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Skipping Traditional Recruitment, Going Straight To the Source
theodp writes "Out of necessity, reports Slate, tech startups are changing the way workers are screened and hired. Take database technology startup RethinkDB, whose old-school recruiting effort — job boards, external recruiters — yielded hundreds of resumes, dozens of phone screens, and numerous four-hour meetings with viable candidates, but no one who fit their criteria. 'They [recruiters] can't tell the difference between the competent ones and the stars,' complained Y Combinator's Paul Graham. Instead, the RethinkDB founders turned to sites like Github.com and stackoverflow.com to pick up six people (they're still looking), a mix of full-timers and interns, both senior and junior. 'You can see the code being written and how technically accurate they are,' explained RethinkDB's Michael Glukhovsky."
I've never used one/been contacted by one, I've gotten my jobs the old fashion way of knowing someone who works there :D. However a good friend of mine was recently out of work for a long time and talked with numerous recruiters (he used every avenue he could to get a job). He'd call me regularly to vent about the process. They were just universally stupid in the questions they asked. They did not at all understand the kinds of positions they were hiring for and had a very much "One size fits all," attitude. For example some of them just flat couldn't deal with his years of consulting. It was a legit business, actual company (consisting of just him) making money and so on. However they couldn't deal with the fact that he didn't have a boss, and that the company phone number was his cell. There was no conception that someone might have worked for themselves. That wasn't the only stupid thing, just one example of many.
To me it really does seem like they provide little value to companies other than maybe to gather resumes, but there has to be a better process for that. Also, their process seemed like what it was most likely to get you was good liars. They didn't ask the right questions so someone who answered honestly wouldn't pass screening in almost all cases. So the candidates you would get would likely be the ones who were willing to just answer in the manner they thought was most likely to get them past that phase.
Maybe he just had a really bad experience, but it has given me a really poor opinion of recruiting companies. Seems to me like this company is on the right track: Do your own searches for people you want, solicit resumes, interview potential candidates first round, etc. Don't think some recruiter will filter all but the best, unless by "best" you mean "People who will say what it takes to get past that step."
It should be no surprise to anyone who has dealt with job agencies that they are only after their commission. They don't understand IT in any meaningful way and can't tell a monkey from a genius. They are corporate BS artists.
Having said that sorting one good guy from a few thousand applicants is very, very time consuming.
I agree 100% WTFA. In the time I've been employed in the I.T. field, it astounds me that managers and bosses hire on the pure premise of line items on a resume and talking-the-talk, and take a side-line approach to not asking or quizzing outside the realm of if the interviewee still has a pulse and is breathing. It seems like everything is taken at face value and if the 'buzz word' scan on the resume succeeds, so-I-guess-we-are-going-to-hire-them approach becomes all to comfortable.
Any time that I've interviewed anyone, sure, I take their honesty on a resume with some consideration, but I'm more interested in you, the interviewer, proving those skills you have written down on your resume, whether that be an online open-sourced repository, tossing a dry-erase marker at them during the interview, ect and showing your soon-to-be employer you got the stuff than I am wow'ing about someone word-smithing the shit out of their resume.
I have excellent Slashdot karma, does that count?
I've talked to Slava a lot, and he's a really smart guy. Unlike most startups, RethinkDB is actually doing innovative things. If you're looking for work in the bay area and you're good at algorithms, GO WORK FOR RETHINKDB!
(If I didn't have my own startup, I'd be working there right now -- instead I'm cheering them on from afar.)
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
HR's the only one with the buzzword matching filter, and lord help any IT department that lets HR do the actual hiring! We match for two things, technical skill and your ability to jell with the team, specific technologies are rarely that important (no must have 5 years experience with Windows 2008 here) because we figure any potential candidate who got that far and passes the sniff test can probably learn on the job.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Google did that in their glory years. I've been contacted by Google recruiting because of posts I made on comp.lang.c++.
The real reason why they have recruiting problems....
I would say if you think the IT department is some exception, that is because you know it. If they are unable to do it for IT, why do you think they are able to do it for any other department?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I'm 20 year old software engineering student and my resume... I wouldn't perhaps say that it is full of lies but I know that it is full of exaggerations. Gross ones. For example, I list Python under my skills even though my knowledge of it is pretty much limited to one course I took.
I don't like doing that but feel that I am expected to do that. When I browse job advertisements it is obvious that many claim to require skills you would never actually need in such a job. They have often been written by people who aren't software engineers themselves so my process goes like this:
-See a job that I think I would be skilled enough to do or learn quickly enough
-Ignore all skills they claim the job to require
-See if I can in any way justify adding them to my resume without outright lying
-Try to get to an interview and sort everything out there.
