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Don’t “Hire by Keyword”

186 points by SeanDav 10y ago

iopq 10y ago
As a PHP programmer, I picked up Node.js really quickly. I mean, sure, I already knew JavaScript, but Node is a very different ecosystem and has its own tools. After a week I was already productive and after a month I was already bored with it. I bet I could be a perfectly fine RoR developer, given a little bit of time. I don't know Ruby, but I pick up languages quickly. Or, I mean, you could just keep the position open for a few months and just screen for keywords. It's really your choice.
- Spoom 10y ago
  The problem that I see is that employers don't want to spend the time to train people, or even wait for them to train themselves. They figure, if they can get someone who can hit the ground running, why would they waste time waiting for someone like you who needs to learn the language, regardless of how long it actually takes?
  - GoToRO 10y ago
    so true. Of course they wait 3 months maybe to hire somebody expensive vs. hiring someone smart that can do a very good job after one month.
    - logfromblammo 10y ago
      It never fails to amuse me to see job advertisements that state "hit the ground running" that have been up for more than a month. It especially amuses me when the critical skill keyword, paired with "developer" or "engineer", surveys above median pay for "software developer" or "software engineer". They are literally searching harder and waiting longer, to pay more for a narrower skill set. Good luck finding that "javascript applications developer" or "ruby on rails engineer" or "SPARK/RTEMS engineer", guys. If you needed someone to be productive today, all you had to do would have been to hire them last month and give them a $200 book budget.
  - shubhamjain 10y ago
    Considering the amount of interviews it takes to hire "the one", I guess the better bet is to hire quick learners who have the enthusiasm. How much time will it take to be an average RoR developer? One month? Two months tops! I know someone who was hired without any substantial background in HTML or CSS, and as of now, after three years, he knows enough to be able to speak at a major CSS conference.
  - danielweber 10y ago
    If you are going to have them on your team for 3 years, do the first two weeks matter? Where I work the first two weeks are explicitly training. You will not contribute to the bottom line at all, even if you are an expert already. And sometimes this feels like not enough.
  - quantumhobbit 10y ago
    What they don't realize is that they it takes longer to find the perfect candidate than to train a good enough candidate. It might take a month or so to train someone on whatever web framework if they have similar experience. Yet the position could stay unfilled for six months or more waiting for that perfect candidate.
    - vonmoltke 10y ago
      You have identified one reason we have a "talent shortage".
  - wyclif 10y ago
    When I've asked why tech employers don't want to train people in the past, the prevailing answer was always that they didn't want other companies to get the benefit of the investment when they poach. This was what was behind the anti-competitive suit brought against Google, Apple, Adobe, etc
- onion2k 10y ago
  As a PHP programmer, I picked up Node.js really quickly. Every PHP developer who I've seen pick up a nodejs project has end up fighting against asynchronous code and promises. You're fortunate that you were able to grok that aspect of node easily.
  - arenaninja 10y ago
    The thing is, that's pretty much what JavaScript is. Callbacks, promises, closures and async. If you already figured out that while working with Frontend Javascript the transition to Node is pain-free. But I can see how, if you're a PHP-only developer you would suffer.
  - iopq 10y ago
    I had to deal with asynchronous code when working with client-side JavaScript, it wasn't a new thing for me. If anything, I expect Ruby to be a little nicer if I have to work with RoR. But I probably won't because everyone wants 10 years of RoR experience nowadays.
rickcusick 10y ago
Excellent article. Especially love the call outs on "must have 5 years experience using {technology ABC}" when it's only been around for 5 years.
- softawre 10y ago
  Sometimes you want to hire the creator of such technology. ;)
wassuup 10y ago
In my opinion, the many emphasized words make this post difficult to read.
- imron 10y ago
  Yep. I was going to make the same comment.
noxToken 10y ago
I think the author's message is spot on, but I disagree with some of the details. Mainly: > Industry experience is often a negative, not a positive I can see why someone would say this. If you looking to innovate, you don't want employees always saying, "This is just the way we've always done it." At the same time, people with industry experience can avoid novice pitfalls. Also, I cannot stand all the emphasized keywords. I get why he did it, but it's so jarring to read.
- Clubber 10y ago
  I agree. What I suspect vision founders don't want to hear is that everything that can be done up to this point has already been done. Perhaps not the whole, but the pieces certainly. They don't like this idea because they want to believe their idea is new and groundbreaking. It may very well be, but the pieces aren't. That's where experience comes in.
  - inlined 10y ago
    And "avoiding industry experience" is a convenient excuse for ageism.
    - blakesterz 10y ago
      There's really great things about being 25. There's really great things about being 45. There's also things that suck about being 25 or 45. One of the things that suck about being 25 is KNOWING that being 45 means you're old and you don't know a damn thing. KNOWING that some 45 year old fart will just get in the way because they're slow and only know Perl. Hell, when you're 25 you simply KNOW so much. Then one day you wake up and you're 45 and you realize that even now you don't know a damn thing. I guess you're right, it's ageism, but it's also just being 25 and being so sure of everything that you couldn't possibly learn anything from "industry experience".
      - thatfrenchguy 10y ago
        "KNOWING that some 45 year old fart will just get in the way because they're slow and only know Perl" This is such a horrible misconception that I think you've never worked with senior people in your life.
designium 10y ago
Finally, someone who also thinks in a sensible way on hiring. In Toronto, I keep seeing all these job posting of companies that need people with 10 years in social media experience, or 10 years in mobile app development and it's quite laughable how they are able to hire those people. I'm curious how those people can actually perform.
- IndianAstronaut 10y ago
