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."

Comments

Personally I think recruiters are worthless

[Sycraft-fu]

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."

Re:Personally I think recruiters are worthless

[tomhudson]

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.

Re:More companies should follow RethinkDB approach

[afidel]

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.

Google does that

[Animats]

Google did that in their glory years. I've been contacted by Google recruiting because of posts I made on comp.lang.c++.

Re:More companies should follow RethinkDB approach

[houghi]

HR's the only one with the buzzword matching filter, and lord help any IT department that lets HR do the actual hiring!

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?

And you should be, because we must tell lies

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The flaw with this approach

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The flaw with this approach

[tomhath]

It apparently has never occurred to him that top people probably don't want to work there

This seems to be the heart of his problem, although I don't think it's for the reasons you list. He wants experienced database internals programmers who hate SQL, know LISP, and can modify the LINUX kernel. He boasts about getting a whopping $1.25M in funding for 2010. No market for his product and no sales. Those should be huge red flags for anyone with experience in the field (if such a person exists).

Well I don't really consider Linkedin personal

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Trade one BS method for another?

[Jane Q. Public]

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.

Re:Newsflash - job agencies are jokers

[David Gerard]

"In a previous job I once got change control approval to clad my entire building in two foot thick lead to prevent ram parity errors."

And you didn't go through with it? A schoolboy error!

That's why you need automated candidate testing

[helarno]

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.