8 ms·

I sometimes think there's a built in pomposity in the whole attitude of hiring, looking for someone "good enough to qualify." Instead, I like to think of it as,

by mbrock 11y ago

I sometimes think there's a built in pomposity in the whole attitude of hiring, looking for someone "good enough to qualify." Instead, I like to think of it as, we are looking for someone to help us, someone who has different experience and knowledge, someone who could tell us how we can improve. Then instead of this adversarial situation of selecting a new ingroup member, it's a solicitation for assistance with a built in humility.

mooreds 11y ago
Appreciate the humanization of both job candidates and employers inherent in the shift you advocate. I have done a bit of hiring and it was very hard to walk the line between effective use of my time and being open to people with all kinds of experience. (It was a junior position and I talked to some very junior candidates.) But it is always important to remember that there is a human being on both sides of the table.
- J-dawg 11y ago
  Could you expand on how you ended up walking that line? Did you feel you wasted your time on under-qualified people? Did you end up hiring anyone who initially didn't seem like a textbook candidate? If so, how did they turn out? The reason I ask is that I've always been nervous about applying for jobs when I don't have every skill listed on the ad. The advice I've been given is usually something like "Apply anyway. The job advert is a wish list, not a minimum." But I'm still terrified of an interviewer opening my CV and asking how the hell I slipped through the screening process. Or even worse, being too polite to be so blunt and awkwardly going through the motions of an interview. It would be awesome to get the perspective of an interviewer.
  - lallysingh 11y ago
    I interview tons of candidates. The resume tells me nearly nothing, just what you've worked on before. Not how much, out how well that went. So in terms of some "textbook" model fit, the question is a little silly. Generally few people are really good. And their spread out unpredictably across the landscape, so you have to just interview lots of people to find them.
  - mooreds 11y ago
    Hi. I definitely wasted time interviewing underqualified people. But I wasted time interviewing some overqualified people too (because of salary/location expectations that should have been communicated up front). Actually, all of interviewing feels like wasted time (you have this burning need, and you want to fill it yesterday, or better yet a month ago, and yet you have to go through this process and learn about all these strangers, while the building feels like it is on fire). Note that I said feels like wasted time, not is wasted time. It's a bit like learning a new programming language--you end up going down lots of blind alleys before you find the way you really want to go. (All we could afford was non textbook candidates, and out of 3 hires, 2 worked out.) As far as walking the line, as I got more comfortable interviewing, I always worked off a rubric, and set things up so that I could ease out of a phone interview early if it was clear that they didn't live up to their resume. Ended up doing the same thing with the in person interviews as well. Definitely screened by resume. > I've always been nervous about applying for jobs when I don't have every skill listed on the ad. This is a hard problem because some institutions write wish lists in their job reqs, and some write hard and fast requirements. And you don't know before applying. (And sometimes the goal posts in the organization move when their "requirements" meet the labor market.) Personally, I'd apply if you have half of the requirements and feel like you can speak to the way you learn. If you're interested in the company, I'd also take the extra step and do some work around it, whether that's writing a pain letter ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2015/03/01/how-to-write-your-first-pain-letter/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2015/03/01/how-to-write-... ) or writing a simple client against someone's external API or creeping^Hscanning LinkedIn, Twitter and Github profiles and finding out about the team and company. Good luck!
    - Grishnakh 11y ago
      >But I wasted time interviewing some overqualified people too (because of salary/location expectations that should have been communicated up front). Well that's your own fault as the job advertiser, and when I say "you", I mean almost all companies that advertise jobs. You almost never state the salaries to be paid, so tons of peoples' time gets wasted by pointless interviewing which gets followed up with insultingly low salary offers. If you're a cheap-ass and want to pay a pathetic salary, you should state this in your job ad, so that non-deadwood people don't bother to apply to your job. >This is a hard problem because some institutions write wish lists in their job reqs, and some write hard and fast requirements. It's not that hard to tell the difference. When the word "required" is used, that sounds like a requirement to me. When a separate list is preceded by "nice to have", "plusses", etc., those are obviously skills that the company would like to have in a candidate, but are not hard-and-fast requirements. If the company is so stupid they can't write a simple job advertisement this way, and they use the word "requirements" or "required" when they really meant "nice to have", then they don't deserve any employees at all.
- mbrock 11y ago
  Well, and I always make sure to run a quick Voight-Kampff just to screen out the replicants before the real interview.
Spearchucker 11y ago
"...we are looking for someone to help us,..." This is exactly what I look for when I interview for a new job. It's inclusive, shows humility and a willingness to learn through others' experience. Any other attitude belies an employer that's arrogant at best, and at worst nurtures a narcissistic blame culture.
cubano 11y ago
> I sometimes think there's a built in pomposity in the whole attitude of hiring... Of course there is. At a basic level, that's what hiring is. With this now-popular attitude that "1 bad hire is worse then 100 good ones" or something like that, how could it be anything else? Imagine the pressure that puts on the hiring teams.