  Fake resumes. Indian tech shops specialize in this (I'm Indian btw). Fake resumes are extremely common among Indian tech workers. I was asked by one IT body shop to write 7 years of Java experience even though I had none. I routinely run into resumes where people sometimes write more years of experience with a package than the number of years the package has existed.
  - dasboth 10y ago
    I'm interested in how that kind of thing prevails. Is it because the purpose of the lie is just to get past HR screening, and after that competent people just learn the language they lied about on their CV? I can't imagine that would work though, I mean how does someone get past a technical interview with a fake CV?
    - logfromblammo 10y ago
      That will get you a job in the short term, but isn't great for a career that will last until retirement. But as far as I can tell, the candidate crams for the tech screen, learns the basics between offer letter and start date, and picks up the rest as they work. The dirty little secret is that nobody actually needs any specific experience to do the job. You just need a decent brain and an Internet connection, and just enough people skills to fake it until you make it. But it probably works better in larger organizations, where none of the people who would be able to detect the deception are involved in the interview process. You don't need to fool your peers if you can fool your boss. It never would have worked in any of the smaller companies that I have interviewed with, as they have all (perhaps coincidentally) been ultra-paranoid about resume frauds, for some reason.
dkopi 10y ago
THIS. After learning a few languages and paradigms, I find that I often have a 2 week ramp up for any given programming language. If you already know Java and Javascript, you'll get Scala / Kotlin in no time. If you're experienced in Python and Django, RoR is a few weeks away. If you're experienced in C++ and Python, it won't take long until you're good to Go. I get that companies want someone who's productive from Day 1, but they're missing out on a lot of great candidates that might only be productive from Day 15, but they'll be a lot more productive over time.
- GVIrish 10y ago
  The silly thing about companies being so obstinate about hiring someone with experience in the exact stack they use is that often times job reqs go unfilled for many weeks or even months. The result is that they end up wasting a lot more time with an unfilled position than if they had just hired that person who needed 2 weeks or so to ramp up.
  - wyclif 10y ago
    Letting a developer or engineering job go unfilled for months is nothing, at least in my experience. I've seen a lot of jobs go unfilled for years while the company tried to find a unicorn to fill it, while at the same time priding themselves for being so picky and demanding excessive levels of experience, "full stack" experience, and "culture fit."
- bsbechtel 10y ago
  I wonder if part of this is because of pressure from investors. I heard an investor once comment about how they don't want to pay for a team to learn on the job, which I found ironic given the VC space implicitly invests in innovation, which is creating new opportunities that have lots of unknowns.
- notyourloops 10y ago
  So what is suggested for developers running into this situation? Not all of us live in dense, major cities where it's easier to find a cross-section of all stacks, but most of us with experience can ramp up into a new stack based on similar paradigms we already use regularly.
vthallam 10y ago
I agree to the article in general. But most of the keywords in job description are put up to set some expectations or if you have a project that needs people who already know things.
avip 10y ago
Altogether nice article, excluding the sad appearance of "cultural fit" as hiring criteria. Cultural fit, begone.
notyourloops 10y ago
Do they actually end up hiring based on the criteria in their postings? I often find that the typical listing is unreasonable. Who actually gets the job? Is it worth applying to anyway?
- ssharp 10y ago
  In my experience, I've seen direct hiring tends to focus less on "x years of experience" but recruiters, especially larger firms with junior staff doing screening, is absolutely terrible with obsessing over it.
  - johnward 10y ago
    Some postings go way overboard on skillset. You must be a master at everything. I've heard that this is done sometimes so that they can't find the talent locally and then can outsource for that specific role. Some recruiters, not all, are basically no better than a robot. I don't have a B.S. but I have an A.S. plus 10 years of experience now. Give a recruiter a req of "B.S. or equivalent experience" and they will turn me away without a phone call because I don't have the degree. When 10 minutes on the phone is all I would need to convince them I have the experience they need. I've basically given up on interviews for awhile. It drains so much energy just to get canned responses back.
cgearhart 10y ago
This is an example of an article that does a great job of identifying the problem (seriously -- I think it's great), but it has limited impact because it doesn't offer concrete steps towards a solution. It is hard to interview for intangible keywords -- how does the choice of keyword change that? Is the advice here just to take risk in hiring? That's not going to be received well...it can be just as damaging to make a bad hire for non-technical factors as technical ones, and I suspect this is why so many companies rely on terrible technical interviews. The broken part of tech interviews isn't that they ask technical questions, it's that no one on the hiring side looks at their process and asks "what is it that this part of our process is measuring?" and "does that factor matter in making a hiring decision?" Asking brain teasers and CS "fundamental" questions is fine as long as there is a good answer to those two questions, but instead everyone does cargo-cult interviews because Medium says that's how Big Tech does hiring.
- stinkytaco 10y ago
  I think in any field it's important to decide on the desired answer (from what traits and skills you need), then build the question. We use a scoring system (1-4) in our case and for each question the interviewer has several general bullet points the interviewee ought to be hitting on. For a simple example, if we're hiring for a desktop tech, we might ask what steps you take when troubleshooting an individual who claims their PC is slow. The desired answers might be: determine scope of problem (how often, how slow, is it affecting work duties), determine specific triggers, check PC for known issues (spyware, virus, etc), research, attempt resolution. We don't expect exact wording or even total coverage, but at least everyone is on the same page in terms of expectations. This has proven to be a very effective way of getting quality people into positions at a variety of levels. EDIT: Side note, we also generally build the interview questions, then write the ad. Since we already know the answers we want, the ad comes fairly naturally from that.