Of course, if I actually do get to an interview and there is a technical guy present and we begin discussing my skills, I will make it clear what I really can do and what I can not. If there isn't a technical guy present (IE: a mid-sized company is hiring their first in-house webmaster) I pretty much have to use my own judgement about whether I can do the job or not. That is a horrible way to do things because it sometimes wastes employers' time, etc. when I am not actually qualified to do something. But if I wouldn't do it like that, I might not even get to an interview for some job that I would be very competent at.
It pretty clear that Slava at RethinkDB is clueless about his problem. Sure, he has trouble finding top people. It apparently has never occurred to him that top people probably don't want to work there. I'm sorry, but from what I can see, it looks positively inane. My version of hell, because I like far tougher problems than can happen in that area.
Honestly, this strikes me as the narcissists' approach to interviewing. Wake up guy. You're not Bell Labs, and you're not going to get Denis Ritchie to come work for you.
The problem is that people view social networking as just some sort of big ole' party. Most people I know can't believe I won't accept any and every Facebook friend request. For me, it is someone I know that I would consider a friend, even if fairly distantly. For most people, the more the merrier. They just say "yes" to anything.
Well that attitude spills over to Linkedin, even though it is supposed to be more professional. People just associate with whoever the hell they happen to know, regardless of how they think of the person. I know people who have "linked" with people they really don't like.
The kind of recommendation I'd take is an actual, in person, personal recommendation from someone I know who's judgment I trust. Those kind of people would have trouble looking me in the eye and lying to me (that's why I trust them). That doesn't guarantee anything, maybe they don't know something about the person or have misjudged them, but it is a much better sign.
In terms of more cold hiring I think companies just have to put in some more legwork. I work at a university and our hiring process is all our own. Does mean that you have to work more at it, the manager has to write up the position, HR posts it on the site (it can be posted/linked elsewhere is you like), resumes are collected and the manager has to review them, decide who to interview, etc. Not as easy as just telling some recruiter "Go find me a programmer," but you get better candidates. For example in the campus environment, we've found that hiring student employees to staff, if they are interested, works well. Pay is lower than industry but benefits, including work environment, tend to be good. Students who are interested in working there know this and are ok with it, whereas other applicants sometimes view it as a temp job due to the pay.
I think companies need to be more willing to do that. Yes, it sucks to have to spend more time on hiring, it is a crap process. However if you want candidates that fit you better it is what you have to do.
Remember "web pages"? Before facebook, before linked in, before myspace and geocities, programmers posted their resumes on their own web pages that they ran on their own web servers. They still do. They post code samples, demonstrations, and sometimes entire applications. It's strange how some employers seem to think that they need to use some kind of meta search or intermediary site to find them.
As with all other professions the quality of recruiters varies greatly. I have talked with a few different recruiters and some of them know exactly nothing about what is a good programmer. They are generic HR people that can do little more than check the bullet points on the CV. To get past these recruiters generally require more bullshit and less actual knowledge.
On the other hand I have also talked with some really skilled recruiters that are dedicated to finding people for tech jobs. One guy had worked as a programmer himself for 15 years before he decided he should do something else. He asked good questions and I am sure he would sort out the people that exaggerate their CVs
Sadly, most recruiters belong to the first category.
The problem with filtering your developers through Github, or limiting them to those who have contributed to other open-source projects, is that you will be bypassing by some very good prospects for employees.
Not everybody who works in the field, including many who are very involved with and passionate about their work, also has the time or inclination to be coding in their spare time as well. Sure, you expect people who are dedicated to do some continuing education outside the office, but that's not the same thing. Many people, besides the hectic day at the office, and constant "continuing education" at home, also have families and other interests to deal with.
For the most part, if you limit your search to open-source contributors, you are skewing your results toward single people, mostly men, who may or may not have any social skills outside work, and leaving behind a great many well-adjusted people with well-balanced lives, who are equally great coders.
Not to mention that according to most people in the Agile industry, the idea of the "rockstar developer" has been dead for about 2 years. There are damned few of them, and you are making up bogus criteria for trying to identify who they are.
Sadely today, for every interactions between two entities, there seems to be a person trying to be a middle-man. For physical wares trading, they can be a bit useful, by taking care of all the exporting/importing work, all the advertisment work,.. But for things envolving two entities for an exchange that doesnt involve the middle-man's skill? They are kinda useless... A company would be better off recruiting people from SourceForge.
I have been wasting lots of time on candidates from external recruiters -- most of them were unable to get a few lines of code right. I ditched recruiters as soon as I discovered Codility.com -- it runs the candidates through on-line programming tests to filter out lame programmers (majority!). For me it filters out 8 out of 10 folks who apply from a standard ad. We run the surviving few through interviews with our tech staff. If I am ever going back to non-tech recruiters I will make sure they use Codility first before even asking me about a candidate. I still have to see a single tech recruitment agency which does any tech assessment.
Maybe their requirements are an issue.
