Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, they do seem to be able to recognize when people are not the right fit during that four hour interview. Their whole story is that they are finding that everyone they do interview that way are people they don't want to hire. The problem is, this is inefficient considering the glut of programmers below the level they want. The article is about finding alternatives to this process where this glut can be avoided. Maybe better phone screen skills might have done so? But they seem to think there is success in going to the source, where the good programmers are known to hang out. Of course, the big problem there is most of them don't want a new job.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.
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.
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.