  - csydas 10y ago
    Though I've been hiring for much smaller institutions, I can attest that this is a common problem for virtually all hiring processes: > I think in any field it's important to decide on the desired answer (from what traits and skills you need), then build the question. My previous job liked to hire by committee that was created by randomly selecting employees to participate with hiring. (already a mistake) Even though these included the department head actually hiring, we'd often find that most of the time in meetings was spent asking or telling each other what was "really" necessary for the job, since even if we had a solid job description and list of wants, the committee members would squable since the jobs were allowed to be too flexible. When it came time to design questions, we would run into the same problem each time: We were more focused on "good questions" than deciding what we really wanted the answer to be and designing questions around it. This often resulted in really poor interviews where we let applicants just talk their way through any of our concerns because there was no concrete idea of what we were looking for. I think in general this tends to be an issue with employers who have difficulty with hiring - they are not good at articulating their wants beyond "we need a web developer" or "database admin" - undoubtedly it's managers who were told "don't get too specific with your wishlist", the idea being to prevent job postings with absurd requirements, but it's swung too far in the opposite direction in many cases with employers relying exclusively on keywords as indicators of success. ("They know X language and have worked with Y hardware - they're perfect") The hard truth is that even though hiring sucks and can take forever if you're not careful, it's worth taking the extra prep time to ensure you have a clear idea of the type of hire you want. Anything less is a disservice to your company, your employees, your customers, and your new hire. The HR hatchets are generally not useful either, as they're too broad sweeping and the same tools that weed out the absolutely unqualified also end up weeding out those who haven't jammed the right keywords into their resume. Neither ends up getting you what you want; while it's shitty to have to read potentially dozens or hundreds of resumes, if you're struggling to fill positions with good people, it's a necessity.
kbart 10y ago
The author is mocking keyword stuffing, but promoting "cultural fit" as "more impactful keyword". Sorry, but replacing technical keywords with some vague buzzwords does not improve your ads.
- rejschaap 10y ago
  I think the wording is a bit unfortunate. I'm sure he doesn't mean you scan resume's for keywords like team player, communication, cultural fit, etc. Instead you should focus on these skills during the interview process, more than specific technologies or previous employers. As others have said, the article identifies a big problem in hiring. However, it doesn't give you a lot of handles to solve anything.
  - kbart 10y ago
    So what is "cultural fit" then? If one didn't wear skinny jeans and don't enjoy playing foosball, he's out of luck? "Cultural fit" is one of the most offputting keyword for me, because as far as I've seen, it has one of two negative meanings: a) there's a monoculture inside company (usually "hipsters"). b) they creating a bubble around them and do not accept any other attitude than fanatically following their idea(s) which often leads to another overhyped bullshit-that-nobody-needs.
    - ysavir 10y ago
      Being a "cultural fit" just means that the person will fit in well with the process and people at a company. Whether the "culture" in question is a specific type of culture is irrelevant. If you approach it from that perspective, you're probably taking the term at face value and missing the point. The idea being expressed here is that if you bring in a new employee, even one that has no previous experience with the technologies being used, they will perform best if they are naturally in tune with the company's ideals and methodology, and can quickly develop camaraderie with the existing crew. On the other hand, if you hire someone that knows all the necessary tech, but is constantly at odds with how things are done, alienates their coworkers, or manages to clog up the process in other ways--in those scenarios, everyone loses. It has nothing to do with a cultural hive mind; it's just a matter of keeping a team synchronized and efficient.
kalleboo 10y ago
Just in case anyone else had trouble concentrating on the article: javascript:document.styleSheets[0].insertRule("strong%20{%20font-weight:%20normal%20}")
Zigurd 10y ago
This is mostly right, but using "cultural fit" as a criterion is the road to "hire people like us," which is as unproductive and keyword-based hiring just in a different way. In fact all the criteria cited in the article as good have significant weaknesses. Even "expertise" need some explanation, since one would hope that's not the keywords listed under "Expertise." Having an applicant write some code and defend they way they did it, and/or bring some code they wrote, would be a much better gauge of expertise.
ccozan 10y ago
Exactly my train of thoughts. I cringe when a recruiter wants to know which language I program in and he/she does not get it immediatelly when I reply "any that you like" or "what ever the customer wants". Keyword based job match is however the only automatic solution, all other are to work intensive so that it makes economically sense.
- coldcode 10y ago
  Even worse is keyword technology and version. "I need someone with X version 5.12" kinds of job ads. Really, you intend to avoid upgrading for the rest of time?
  - DanielDent 10y ago
    There exist job ads which have the explicit purpose of not finding a qualified candidate. It tends to be a result of things like H1-B visas, union contracts, and other frameworks which provide 'first dibs' on an opportunity to a subset of the global labour pool.
  - collyw 10y ago
    I remember visiting a recruitment consultant after University in the dot com bust of 2001. He told me to add Oracle version numbers to my CV as "Techies love that".
ed_blackburn 10y ago
A few years ago I built some .NET components to service a node front end. I used to get so many people contact me about Angular and node contracts. I tweaked my CV to say Microservices instead of components and replaced node with java script SPA and now I get far more relevant enquires from agents.
GoToRO 10y ago
The truth is that those kind of companies have very little money and so they want to hire people that can be productive from day one. Of course this is utopia but that will not stop them.
pyb 10y ago
