume (which the role based on my experience in the role with other companies), this is especially true. I don't need to rely on notepad to manipulate CSV data, I can easily use Excel, Sublime or any other tool that can open a comma separated file.
So I'm going to softly reject the notion that this recruiter was looking for someone who uses a specific tool. With the experience you mentioned, I can absolutely see why they'd want a certain toolset because perhaps their internal development lifecycle relies on features not present elsewhere.
If that's the case with a recruiter, it's entirely their job and responsibility to their candidates to find this out and outline it in a job post to explain this without inundating interested prospects with tool-speak. This could have easily been accomplished, but it wasn't.
My observations as someone who's checked job boards/sites continually for almost 20 years:
Through the mid-nineties, when I graduated college, the requirements were reasonable. A solid understanding of software development fundamentals and reasonable experience for the advertised position. Focus was on ability and potential.
A few years later, as the .com boom was underway, requirements dropped to unreasonable levels. I saw people with embarrassing "qualifications" who were far better compensated than me. If you could grope a computer without getting slapped, you were hired to build web sites and paid top dollar.
A few years later, after the bubble burst, the pendulum swung in the other direction, hard. The market was flooded with applicants, and requirements at best matched the resume of the person who left. At worst, we got "10 years of Java" in 2001. Focus was on experience in very specific (and usually broad ranging) skills.
I have seen very little recovery from this point. It became the new norm. I do think it's getting better, but not a lot better, and only recently.
People are hiring employees like they would consultants or contractors. For short term hires, I want very relevant experience because paying premium, short term rates to someone learning on the job is very expensive. But if I'm hiring an employee, I just want someone who can learn quickly and with whom I can happily work for the next 5 years.
Never before in my life has it taken more than 3 weeks to find a job, certain bloggers keep claiming the job market is "on fire" and yet I've been at it for two months, already having reached out to about 30 companies and done at least half that many informal meetings.
The really strange thing about it is that my skills are undeniably stronger than when I got hired at my first tech job in Beijing 18 months ago, and that search was much easier. Similarly, I've met a few interns over the past month with clearly less productive ability than I have who have been hired with great packages. The other thing I've noticed is that the hiring demand is very bimodal.
On one hand, hiring managers I've talked with at various small-medium sized companies have had extremely high expectations and been quick to reject me for not having specific skill X or for not having N number of years' experience with Y. Worst is that in many cases, this doesn't happen until they or their recruiters have actively pursued me over half a dozen phone calls and a trip to their office.
On the other hand, there are clients with lots of money to spend on making sites or customizing iPhone apps. In this market, I've suddenly found myself to be at the highly-skilled end of spectrum. Not only is there the potential for great earnings, but it's still not bad in terms of learning opportunities. It's leading me to seriously consider abandoning the job search entirely. I can just freelance, keep going to meetups to hang out and learn with the inside crowd and start saving money to bootstrap my own thing. It wasn't my original plan, but the long-term result will be the same.
Yeah, this happened to me a while ago. Got through two phone calls with someone talking about their start-up and my compiler. Never got a call back after I dared reveal that I have no previous experience in iPhone front-end programming.
Well, what did you expect? You called a compilers guy and you think "compilers" is code for "really smart rock-star", but it's actually just language for "guy who knows about compilers". There is no implied expertise in whatever the latest San Francisco fad happens to be from knowing Real Computer Science.
I've just recently started freelancing for the first time in my long career and so far it seems to have many more upsides than downsides. I'd maybe be more hesitant to do this if I had a family to look after but since it's just me the uncertainty is more than offset by the flexibility and freedom.
I totally agree with the article. Perhaps if you're a startup moving very quickly, you might need someone with a specific skill set; otherwise, you're probably excluding better candidates by focusing on skills.
I've performed a fair number of technical interviews over the past few years -- usually looking for some combination of Java & database skills -- and I've developed a couple of informal heuristics, imperfect, but with some predictive power.