If after hundreds of resumes you still have no-one that "fits the criteria" maybe you're looking for someone who doesn't exist. Or they are not willing to pay enough for someone who can fulfil their obviously very high expectations.
They are a startup, developing tech "that changes the way how people store and access data" (wow, they must be up to something), and are now looking for people to help them with it. Well the criteria are not listed so hard to say where the problem lies, but finding people with experience in their database tech well that will be hard of course.
Great they found the people they need now, from the article it seems to me that not only did they change the way they were looking for people, they also changed their selection criteria and the way they were looking AT potential candidates.
Pretty sad, but I actually just bought ~$340 worth of clothing from this site. Never bought a knock-off, so I loaded up on some Gucci shirts and a pair of jeans.
I've always found it much better to interact with companies directly. Recruiters rarely know enough about any job to find people that fit the job. I think a used car salesman has more integrity than a recruiter.
... We (the GNU Compiler Collection) have a policy about this for our mailing lists:
"Recruiting postings, including recruiting for GCC or other free software jobs, are not permitted on this list, or on any of the other GCC mailing lists."
We can't (and won't, of course) prohibit you to contact individual developers personally. Note, however, that most are already employed.
I would prefer if browsing stack-overflow and similar sites was the preferred way of finding possible workers, like the article said, it shows a much bigger picture, as well as a person's strengths, and major areas of interest. It sure beats a resume that's designed to make the recruit look like a golden angel, especially because there are bound to be hundreds just like it, finding the right guy is pretty much a "pin resumes to the wall, and throw darts" type of science.
... unless you want to find programmers.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
yielded hundreds of resumes, dozens of phone screens, and numerous four-hour meetings with viable candidates, but no one who fit their criteria.
If this is true, then either they don't know what they are looking for or they are looking for someone who perfectly fits a description. If they can't tell who is good and who is not after a four hour meeting with a candidate, then I would suggest that the problem is not with the candidates but with the people doing the hiring.
Unfortunately, in larger companies (and yes, there are people that are happy to work for larger companies), corporate policies get in the way and require HR to do the filtering. Then the IT manager has to choose between using relevant topics that HR is likely to screw up, or use irrelevant topics that will just lead HR to pick at random because everyone matched. Or worse, pick the people that state the lowest required salary (which, BTW, I never put on a resume).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
We match for two things, technical skill and your ability to jell with the team, specific technologies are rarely that important
...So you match technical skills but the exact technologies you're looking for aren't important? You're kidding right?
That comment alone should make you give up doing the hiring and turn it over to someone else.
That's the whole point to not hire a "...hell of a good guy who get along with everyone but has zero skills in the area you're seeking or lacking in." Where can I put my application in at? Sounds like a hell of a place to work for.
I would say if you think the IT department is some exception, that is because you know it. If they are unable to do it for IT, why do you think they are able to do it for any other department?
That indeed is the problem with allowing HR to be involved in selection of candidates. Their job is to provide a list of people who can legally apply for the job to the manager, then he hands them back a shorter list of people who should be contacted, then HR disqualifies everyone who obviously can't do the job after the brief contacts, and then interviewing begins. HR's sole job in the hiring process (besides legwork) should therefore be to hate on people. It's unfortunate, but true. :)
Also, any HR department which does not include an employee advocate whose job description says that they are there to represent the concerns of the employees and to do their best to ensure that the employees get what they need to succeed is your enemy at all times unless you are an executive, this is not really relevant to this conversation, but never forget it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
My current boss put an ad on Craigslist which said send your CV and write a perl script that does [thing]. I did so. That turned into a 90-min. phone screen in which he grilled me technically, and then he set up an on-site interview. 5 people, 45 min. each, intense technical drilldown.
The hr person was annoyed that he'd gone to Craigslist (mgr. never told me to say otherwise...), but the mgr. found somebody who could do what he wanted.
There's a lot of recruiter hate going on here but it seems to miss the real problem. Having spent the last 6 years on the hiring side, it's very obvious that Jeff Atwood's FizzBuzz problem is too hard for 90% of the people applying for programming positions out there. When you end up with a situation like this, traditional hiring methods just don't work. Job board postings will get you hundreds of resumes in a single day but the quality is really crap and it is prohibitively expensive to do traditional interviews for every single resume received. HR recruiters, hated as they are, actually do provide higher quality candidates than posting on the job boards. However, it's something like an increase from 1% quality candidates to 5% quality. Still very poor.
We've ended up using a multi-prong approach to hiring ourselves. Besides using recruiters and posting to SIG boards, we've also optimized our candidate screening to handle the flood that comes in from job board postings. Since you can't tell much from resumes (some candidates lie, but an amazing number of good developers are also very bad at writing resumes), we try to call in all but the worst of the resumes received. Then we sit them through an automated testing system (we use Codility). Candidates that pass the equivalent of the FizzBuzz problem are then interviewed by technical interviewers that go over the code with them detail and attempt to thoroughly assess their true skill level. That automated testing step filters out the equivalent of 90% of our candidates, resulting in an almost 90% savings in our HR costs. It's very expensive to have good technical people spending hours interviewing after all, and they tend to hate it anyway.