Everybody knows one shouldn't Hire by Keyword, but they still do it. Why ? I think this is the CYA principle in play. "I hired a $keyword specialist, it clearly says so in his resume. I am limiting any blame I get if they don't work out !"
- hbosch 10y ago
  I've worked at a company where this philosophy was compounded on during the "down" days, where the company I was at was in a sharp decline. When the VPs and execs panicked, they started at the hiring level... They made a plan to "stop hiring junior level" employees, and our team became full of Senior level people. Then they said we need more PhDs... because a PhD is prestigious and we need prestige. There was even a brief mandate to high an industry celebrity type, basically just for show. It all started with a "hiring by keyword" mentality and pretty much led to a massive decay of passion across the entire team.
deleted 10y ago
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diafygi 10y ago
What about hire by questionnaire? We used to ask for resumes only, but we ran into the same issue as OP where qualified candidates wouldn't have key items in their resume, and unqualified candidates would have lots of things but end up failing during the coding interview. So we just started asking people up front what we wanted to know. For example: http://goo.gl/forms/YICrUuz7XNjiTcId2 http://goo.gl/forms/YICrUuz7XNjiTcId2 Here's one of our software engineering forms. It's worked extremely well at filtering for technically qualified candidates. But we worry that we're still missing people because https://imgur.com/RIamYIZ https://imgur.com/RIamYIZ
- dpark 10y ago
  > But we worry that we're still missing people because https://imgur.com/RIamYIZ https://imgur.com/RIamYIZ Eh, that's a pretty reasonable questionnaire. If it was pages and pages, it'd be too much, but there's only 12 questions here (including the citizenship and email address questions) and I'm assuming you don't expect an essay for each of these. Someone who's indignant at the idea of filling this out is probably not worth working with. I have to say, I find the SSH question at the bottom odd. Who is this screening for? Are there people who hit all your other requirements but don't know how to use SSH? Would you actually eliminate someone for this, as opposed to spending 5 minutes introducing them to SSH (or 30 seconds sending them a link)?
- mjevans 10y ago
  My question, seeing a form like that, is what is the resume field actually for? Would the resume be used for the actual screening/selection process, or is it instead just to get all of the other details that might be necessary later in the hiring process as a catch-all?
namelezz 10y ago
I don't think companies are hiring by keyword. It's the clueless tech recruiters filtering out candidates by keyword.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  Perhaps the companies you deal with aren't but non-software companies are pretty bad about it, with non-tech companies being the worst.
alexeiz 10y ago
Bullcrap. Just look at the examples of hires he has in mind: co-founder of a startup, VP of marketing, CEO, "Could Hollywood execs have started Netflix?". This guy is a fly-high investor. Unless you're in a similar position, his advice is useless.
lstamour 10y ago
We should probably add (2012) to the title, I was confused by the comment on social media being "barely 5 years old" until I saw that.
tormeh 10y ago
I think it's weird that the IT industry hires based on technologies you know. It seems much more relevant to hire based on whether you've completed similar kinds of projects to those that will be done at your new workplace. It's like aiming to hire someone to build a high-rise out of wood and going "We need someone who can use a hammer and nail". Not really wrong, but it's kind of an odd emphasis.
segmondy 10y ago
The reality is that resume must be filtered out, either by tech keywords such as "clojure or ruby on rails" or social keywords such as "culture fit or team player". No one hires by keywords, they filter resumes by keywords. If you're smart enough, you will load up your resume with keywords if that's how your target company is filtering resume by. You just want to get to the next base which is getting an interview. How do you get hired after an interview? Some companies will give you tests, puzzle, white board coding, all conversation/culture fit, etc. You likewise have to be a fool not to adjust accordingly. If you want to join Acme corp so bad and they require you wear a suit, wear a freaking suit. If they are laid back and cargo pants and t-shirt will do, you have to be an idiot to go in with a suit. If they are big on whiteboard coding, then practice so and do load's of exercises prior to your interview. game theory 101, people will always look for ways to maximize their outcome.
gedrap 10y ago
The key takeaway, for me, is: * outsiders can bring some fresh thoughts and challenge ideas that everyone inside keep as status quo and unchallenged; * people who define themselves as e.g. 'Ruby on Rails dev' (or JavaScript dev or whatever) might have hard time adapting if the landscape changes, or they need to do something outside their comfort zone; * specific technical skills (programming language, etc) are usually easier to develop than soft skills such as leadership, teamwork, communication. Of course, it's not unconditional. Sometimes you really need someone who has deep knowledge of some niche, or is really a master at some technology. It's just probably not as common as one might believe.
chrisp_dc 10y ago
Devil's advocate: I like it when ads have the technologies as keywords. Preferably listed explicitly & directly. I have arbitrary preferences like Apache Camel v Spring Integration & Ansible v Puppet. I'm not on the market looking, but I do occasionally peak to see if there are dream jobs available on Craigslist/StackOverflow. Even if I can quickly grok the equivalent, I'd get frustrated after a months/years of solving problems using my less preferred stack. The stack can also tell you a lot about the philosophy of the shop: flexibility vs. convention/readability, stability vs. cutting-edge.
spitfire 10y ago
Tokenadult isn't around to chime in here, so I'll take his place today. Hunter and Schmit did a meta-study of 85 years of research on hiring criteria. [1] There are three attributes you need to select for to identify performing employees in intellectual fields. - General mental ability (Are they generally smart) Use WAIS or if there are artifacts of GMA(Complex work they've done themselves) available use them as proxies. - Work sample test. NOT HAZING! As close as possible to the actual work they'd be doing. Try to make it apples-to-apples comparison across candidates. - Integrity. The first two won't matter if the candidate is a sociopath. This alone will get you > 65% hit rate. [1] [1] http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...