1. The ability to code seems inversely proportional to the number of acronyms on the resume.
2. Listing certain skills is a negative indicator: XML, for example, or Eclipse.
3. Certifications are often (though not always) a bad sign.
Perhaps if you're a startup moving very quickly,
you might need someone with a specific skill set
My experience is the opposite of this claim ... when working for a startup you cannot afford the privilege of being specialized, but rather a jack of all trade that can easily switch between technologies and problem domains like putting on socks in the morning.
I've developed a couple of informal heuristics,
imperfect, but with some predictive power.
Your rules will give you a lot of false negatives, because the current hiring practices are completely broken, so naturally many people also know how to game the system (devs are a smart bunch in general)...
1. I also added lots of acronyms on my resumes in the past, because resumes are first read by HR people that look for keywords
2. I never listed XML or Eclipse, but I am listing Emacs :) ... regardless, this is in no way worse than listing those same requirements in a job posting, which many do
3. Certifications are cheap to get and in the corporate world certifications matter. I never got one, but that's only because I work with startups or with companies that know these certifications are useless
I agree with you, and for the record, I was only approaching this as one developer (out of several) doing an interview. It's just that, after several iterations of, 1. "Hey Mike, can you interview this guy tomorrow" 2. Looks at resume, sees dozens of acronyms, languages, platforms 3. "Ok, can you write a function to reverse a string?" and getting something like 4:
for (int i = s.length() - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
String newString = new String();
char x = s.charAt(i);
newString = newString + x;
}
1.) newString gets re-created every iteration of the loop, so it always contains a single character, and at the end of the loop it contains the first character of the string. 2.) Strings are immutable (in Java), so "newString = newString + x" creates a new object on every iteration. Better to use a StringBuffer and swap the ith and N - i - 1th characters of the string.
Isn't there some common library that contains a reverse() String method? That's why I like Ruby, for stuff like "string".reverse in the standard library. I can just use the language and know that the people writing the language are better language() method implementors than I am, which is fine. Not sure how well that flies in interviews at KPMG, but whatever.
This article resonates strongly with me as a candidate who works as a generalist Software Engineer at a small company and has been looking out for opportunities.
At this point I am frustrated enough to put up a big 'Fuck you recruiters!' on the top of my resume.
I mean there are tons of software positions that I apply to that I know I can easily handle but just get turned down because of lack of 5x years of experience with Tech Stack Zaphod v4.2.
Want a better job? Put more info in your Hacker News profile. Email address, Github link, personal website, LinkedIn...so when you write these posts, people can contact you if they're interested.
> I know many companies that are hiring, and all of them are saying they can’t find the people they want.
Here's why (real job posting, name and location withheld):
Responsibilities:
Analyze, design, and develop scalable, reliable Java EE applications, using several Java technologies: Servlets, JSPs, EJB, JMS, and JDBC
Lead the solution architectural design and/or analysis tasks
Design and develop the Java programs required to achieve the desired functionality
Prepare technical documentation
Work with the SQA team to ensure high-quality products
Qualifications
Must have:
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent
7 years + of experience in large-scale application design and development
Experience in Data security Domain
Sound knowledge in Cryptography
Nice to Have:
Proven expertise in OO design and development using Java EE
Good experience in Servlets, Hibernate, Spring etc.
Experience developing in JUnit and Ant
Experience with Java technologies and frameworks: JMS, JDBC, JAXB, JAXP, JAX WS, etc.
Expertise in Web development, XML Web standards, and Web Services
Experience developing Web Portals (using AJAX, Ext.js++) is an asset.
Proficiency in English (oral and written)
I bet you $8 that the job posting above could be done by someone with 1/4 of the necessary "years" of experience.
Most places seem to find some <insert tech job> and just blindly copypasta all of the acronyms they can find into a big wall of useless information.
If you want to hire someone then put as much effort into the job posting as you would expect from the candidate applying, don't just put a wall of text up and expect to get a "rockstar" (good god, I hate that term so much). Have the team where the person will be working in write the job posting.
I seriously doubt hiring managers are actually "blindly copypastaing acronyms" unless they are hiring for a role for which they have previously written similar/identical a job ad.
A much, much more likely scenario -- and this I have observed first-hand many times -- is that BigCorp used to have Bob on staff, until Bob realised he was worth more and left; subsequently, the hiring managers assess what exactly it was Bob was hired to do (Cobol) and what he actually did (something like the above) and decided to include the former and a carbon copy match of every niche, technology, domain and specialist skillset Bob had.