- dexterdog 11y ago
  There is not a hiring team out there that even bats 90% let alone 99. The problem is that they significantly hinder their ability to get stuff done when they spend too much of their time in vetting/hiring mode. I've been there and it's no fun at all.
  - p4wnc6 11y ago
    But this is required for the hiring staff to give the appearance of being important and needed within the company. If managers really understood how effectively non-management engineers can find and hire acceptable candidates when you remove the bullshit from the process, they would be confronted with the cognitive dissonance of their choice to staff up an army of HR and recruiters and talk all day about "ZOMG how hard it is to hire a good engineer!" and "look out for the toxic worker" and other such drivel.
- OJFord 11y ago
  > "1 bad hire is worse then 100 good ones" I don't think that's quite right! (Or at least, it's so obviously right that it can't possibly be the "now-popular attitude" you mean.)
  - phpnode 11y ago
    I think cubano is referring to the mindset that "it's better to skip over 100 good people than to hire one bad apple" which is very silly but a common attitude in certain kinds of organisation.
    - 11y ago
vlunkr 11y ago
That makes sense, after all, you're going to be paying them, not giving them an award.
Spooky23 11y ago
That approach makes a lot of sense to me. If you can actually manage people, filtering for "not dumb" is usually sufficient to get the desired result. Most companies demonstrate this with H1 contractor hiring. They usually don't bother with the cool kids club screening in those situations. One of the smartest people I ever worked with had a degree in Chemical Engineering from some mid-tier university in India that I never heard of. That guy would never get hired as a FTE at that company, because he didn't drink and didn't have the cultural "fit" nonsense.
Bahamut 11y ago
When I interview candidates, the make or break question for me is does the person possess critical thinking skills? Various things may point one way or another for this, but it is a mistake to assume [insert working at a particular company] is an indication that someone has to have the skills, as well as to assume someone not having [insert pet qualification] is an indication that someone does not have these skills. Sadly, there is a severe lack of this skill applied in our profession, and it is probably the costliest common mistake I see.
- walterbell 11y ago
  Any pointers on assessing critical thinking skills during an interview, e.g. with or without technically focused questions?
- im_down_w_otp 11y ago
  I would be interested to know how you're assessing for "critical thinking skills".
  - beachstartup 11y ago
    instead of asking them stupid, verbatim-recall questions, i give them a problem and ask them how they would solve it. i.e., "a customer reports his website is running too slow. describe how you would identify and solve the problem." it's a good sign when they start asking you follow-up questions, like "is it load balanced? is there a database?". it's a bad sign when they say, "just restart the server".
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      I got asked "what happens when you hit return in the browser?" After I had traced from the keyboard driver through libraries and runtimes to the browser event system, then back down thru the network layers to sockets, then thru IP events to land a packet on the remote router, they called a halt. Apparently nobody had actually answered the question before. IMO Its a good exercise for problem-solving, and plumbs experience and terminology. I'm not so sure you learn anything about the subject's actual programming skills?
dominotw 11y ago
>it's a solicitation for assistance with a built in humility. Thank you for bringing this up. No matter how good or bad a candidate is, that person is your social equal and deserves basic respect. I feel strongly about this ever since the humiliation I faced at AirBnb, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11291155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11291155 This could happen to anyone.
- wehadfun 11y ago
  I just read that. Dam.
- dclowd9901 11y ago
  Wow I had a similarly perplexing and bad experience interviewing there. It was for a UI Engineer position. I did very well on all of my technical coding challenges, with the exception of an algorithm question, which I still managed to complete once the interviewer pointed me in the right direction. I was later told that while everyone really liked my culture fit for the company one of the interviewers with whom I sailed through the challenge thought I did mediocre, and the algo question asked said I "really struggled". It was pretty devastating but I just chocked it up to me needing to dig in and study harder.
HelloMcFly 11y ago
When I interview, I start with a description of the couple of team members they'll be working most closely with, for, or leading. After that, I like to ask "With your limited understanding of where we're strong right now, what do you think your biggest contribution to our team will be? what will we learn from you?" I've not done any validation studies on the answer, but it's certainly the question that has led to the best conversation.
dclowd9901 11y ago
Yeah, definitely. I never felt more like the Mike of the story than I did interviewing at Airbnb. Every interviewer was fresh out of school, very smart, fashionable and attractive and definitely wanted to prove something. Despite doing rather well and scoring exceptionally well on personality, I was still passed on, and it's hard to shake the feeling that maybe it was because I wasn't a hipster. They just had this air of superiority the whole time.

by mbrock 11y ago

mooreds 11y ago

Appreciate the humanization of both job candidates and employers inherent in the shift you advocate. I have done a bit of hiring and it was very hard to walk the line between effective use of my time and being open to people with all kinds of experience. (It was a junior position and I talked to some very junior candidates.) But it is always important to remember that there is a human being on both sides of the table.