186 points by SeanDav 10y ago

iopq 10y ago

As a PHP programmer, I picked up Node.js really quickly. I mean, sure, I already knew JavaScript, but Node is a very different ecosystem and has its own tools. After a week I was already productive and after a month I was already bored with it. I bet I could be a perfectly fine RoR developer, given a little bit of time. I don't know Ruby, but I pick up languages quickly. Or, I mean, you could just keep the position open for a few months and just screen for keywords. It's really your choice.

Spoom 10y ago
The problem that I see is that employers don't want to spend the time to train people, or even wait for them to train themselves. They figure, if they can get someone who can hit the ground running, why would they waste time waiting for someone like you who needs to learn the language, regardless of how long it actually takes?
- GoToRO 10y ago
  so true. Of course they wait 3 months maybe to hire somebody expensive vs. hiring someone smart that can do a very good job after one month.
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    It never fails to amuse me to see job advertisements that state "hit the ground running" that have been up for more than a month. It especially amuses me when the critical skill keyword, paired with "developer" or "engineer", surveys above median pay for "software developer" or "software engineer". They are literally searching harder and waiting longer, to pay more for a narrower skill set. Good luck finding that "javascript applications developer" or "ruby on rails engineer" or "SPARK/RTEMS engineer", guys. If you needed someone to be productive today, all you had to do would have been to hire them last month and give them a $200 book budget.
- shubhamjain 10y ago
  Considering the amount of interviews it takes to hire "the one", I guess the better bet is to hire quick learners who have the enthusiasm. How much time will it take to be an average RoR developer? One month? Two months tops! I know someone who was hired without any substantial background in HTML or CSS, and as of now, after three years, he knows enough to be able to speak at a major CSS conference.
- danielweber 10y ago
  If you are going to have them on your team for 3 years, do the first two weeks matter? Where I work the first two weeks are explicitly training. You will not contribute to the bottom line at all, even if you are an expert already. And sometimes this feels like not enough.
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  What they don't realize is that they it takes longer to find the perfect candidate than to train a good enough candidate. It might take a month or so to train someone on whatever web framework if they have similar experience. Yet the position could stay unfilled for six months or more waiting for that perfect candidate.
  - vonmoltke 10y ago
    You have identified one reason we have a "talent shortage".
- wyclif 10y ago
  When I've asked why tech employers don't want to train people in the past, the prevailing answer was always that they didn't want other companies to get the benefit of the investment when they poach. This was what was behind the anti-competitive suit brought against Google, Apple, Adobe, etc
onion2k 10y ago
As a PHP programmer, I picked up Node.js really quickly. Every PHP developer who I've seen pick up a nodejs project has end up fighting against asynchronous code and promises. You're fortunate that you were able to grok that aspect of node easily.
- arenaninja 10y ago
  The thing is, that's pretty much what JavaScript is. Callbacks, promises, closures and async. If you already figured out that while working with Frontend Javascript the transition to Node is pain-free. But I can see how, if you're a PHP-only developer you would suffer.
- iopq 10y ago
  I had to deal with asynchronous code when working with client-side JavaScript, it wasn't a new thing for me. If anything, I expect Ruby to be a little nicer if I have to work with RoR. But I probably won't because everyone wants 10 years of RoR experience nowadays.

rickcusick 10y ago

Excellent article. Especially love the call outs on "must have 5 years experience using {technology ABC}" when it's only been around for 5 years.

softawre 10y ago
Sometimes you want to hire the creator of such technology. ;)

wassuup 10y ago

In my opinion, the many emphasized words make this post difficult to read.

imron 10y ago
Yep. I was going to make the same comment.

noxToken 10y ago

I think the author's message is spot on, but I disagree with some of the details. Mainly: > Industry experience is often a negative, not a positive I can see why someone would say this. If you looking to innovate, you don't want employees always saying, "This is just the way we've always done it." At the same time, people with industry experience can avoid novice pitfalls. Also, I cannot stand all the emphasized keywords. I get why he did it, but it's so jarring to read.

Clubber 10y ago
I agree. What I suspect vision founders don't want to hear is that everything that can be done up to this point has already been done. Perhaps not the whole, but the pieces certainly. They don't like this idea because they want to believe their idea is new and groundbreaking. It may very well be, but the pieces aren't. That's where experience comes in.
- inlined 10y ago
  And "avoiding industry experience" is a convenient excuse for ageism.
  - blakesterz 10y ago
    There's really great things about being 25. There's really great things about being 45. There's also things that suck about being 25 or 45. One of the things that suck about being 25 is KNOWING that being 45 means you're old and you don't know a damn thing. KNOWING that some 45 year old fart will just get in the way because they're slow and only know Perl. Hell, when you're 25 you simply KNOW so much. Then one day you wake up and you're 45 and you realize that even now you don't know a damn thing. I guess you're right, it's ageism, but it's also just being 25 and being so sure of everything that you couldn't possibly learn anything from "industry experience".
    - thatfrenchguy 10y ago
      "KNOWING that some 45 year old fart will just get in the way because they're slow and only know Perl" This is such a horrible misconception that I think you've never worked with senior people in your life.

designium 10y ago

Finally, someone who also thinks in a sensible way on hiring. In Toronto, I keep seeing all these job posting of companies that need people with 10 years in social media experience, or 10 years in mobile app development and it's quite laughable how they are able to hire those people. I'm curious how those people can actually perform.