Why?
Because they want another Bob, of course! It's unlikely such a person exist and, more likely, the ones who do charge out the yazoo for their skills.
The claim that every applicant should get to "make their case" to a human may sound nice in theory, but it would be a monumental waste of time.
It's easy to get a stack of 500 resumes, and many of those resumes are from people who legitimately lack the skills to be productive. A company committed to talking with every applicant would never get anything else done.
I don't think that he was trying to suggest that every single applicant should get an interview. Right now there are people who are being excluded from consideration for missing one small item from the checklist of requirements. I'm not a programmer, but I've run into the same issue as a telecommunications specialist.
As an example, I applied to a position that was looking for someone with at least 1-2 years of experience working with military Satellite Communications systems. I have almost a decade of recent SATCOM experience but when I spoke with their recruiter, they wanted someone who had specifically worked with their system and would not budge on this issue. For anyone who has worked in the telecommunications industry, pretty much all of the long-haul systems are made up of the same basic components (modems, crypto, frequency converters, high-powered amplifiers, etc.) and you can train someone who is familiar with one system to use another in just a few days. Six months later, this position was still being advertised and the employer still wasn't budging.
Now many people might say that this is a company I shouldn't want to work for anyways, but generally when someone is looking for a job it is because they don't have one.
I was probably overstating the author's position when I mentioned interviewing every single applicant. But, I think I'm correctly interpreting him as interviewing a lot of people who don't meet some predefined "requirement" list.
The strict requirements filter doesn't work great... You may be the perfect example of where it's missing a great potential employee.
But the problem remains: if you receive 500 resumes, and you don't have time to interview even 100 of them... how do you whittle down the pool?
That doesn't always work. You may find that even when your inside contact says you are a "must hire," company policy inserts HR into the process anyway and rejects you based on the same trivial criteria.
I'm not saying don't try it, just don't bet your career on it.
I can't imagine what kind of successful career you could have in a company with an policies and an HR department so short sighted. If both HR and the company policies are at the point where they would reject you even though you've sidestepped HR to get the actual hiring manager to deem you qualified then there is more to worry about at that company than a career.
Ola, Andrew. I think your assumption that weird HR policies imply the company is bad is unfortunately incorrect. I say "unfortunately" because I wish it were true, since I wish could follow your advice and simply avoid companies with doubtful HR practices from the start.
I recently contacted 3 friends/acquaintances that work in 3 companies I'd like to apply at. These are engineer-driven companies that are thriving and have a good reputation as good places to work at. I still had to go thru HR in all of them.
In one case (a certain search/advertising company) the in-house recruiter cut my process short after a phone interview without asking me a single technical question. So I couldn't talk to the hiring manager (it's the job of the recruiter to filter down the number of people the hiring manager has to talk to) or even a technical peer for that matter.
Essentially they're randomly throwing a large % of the resumes in the trashcan, but they can get away with it because they receive a very large number of resumes to start with.
One possible scenario: sometimes a lot of good technology is locked up in a bad company (e.g. through acquisitions, mergers, and/or changes in management), and some engineers may consider it worth the risk of boarding a slowly sinking ship just to be able to play with cool toys that aren't available elsewhere.
Relatedly, it's easy to say, "That's not a place you want to work anyway," but there are other factors that influence one's decision whether to work at a particular place.
If you want somebody to talk to your computers you employ somebody who can do that. If you need somebody who can deal with customers, then you employ somebody to do that. You can find a happy medium for many roles. But for a lot your better of seperating them. This is why you have sales people and marketing people and HR and line managers. Your tech people dealing with your computers need to be able to do that, anything else upto and including personal hygiene is a bonus. Computer room cooling units aint just to cool the computers down, for many there air showers.
