4 ms·

This has been a deepening mystery throughout my career. I see most companies are utterly uninterested in improving their recruitment processes, and are at the s

• potatolicious 10y ago
  > "I see most companies are utterly uninterested in improving their recruitment processes" I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. Most companies seem to be interesting in improving their recruitment processes - but certain fundamental systems and assumptions are treated as inviolate and sacred. Here is a quick but incomplete list of the ones that come to mind: - Open-ended unstructured interviews are the optimal way to evaluate candidates. - Whiteboard coding is an acceptable, reliable, and reasonably accurate way to gauge coding ability. - Algorithms and data structure knowledge predicts overall software engineering capability. - Culture fit (in however nebulous ways) is a stronger predictor of future performance than standardized evaluation. The list goes on. The tech industry overall seems very interested in improving recruitment and hiring, so long as these fundamental tenets are never violated. Suffice it to say, this stands in contrast to tech's (in)famous claims of thinking outside the box, breaking the rules, and holding nothing sacred to disruption. I've personally seen companies try to improve candidate sourcing, scoring systems, interview scheduling, etc etc, but practically never any of the above. Companies try really, really hard to optimize within an extremely narrow band of parameters.
  • pyb 10y ago
    Agreed, but I'd put it that way: most companies I see are very interested in pretending to improve their recruitment processes. What they don't really want, is to take on people who are noticeably better than (or different in any way from) the people already working there.
    • pyb 10y ago
      Perhaps a more exact personal observation would be that hiring managers always hire the same type of person.