IndianAstronaut 10y ago
Fake resumes. Indian tech shops specialize in this (I'm Indian btw). Fake resumes are extremely common among Indian tech workers. I was asked by one IT body shop to write 7 years of Java experience even though I had none. I routinely run into resumes where people sometimes write more years of experience with a package than the number of years the package has existed.
- dasboth 10y ago
  I'm interested in how that kind of thing prevails. Is it because the purpose of the lie is just to get past HR screening, and after that competent people just learn the language they lied about on their CV? I can't imagine that would work though, I mean how does someone get past a technical interview with a fake CV?
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    That will get you a job in the short term, but isn't great for a career that will last until retirement. But as far as I can tell, the candidate crams for the tech screen, learns the basics between offer letter and start date, and picks up the rest as they work. The dirty little secret is that nobody actually needs any specific experience to do the job. You just need a decent brain and an Internet connection, and just enough people skills to fake it until you make it. But it probably works better in larger organizations, where none of the people who would be able to detect the deception are involved in the interview process. You don't need to fool your peers if you can fool your boss. It never would have worked in any of the smaller companies that I have interviewed with, as they have all (perhaps coincidentally) been ultra-paranoid about resume frauds, for some reason.

dkopi 10y ago

THIS. After learning a few languages and paradigms, I find that I often have a 2 week ramp up for any given programming language. If you already know Java and Javascript, you'll get Scala / Kotlin in no time. If you're experienced in Python and Django, RoR is a few weeks away. If you're experienced in C++ and Python, it won't take long until you're good to Go. I get that companies want someone who's productive from Day 1, but they're missing out on a lot of great candidates that might only be productive from Day 15, but they'll be a lot more productive over time.

GVIrish 10y ago
The silly thing about companies being so obstinate about hiring someone with experience in the exact stack they use is that often times job reqs go unfilled for many weeks or even months. The result is that they end up wasting a lot more time with an unfilled position than if they had just hired that person who needed 2 weeks or so to ramp up.
- wyclif 10y ago
  Letting a developer or engineering job go unfilled for months is nothing, at least in my experience. I've seen a lot of jobs go unfilled for years while the company tried to find a unicorn to fill it, while at the same time priding themselves for being so picky and demanding excessive levels of experience, "full stack" experience, and "culture fit."
bsbechtel 10y ago
I wonder if part of this is because of pressure from investors. I heard an investor once comment about how they don't want to pay for a team to learn on the job, which I found ironic given the VC space implicitly invests in innovation, which is creating new opportunities that have lots of unknowns.
notyourloops 10y ago
So what is suggested for developers running into this situation? Not all of us live in dense, major cities where it's easier to find a cross-section of all stacks, but most of us with experience can ramp up into a new stack based on similar paradigms we already use regularly.

vthallam 10y ago

I agree to the article in general. But most of the keywords in job description are put up to set some expectations or if you have a project that needs people who already know things.

avip 10y ago

Altogether nice article, excluding the sad appearance of "cultural fit" as hiring criteria. Cultural fit, begone.

notyourloops 10y ago

Do they actually end up hiring based on the criteria in their postings? I often find that the typical listing is unreasonable. Who actually gets the job? Is it worth applying to anyway?

ssharp 10y ago
In my experience, I've seen direct hiring tends to focus less on "x years of experience" but recruiters, especially larger firms with junior staff doing screening, is absolutely terrible with obsessing over it.
- johnward 10y ago
  Some postings go way overboard on skillset. You must be a master at everything. I've heard that this is done sometimes so that they can't find the talent locally and then can outsource for that specific role. Some recruiters, not all, are basically no better than a robot. I don't have a B.S. but I have an A.S. plus 10 years of experience now. Give a recruiter a req of "B.S. or equivalent experience" and they will turn me away without a phone call because I don't have the degree. When 10 minutes on the phone is all I would need to convince them I have the experience they need. I've basically given up on interviews for awhile. It drains so much energy just to get canned responses back.

cgearhart 10y ago

This is an example of an article that does a great job of identifying the problem (seriously -- I think it's great), but it has limited impact because it doesn't offer concrete steps towards a solution. It is hard to interview for intangible keywords -- how does the choice of keyword change that? Is the advice here just to take risk in hiring? That's not going to be received well...it can be just as damaging to make a bad hire for non-technical factors as technical ones, and I suspect this is why so many companies rely on terrible technical interviews. The broken part of tech interviews isn't that they ask technical questions, it's that no one on the hiring side looks at their process and asks "what is it that this part of our process is measuring?" and "does that factor matter in making a hiring decision?" Asking brain teasers and CS "fundamental" questions is fine as long as there is a good answer to those two questions, but instead everyone does cargo-cult interviews because Medium says that's how Big Tech does hiring.