J-dawg 11y ago
Could you expand on how you ended up walking that line? Did you feel you wasted your time on under-qualified people? Did you end up hiring anyone who initially didn't seem like a textbook candidate? If so, how did they turn out? The reason I ask is that I've always been nervous about applying for jobs when I don't have every skill listed on the ad. The advice I've been given is usually something like "Apply anyway. The job advert is a wish list, not a minimum." But I'm still terrified of an interviewer opening my CV and asking how the hell I slipped through the screening process. Or even worse, being too polite to be so blunt and awkwardly going through the motions of an interview. It would be awesome to get the perspective of an interviewer.
- lallysingh 11y ago
  I interview tons of candidates. The resume tells me nearly nothing, just what you've worked on before. Not how much, out how well that went. So in terms of some "textbook" model fit, the question is a little silly. Generally few people are really good. And their spread out unpredictably across the landscape, so you have to just interview lots of people to find them.
- mooreds 11y ago
  Hi. I definitely wasted time interviewing underqualified people. But I wasted time interviewing some overqualified people too (because of salary/location expectations that should have been communicated up front). Actually, all of interviewing feels like wasted time (you have this burning need, and you want to fill it yesterday, or better yet a month ago, and yet you have to go through this process and learn about all these strangers, while the building feels like it is on fire). Note that I said feels like wasted time, not is wasted time. It's a bit like learning a new programming language--you end up going down lots of blind alleys before you find the way you really want to go. (All we could afford was non textbook candidates, and out of 3 hires, 2 worked out.) As far as walking the line, as I got more comfortable interviewing, I always worked off a rubric, and set things up so that I could ease out of a phone interview early if it was clear that they didn't live up to their resume. Ended up doing the same thing with the in person interviews as well. Definitely screened by resume. > I've always been nervous about applying for jobs when I don't have every skill listed on the ad. This is a hard problem because some institutions write wish lists in their job reqs, and some write hard and fast requirements. And you don't know before applying. (And sometimes the goal posts in the organization move when their "requirements" meet the labor market.) Personally, I'd apply if you have half of the requirements and feel like you can speak to the way you learn. If you're interested in the company, I'd also take the extra step and do some work around it, whether that's writing a pain letter ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2015/03/01/how-to-write-your-first-pain-letter/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2015/03/01/how-to-write-... ) or writing a simple client against someone's external API or creeping^Hscanning LinkedIn, Twitter and Github profiles and finding out about the team and company. Good luck!
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    >But I wasted time interviewing some overqualified people too (because of salary/location expectations that should have been communicated up front). Well that's your own fault as the job advertiser, and when I say "you", I mean almost all companies that advertise jobs. You almost never state the salaries to be paid, so tons of peoples' time gets wasted by pointless interviewing which gets followed up with insultingly low salary offers. If you're a cheap-ass and want to pay a pathetic salary, you should state this in your job ad, so that non-deadwood people don't bother to apply to your job. >This is a hard problem because some institutions write wish lists in their job reqs, and some write hard and fast requirements. It's not that hard to tell the difference. When the word "required" is used, that sounds like a requirement to me. When a separate list is preceded by "nice to have", "plusses", etc., those are obviously skills that the company would like to have in a candidate, but are not hard-and-fast requirements. If the company is so stupid they can't write a simple job advertisement this way, and they use the word "requirements" or "required" when they really meant "nice to have", then they don't deserve any employees at all.
mbrock 11y ago
Well, and I always make sure to run a quick Voight-Kampff just to screen out the replicants before the real interview.