It's not perfect. There are of course great people who get rejected or who even refuse to take an automated test. However, automated candidate testing means the difference between our top technical people spending 10% of their time interviewing or 100% of their time interviewing. With the scarcity of really good technical talent, we obviously chose to optimize our techie time.
Our place is similar (or who knows, maybe we work for the same place, you never know). We have a few positions that require specific technologies (e.g., Oracle sql expert), but most of our positions just require kick-ass coder willing to learn our technology stack, and with social skills sufficient to fit in.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
They're not technical people -- if they were, they'd be doing technical things and not recruiting. The details of the job confuse them. The better ones test your basic skills with simple tests, something an HR department could do without having to go through a recruiter. Most of the time the recruiter is associated with a contracting company, though, and the company can try you out for a few months and simply not renew your contract if they don't like you. That's the really big win for them, since it's much easier to let a contractor go than a regular employee.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
My "favorite" traditional-recruitment style IT interview question: "What TCP port does {service} use?" Examples have been SMTP, HTTP, HTTPS, MSSQL, etc. Good lord, do they really think somebody having those memorized is a good IT worker, and somebody who doesn't but knows how to do a two-second Google search would somehow be unable to troubleshoot a never-seen-before issue? I was able to explain in one interview how "No, I haven't memorized such-and-such port, but I have the ability to learn new things" but in another it was an HR person doing a pre-screening and simply passing answers back to the hiring manage - I doubt she said anything to the manager beyond "Doesn't know" for particular questions. A better sort of question would be, IMO, something along the lines of "A server suddenly can't be pinged. What do you check?" Does it have power, are there link lights, did the switch fail, did the DBA change the IP address, is DNS resolving, did the networking department change the VLAN config for that port, etc. But no, I get gems like "What DOS command do you use to stop the spooler service."
Hell, I just turned down a six figure job at one place because they have a campus wide tobacco ban. The HR droid was pissed because he said he said it was nearly impossible to find someone else with my specific qualifications. I told him sorry but I choose who I want to work for and companies that have punitive policies are not on that list. I choose to work for winning companies that stay out of my business and provide a pleasant, well compensated and creative place to work.
HR's the only one with the buzzword matching filter, and lord help any IT department that lets HR do the actual hiring!
Perhaps I'm lucky, but I've been in this business over thirty years now and have never seen an HR department that had any say whatsoever in hiring. They can tell you what salary ranges you can pay a person based on title, they can help you verify previous employment, but I've never seen one that has final approval authority - in every case, that lies with the hiring manager and people higher up the food chain. Granted HR is fun to bash, because they hold the keys to the matching algorithm, but if you have a big enough network as a manager, you never have people go through the filter anyway. I'm serious when I ask if this is actually an issue anywhere - that HR makes hiring decisions? Because I've never seen it.
That is all.
When looking at working for a startup the most important aspect I look at is my belief in success. If I feel the company is working towards something innovative and likely to succeed sign me up. However if the idea is mediocre with a poor chance of eventual monetization then I am running the other direction. Some startups are not going to attract top talent for those two reasons. (mediocre ideas attract mediocre talent).
In the case of RethinkDB here my personal thought is it fails the second test ( limited market). It would take some heavy discussion about their eventual plans to monetize the product before thinking about joining the venture.
Got Code?
Google has recruiters on staff who will find you in any number of ways (just maybe they use Google!) They apparently don't use external recruiters for engineers and it's not hard to see why.
you had me at #!
After 15+ years of IT work, I finally said screw it and got a teaching job. My coding skills are good, and yeah, I can program my way out of a paper bag and more. I just don't believe I need to justify my skills to some little 20-something shit just out of college. I get my programming fix by contributing to some open source project and teaching my high school kids what they need to know to survive in the world of IT (including advice, when appropriate, to think about some other line of work). And before you trot out the oh-so-cliche "Those who can't do, teach," I'll just say that I can do both very well. Not to sound too arrogant, but I'd like to think that my self-imposed exile from the IT world is their loss, not mine.
I laugh at the silly interview games people post here. I wonder how many of those asshats who play such games could actually answer their own questions. I suspect very few could.
I posted a few anti-recruiter comics at http://bit.ly/ad3sMh Plug: my automated assessment product is in private beta at http://codeboff.in/. Beta passes available via the blog.
Yes, I've seen places where HR is given a requirements list and does the actual hiring from there on out.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
If you're recruiting programmers, and not football players, then moaning about people only being competent seems incredibly pretentious.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it