The real question should be, are companies asking the right types of tech questions in there interview process. The tech skill should be relevant to what you have experienced and asking question about how they would deal with a situation you recently had and seeing how there mind responds knowing how you eventualy solved it will give you an insight. It also tells you, if we had this chap then would we of solved that problem quicker and if it's yes then that person nomatter what is sombody of value to your company, thats the easiest way in an interview on how to measure there tech skills. You can ask more detailed questions during the thought process as you already have the answears as you experienced it. Remember there is a probabtion period as well so you have a safty net nomatter what and remember that works both ways. So don't overpromise either, be honest and open. Works both ways. Somebody who knows there limitations is also important. Some people have no limitations, but they can take a while, as long as they know that again that can be fine. You as the manager should also have somebody who you can communicate with, even if you have to interpret geek to managment, anything else is a bonus if they can do the job in a way that add's value, everybody is happy.
I agree with the article and with, "I look for an applicant that fits the culture, who is bright, and who is excited and wants to learn." Recruiters can't automatically filter on culture, so that is out. Recruiters aren't always that experienced (no offense), as they've probably gotten recruited into the recruiting company as new blood or just started doing it because they thought they'd be good at it. So having them judge things like culture, how bright the employee is, and how much they want to learn (and not just faking it), would be tough.
And without a recruiter, you are going to be missing out on a lot of candidates. I personally have gone through this recently and know small companies that either tried to do this themselves or with a minor (not heavy hitting) recruiter, and finding people that way is SO SLOW.
So basically, this advice is good for interviews once you can get people in, but you won't be able to change the fact that the process to getting people in will stay the same.
There are some other common reasons, apparently so far not mentioned in this thread, for job ads with a list of detailed qualifications nearly impossible to satisfy:
First, the ad might be only to satisfy some legal or bureaucratic purpose and not to help fill a real job. Having the requirements be nearly impossible to satisfy helps reduce the number of responses as desired.
Second, the ad might have been designed to give the employer plenty of excuses to reject people for whatever unstated reasons they have in mind. So, maybe they don't want to hire anyone in set A they have in mind so ask for five years of HTML5 experience and use lack of that experience to reject anyone in set A.
Likely real hiring in organizations good to work for don't use such absurd ads.
Such ads bring up a fundamental problem: The worker that happens to have so much experience that they can respond to a nearly impossible to satisfy list of 'skills' likely has many more related skills and, really, is quite highly experienced. So, such a worker is likely more experienced than the people hiring. So if the less experienced people hiring have actually done well enough in business to be able to pay a new employee, then the more experienced worker should be able to do still better starting their own business!
Or maybe the worker should do anything to get an interview with the company, see what they are doing, and then start a company to compete with them!
There is a related point: Such a worker will have to have at home his own computing, laptop, desktop, servers, and good Internet connection. So, really, he must already have nearly everything but a good 'business idea' for bringing up his own Web site and, thus, starting his own business. And in doing this work, he gets to use the tools he already knows or ones he would like to learn instead of the tools someone else wants him to learn and use.
Likely good companies are not hiring via such ads but are hiring via Linkedin, job fairs, networking, open source code samples, etc.
The real solution here is due to Darwin: Companies that waste time in silly recruiting efforts are at a competitive disadvantage and on the way out of business.
So, here is the good news: If some companies can remain in business spending time, money, and effort in such silly, wasteful ways, then think of how much money there is to be made if cut out the waste!
One final point hackers should understand: The 'suits' should be afraid of the hackers and they are!
http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes...
in too crucial a role in hiring procedures. Don't screen out people on the basis of biography until you know what they can do for you. A job applicant's biography may possibly tell you what the applicant did for other employers, but it is a demonstrably low-validity way to find an applicant who can and will do a lot for you. The best hiring procedure is to give your applicants a work-sample test.
Because I posted the latest revision of my detailed FAQ for Hacker News on company hiring procedures
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4270768
just yesterday, I won't repeat all those keystrokes here. If you would like to know more, read the FAQ and follow the links to the references included in the FAQ.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4270768
But the bottom line is that most companies in most countries use stupid hiring procedures, because their managers are too lazy to do even elementary research on the HUGE prior literature on what hiring procedures are most effective (and most legal in countries that have laws about hiring procedures). In the United States, if you are looking for the "best candidates for jobs" that the submitted article here talks about, you had better be using a work-sample test as part of your hiring procedure.