Spearchucker 11y ago

"...we are looking for someone to help us,..." This is exactly what I look for when I interview for a new job. It's inclusive, shows humility and a willingness to learn through others' experience. Any other attitude belies an employer that's arrogant at best, and at worst nurtures a narcissistic blame culture.

cubano 11y ago

> I sometimes think there's a built in pomposity in the whole attitude of hiring... Of course there is. At a basic level, that's what hiring is. With this now-popular attitude that "1 bad hire is worse then 100 good ones" or something like that, how could it be anything else? Imagine the pressure that puts on the hiring teams.

dexterdog 11y ago
There is not a hiring team out there that even bats 90% let alone 99. The problem is that they significantly hinder their ability to get stuff done when they spend too much of their time in vetting/hiring mode. I've been there and it's no fun at all.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  But this is required for the hiring staff to give the appearance of being important and needed within the company. If managers really understood how effectively non-management engineers can find and hire acceptable candidates when you remove the bullshit from the process, they would be confronted with the cognitive dissonance of their choice to staff up an army of HR and recruiters and talk all day about "ZOMG how hard it is to hire a good engineer!" and "look out for the toxic worker" and other such drivel.
OJFord 11y ago
> "1 bad hire is worse then 100 good ones" I don't think that's quite right! (Or at least, it's so obviously right that it can't possibly be the "now-popular attitude" you mean.)
- phpnode 11y ago
  I think cubano is referring to the mindset that "it's better to skip over 100 good people than to hire one bad apple" which is very silly but a common attitude in certain kinds of organisation.
  - 11y ago

vlunkr 11y ago

That makes sense, after all, you're going to be paying them, not giving them an award.

Spooky23 11y ago

That approach makes a lot of sense to me. If you can actually manage people, filtering for "not dumb" is usually sufficient to get the desired result. Most companies demonstrate this with H1 contractor hiring. They usually don't bother with the cool kids club screening in those situations. One of the smartest people I ever worked with had a degree in Chemical Engineering from some mid-tier university in India that I never heard of. That guy would never get hired as a FTE at that company, because he didn't drink and didn't have the cultural "fit" nonsense.

Bahamut 11y ago

When I interview candidates, the make or break question for me is does the person possess critical thinking skills? Various things may point one way or another for this, but it is a mistake to assume [insert working at a particular company] is an indication that someone has to have the skills, as well as to assume someone not having [insert pet qualification] is an indication that someone does not have these skills. Sadly, there is a severe lack of this skill applied in our profession, and it is probably the costliest common mistake I see.

walterbell 11y ago
Any pointers on assessing critical thinking skills during an interview, e.g. with or without technically focused questions?
im_down_w_otp 11y ago
I would be interested to know how you're assessing for "critical thinking skills".
- beachstartup 11y ago
  instead of asking them stupid, verbatim-recall questions, i give them a problem and ask them how they would solve it. i.e., "a customer reports his website is running too slow. describe how you would identify and solve the problem." it's a good sign when they start asking you follow-up questions, like "is it load balanced? is there a database?". it's a bad sign when they say, "just restart the server".
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    I got asked "what happens when you hit return in the browser?" After I had traced from the keyboard driver through libraries and runtimes to the browser event system, then back down thru the network layers to sockets, then thru IP events to land a packet on the remote router, they called a halt. Apparently nobody had actually answered the question before. IMO Its a good exercise for problem-solving, and plumbs experience and terminology. I'm not so sure you learn anything about the subject's actual programming skills?

dominotw 11y ago

>it's a solicitation for assistance with a built in humility. Thank you for bringing this up. No matter how good or bad a candidate is, that person is your social equal and deserves basic respect. I feel strongly about this ever since the humiliation I faced at AirBnb, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11291155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11291155 This could happen to anyone.

wehadfun 11y ago
I just read that. Dam.
dclowd9901 11y ago
Wow I had a similarly perplexing and bad experience interviewing there. It was for a UI Engineer position. I did very well on all of my technical coding challenges, with the exception of an algorithm question, which I still managed to complete once the interviewer pointed me in the right direction. I was later told that while everyone really liked my culture fit for the company one of the interviewers with whom I sailed through the challenge thought I did mediocre, and the algo question asked said I "really struggled". It was pretty devastating but I just chocked it up to me needing to dig in and study harder.

HelloMcFly 11y ago

When I interview, I start with a description of the couple of team members they'll be working most closely with, for, or leading. After that, I like to ask "With your limited understanding of where we're strong right now, what do you think your biggest contribution to our team will be? what will we learn from you?" I've not done any validation studies on the answer, but it's certainly the question that has led to the best conversation.

dclowd9901 11y ago

Yeah, definitely. I never felt more like the Mike of the story than I did interviewing at Airbnb. Every interviewer was fresh out of school, very smart, fashionable and attractive and definitely wanted to prove something. Despite doing rather well and scoring exceptionally well on personality, I was still passed on, and it's hard to shake the feeling that maybe it was because I wasn't a hipster. They just had this air of superiority the whole time.