stinkytaco 10y ago
I think in any field it's important to decide on the desired answer (from what traits and skills you need), then build the question. We use a scoring system (1-4) in our case and for each question the interviewer has several general bullet points the interviewee ought to be hitting on. For a simple example, if we're hiring for a desktop tech, we might ask what steps you take when troubleshooting an individual who claims their PC is slow. The desired answers might be: determine scope of problem (how often, how slow, is it affecting work duties), determine specific triggers, check PC for known issues (spyware, virus, etc), research, attempt resolution. We don't expect exact wording or even total coverage, but at least everyone is on the same page in terms of expectations. This has proven to be a very effective way of getting quality people into positions at a variety of levels. EDIT: Side note, we also generally build the interview questions, then write the ad. Since we already know the answers we want, the ad comes fairly naturally from that.
- csydas 10y ago
  Though I've been hiring for much smaller institutions, I can attest that this is a common problem for virtually all hiring processes: > I think in any field it's important to decide on the desired answer (from what traits and skills you need), then build the question. My previous job liked to hire by committee that was created by randomly selecting employees to participate with hiring. (already a mistake) Even though these included the department head actually hiring, we'd often find that most of the time in meetings was spent asking or telling each other what was "really" necessary for the job, since even if we had a solid job description and list of wants, the committee members would squable since the jobs were allowed to be too flexible. When it came time to design questions, we would run into the same problem each time: We were more focused on "good questions" than deciding what we really wanted the answer to be and designing questions around it. This often resulted in really poor interviews where we let applicants just talk their way through any of our concerns because there was no concrete idea of what we were looking for. I think in general this tends to be an issue with employers who have difficulty with hiring - they are not good at articulating their wants beyond "we need a web developer" or "database admin" - undoubtedly it's managers who were told "don't get too specific with your wishlist", the idea being to prevent job postings with absurd requirements, but it's swung too far in the opposite direction in many cases with employers relying exclusively on keywords as indicators of success. ("They know X language and have worked with Y hardware - they're perfect") The hard truth is that even though hiring sucks and can take forever if you're not careful, it's worth taking the extra prep time to ensure you have a clear idea of the type of hire you want. Anything less is a disservice to your company, your employees, your customers, and your new hire. The HR hatchets are generally not useful either, as they're too broad sweeping and the same tools that weed out the absolutely unqualified also end up weeding out those who haven't jammed the right keywords into their resume. Neither ends up getting you what you want; while it's shitty to have to read potentially dozens or hundreds of resumes, if you're struggling to fill positions with good people, it's a necessity.

kbart 10y ago

The author is mocking keyword stuffing, but promoting "cultural fit" as "more impactful keyword". Sorry, but replacing technical keywords with some vague buzzwords does not improve your ads.

rejschaap 10y ago
I think the wording is a bit unfortunate. I'm sure he doesn't mean you scan resume's for keywords like team player, communication, cultural fit, etc. Instead you should focus on these skills during the interview process, more than specific technologies or previous employers. As others have said, the article identifies a big problem in hiring. However, it doesn't give you a lot of handles to solve anything.
- kbart 10y ago
  So what is "cultural fit" then? If one didn't wear skinny jeans and don't enjoy playing foosball, he's out of luck? "Cultural fit" is one of the most offputting keyword for me, because as far as I've seen, it has one of two negative meanings: a) there's a monoculture inside company (usually "hipsters"). b) they creating a bubble around them and do not accept any other attitude than fanatically following their idea(s) which often leads to another overhyped bullshit-that-nobody-needs.
  - ysavir 10y ago
    Being a "cultural fit" just means that the person will fit in well with the process and people at a company. Whether the "culture" in question is a specific type of culture is irrelevant. If you approach it from that perspective, you're probably taking the term at face value and missing the point. The idea being expressed here is that if you bring in a new employee, even one that has no previous experience with the technologies being used, they will perform best if they are naturally in tune with the company's ideals and methodology, and can quickly develop camaraderie with the existing crew. On the other hand, if you hire someone that knows all the necessary tech, but is constantly at odds with how things are done, alienates their coworkers, or manages to clog up the process in other ways--in those scenarios, everyone loses. It has nothing to do with a cultural hive mind; it's just a matter of keeping a team synchronized and efficient.

kalleboo 10y ago

Just in case anyone else had trouble concentrating on the article: javascript:document.styleSheets[0].insertRule("strong%20{%20font-weight:%20normal%20}")

Zigurd 10y ago

This is mostly right, but using "cultural fit" as a criterion is the road to "hire people like us," which is as unproductive and keyword-based hiring just in a different way. In fact all the criteria cited in the article as good have significant weaknesses. Even "expertise" need some explanation, since one would hope that's not the keywords listed under "Expertise." Having an applicant write some code and defend they way they did it, and/or bring some code they wrote, would be a much better gauge of expertise.

ccozan 10y ago

Exactly my train of thoughts. I cringe when a recruiter wants to know which language I program in and he/she does not get it immediatelly when I reply "any that you like" or "what ever the customer wants". Keyword based job match is however the only automatic solution, all other are to work intensive so that it makes economically sense.

coldcode 10y ago
Even worse is keyword technology and version. "I need someone with X version 5.12" kinds of job ads. Really, you intend to avoid upgrading for the rest of time?
- DanielDent 10y ago
  There exist job ads which have the explicit purpose of not finding a qualified candidate. It tends to be a result of things like H1-B visas, union contracts, and other frameworks which provide 'first dibs' on an opportunity to a subset of the global labour pool.
- collyw 10y ago
  I remember visiting a recruitment consultant after University in the dot com bust of 2001. He told me to add Oracle version numbers to my CV as "Techies love that".

ed_blackburn 10y ago

A few years ago I built some .NET components to service a node front end. I used to get so many people contact me about Angular and node contracts. I tweaked my CV to say Microservices instead of components and replaced node with java script SPA and now I get far more relevant enquires from agents.

