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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."
Google did that in their glory years. I've been contacted by Google recruiting because of posts I made on comp.lang.c++.
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.
My mom ran a very profitable business for about 20 years, from before I was born until I was 16 or so.
When I was 16 my parents got a divorce, long story short, my dad was to blame.
She had a hell of a time finding a new job, because the only job she'd ever had since highschool was as the office manager for her own business. At times they'd had up to 10 employees, she did all the payroll, bid on jobs, everything on the office with the help of one secretary, etc etc.
No one wants to hire someone when they can't verify their employment. She finally found a job (which was was laid off from 2 years ago) as a phone answerer / secretary for a small business. Took her forever to even find that.
Linkedin should be that better process. Sadly people give out recommendations like confetti. I've worked with a sociopath and a lazy slimeball ( two people ) who both got good recommendations on there.
I think there is even a negative correlation between the number of recommendations people have on LinkedIn and their actual competence.
Of the persons I know on LinkedIn, those who have many recommendations are mostly 1) those looking for a job 2) the incompetent ones.
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.
The rockstar programmer is not dead. They are just working for someone else right now. The conventional job hunt is not the way to find them, for the most part. When they do lose a job (because the company's financial people fail, for example), they usually have contacts in place and can latch a new job quickly. Those that don't have such contacts might build them online. Open source projects are one of the places (though RethinkDB might be working way to narrow with just a couple places). Hopefully, they will be approaching this less as a quick-hire place, and more as a build-contact place. They might well find the rockstar there today, that they can hire two years from now.
But I can understand the want to hire the top-talented core people, often just two or three of them, who will then be surrounded by a team of twenty to forty eager beaver programmers who can at least understand new concepts, even if they are not seasoned enough to create them on their own. It seems to me RethinkDB is trying to do this, but doesn't realize it actually is very hard to do.
California itself is problematic. It's perceived as the go-to place for tech jobs. So everyone that wants one goes there. That's why it has both a surplus and a shortage at the same time. It's being diluted by the lower 50%. Once they can spread out and hire people from other locations, they'll find out where those lower-end programmers moved away from. Top-level talent doesn't need to move and it will exist in its small proportion everywhere.
FYI, I've turned down a job at more than double the pay these guys are offering, just because it was in California. I would have taken it if I could have telecommuted and visited in person three or four times a year for a week each. If they were hiring within 100km of me, or in any of the places I'd be happy to move to, then I'd send them a resume and see if they will still look at those.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I need to reply out of order for this to work out...
I don't see how the inability to get a job or find qualified people, is on the recruiter, or why all the headhunter hate in general.
Out of hundreds of contacts (I know some of you have had thousands, but apparently I'm just this guy) I've had only a couple of invitations to apply that actually matched the skillset on my publicly posted resume. From managers I know who have done hiring from a recuiters' pool of applicants, I know that most of the applicants delivered by headhunters are clearly and obviously unqualified for the positions for which they are presented.
I'm not sure how getting me interviews with places I might want to work, for people who might want to hire me == lack of integrity.
Simply, it is because most of the time they're interviews with places you don't want to work (they were clueless enough to try to hire you via headhunter) and most of the time they don't want to hire you because most of the applicants are not matches for the positions (which is why it's clueless to try to hire via headhunter.) This is not to say that there's nobody good out there, of course. Exceptions, however, prove the rule.
"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.
All that is well and good, but it ignores my key point - the vast majority of IT failures have nothing to do with people's technical skills, but management's failure to communicate. Technical skills can be acquired (and when you're developing new technology, obviously it's the only way to go, since there is no prior art, etc.) - communications skills, obviously not so easily.
The use of extensive testing is an easy way to cover up for the lack of a proper way to assess the more important aspect - is the person a good communicator? Not in the "marketing/powerpoint/bs" fashion, but can they take a concept and teach it to someone else on the team?
Stick them in front of a whiteboard and have them give a talk about something. Did you understand it? If so, they've demonstrated 4 things - that they know it, that they know it well enough to explain it to others, and that others can understand their style of communicating, and that they also know how to listen (more on that in a sec).
15 minutes to a half-hour should be all that's needed. If they wash out on communications skills, then it doesn't matter how hot-shot prima donna they are with code. If they're good communicators, they got that way by listening to others, and adapting their "pitch" to the abilities of their audience.
It's a simple test, with a simple pass/fail standard - did you understand what they were talking about? If they bored the crap out of you, they're a poor communicator. If they kept having to pause for 15 seconds to 1 minute to "fill the pipeline", they're not really on top of the subject matter, so you've also eliminated the "BS-ers".
You also get to see if they're really enthusiastic about what they do, or if it's just a job, so you cover the "desperate for a job" motivation as well - someone who's enthusiastic will easily be able to go beyond the 15-30 minutes. It also lets you see if anyone else in the room is not going to be a good fit, personality-wise, during any Q and A. Do they get into a "pissing match?" If so, who started it, and how did the other person handle it? (You might want to have a "plant" for doing exactly that).
Of course, this is just too simple and obvious, just like using two screens is a simple and obvious way to improve productivity, from secretaries to coders and everyone else, but most companies won't do it.
Fear. They'd rather trust in some mythical scores so that if it doesn't work out they can CYA by saying "the checkboxes looked good." Do we pick our other relationships like that? I hope not - and work is just as much a relationship as any other.
In other words, come in one afternoon or evening a week, or on a weekend, and sit in on the interviews, then give your opinion on the pros and cons of the candidate.
Certainly a lot better than anything that a recruiting agency will do, and cheaper in the long run.