GoToRO 10y ago

The truth is that those kind of companies have very little money and so they want to hire people that can be productive from day one. Of course this is utopia but that will not stop them.

pyb 10y ago

Everybody knows one shouldn't Hire by Keyword, but they still do it. Why ? I think this is the CYA principle in play. "I hired a $keyword specialist, it clearly says so in his resume. I am limiting any blame I get if they don't work out !"

hbosch 10y ago
I've worked at a company where this philosophy was compounded on during the "down" days, where the company I was at was in a sharp decline. When the VPs and execs panicked, they started at the hiring level... They made a plan to "stop hiring junior level" employees, and our team became full of Senior level people. Then they said we need more PhDs... because a PhD is prestigious and we need prestige. There was even a brief mandate to high an industry celebrity type, basically just for show. It all started with a "hiring by keyword" mentality and pretty much led to a massive decay of passion across the entire team.

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diafygi 10y ago

What about hire by questionnaire? We used to ask for resumes only, but we ran into the same issue as OP where qualified candidates wouldn't have key items in their resume, and unqualified candidates would have lots of things but end up failing during the coding interview. So we just started asking people up front what we wanted to know. For example: http://goo.gl/forms/YICrUuz7XNjiTcId2 http://goo.gl/forms/YICrUuz7XNjiTcId2 Here's one of our software engineering forms. It's worked extremely well at filtering for technically qualified candidates. But we worry that we're still missing people because https://imgur.com/RIamYIZ https://imgur.com/RIamYIZ

dpark 10y ago
> But we worry that we're still missing people because https://imgur.com/RIamYIZ https://imgur.com/RIamYIZ Eh, that's a pretty reasonable questionnaire. If it was pages and pages, it'd be too much, but there's only 12 questions here (including the citizenship and email address questions) and I'm assuming you don't expect an essay for each of these. Someone who's indignant at the idea of filling this out is probably not worth working with. I have to say, I find the SSH question at the bottom odd. Who is this screening for? Are there people who hit all your other requirements but don't know how to use SSH? Would you actually eliminate someone for this, as opposed to spending 5 minutes introducing them to SSH (or 30 seconds sending them a link)?
mjevans 10y ago
My question, seeing a form like that, is what is the resume field actually for? Would the resume be used for the actual screening/selection process, or is it instead just to get all of the other details that might be necessary later in the hiring process as a catch-all?

namelezz 10y ago

I don't think companies are hiring by keyword. It's the clueless tech recruiters filtering out candidates by keyword.

vonmoltke 10y ago
Perhaps the companies you deal with aren't but non-software companies are pretty bad about it, with non-tech companies being the worst.

alexeiz 10y ago

Bullcrap. Just look at the examples of hires he has in mind: co-founder of a startup, VP of marketing, CEO, "Could Hollywood execs have started Netflix?". This guy is a fly-high investor. Unless you're in a similar position, his advice is useless.

lstamour 10y ago

We should probably add (2012) to the title, I was confused by the comment on social media being "barely 5 years old" until I saw that.

tormeh 10y ago

I think it's weird that the IT industry hires based on technologies you know. It seems much more relevant to hire based on whether you've completed similar kinds of projects to those that will be done at your new workplace. It's like aiming to hire someone to build a high-rise out of wood and going "We need someone who can use a hammer and nail". Not really wrong, but it's kind of an odd emphasis.

segmondy 10y ago

The reality is that resume must be filtered out, either by tech keywords such as "clojure or ruby on rails" or social keywords such as "culture fit or team player". No one hires by keywords, they filter resumes by keywords. If you're smart enough, you will load up your resume with keywords if that's how your target company is filtering resume by. You just want to get to the next base which is getting an interview. How do you get hired after an interview? Some companies will give you tests, puzzle, white board coding, all conversation/culture fit, etc. You likewise have to be a fool not to adjust accordingly. If you want to join Acme corp so bad and they require you wear a suit, wear a freaking suit. If they are laid back and cargo pants and t-shirt will do, you have to be an idiot to go in with a suit. If they are big on whiteboard coding, then practice so and do load's of exercises prior to your interview. game theory 101, people will always look for ways to maximize their outcome.

gedrap 10y ago

The key takeaway, for me, is: * outsiders can bring some fresh thoughts and challenge ideas that everyone inside keep as status quo and unchallenged; * people who define themselves as e.g. 'Ruby on Rails dev' (or JavaScript dev or whatever) might have hard time adapting if the landscape changes, or they need to do something outside their comfort zone; * specific technical skills (programming language, etc) are usually easier to develop than soft skills such as leadership, teamwork, communication. Of course, it's not unconditional. Sometimes you really need someone who has deep knowledge of some niche, or is really a master at some technology. It's just probably not as common as one might believe.

chrisp_dc 10y ago

Devil's advocate: I like it when ads have the technologies as keywords. Preferably listed explicitly & directly. I have arbitrary preferences like Apache Camel v Spring Integration & Ansible v Puppet. I'm not on the market looking, but I do occasionally peak to see if there are dream jobs available on Craigslist/StackOverflow. Even if I can quickly grok the equivalent, I'd get frustrated after a months/years of solving problems using my less preferred stack. The stack can also tell you a lot about the philosophy of the shop: flexibility vs. convention/readability, stability vs. cutting-edge.

spitfire 10y ago

Tokenadult isn't around to chime in here, so I'll take his place today. Hunter and Schmit did a meta-study of 85 years of research on hiring criteria. [1] There are three attributes you need to select for to identify performing employees in intellectual fields. - General mental ability (Are they generally smart) Use WAIS or if there are artifacts of GMA(Complex work they've done themselves) available use them as proxies. - Work sample test. NOT HAZING! As close as possible to the actual work they'd be doing. Try to make it apples-to-apples comparison across candidates. - Integrity. The first two won't matter if the candidate is a sociopath. This alone will get you > 65% hit rate. [1] [1] http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...