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Yeah, the entire HR process at most companies is so incredibly broken for technical candidates. One of the problems IMO is that HR doesn’t know shit about tech

Yeah, the entire HR process at most companies is so incredibly broken for technical candidates. One of the problems IMO is that HR doesn’t know shit about tech, and dev managers don’t know shit about HR. A dev manager who needs a person tells HR “I want to interview 10 people for this open job req” — which is likely just some bullets vaguely describing job responsibilities. HR, having very little idea what any of the bullets on the list mean, do their best to filter resumes. Because they’ve had to do this a lot in the past, they engaged an outside firm to issue coding tests to make sure they don’t pass on shitty candidates to the dev manager (they got dinged last year on their review for that!) So hence all the bullshit before you even get to the guy who posted the job. Part of the problem is that the dev manager just expects to be able to throw this over the fence to HR. One way I’ve solved this in my teams? I don’t expect HR to do resume screens. Sure, I have them do a basic screen for candidates who don’t even mention development anywhere on their resume, but I really don’t expect HR to be able to detect bullshit. The key is to treat hiring a new team member like any other task you have to deal with. But the days when engineers can sit heads-down and code are all but over; because the situation described in the article above is what you get when you try to do that.

slgeorge 8y ago
> "HR doesn’t know shit about tech, and dev managers don’t know shit about HR" This is the cause of a significant amount of waste, friction and general anger for both sides in my experience. Technologists are well-known for their TLA's, and HR teams have their own obfuscating discipline-specific terminology, assumptions and values. The incentives for external recruiters are obviously a problem and even for internal recruiters they are mostly measured on seats filled rather than long-term retention or the candidates performance. Hiring managers themselves are often extremely poor at describing or even understanding what it is they are trying to hire. They often struggle to provide clear and actionable feedback that can change the search. Figuring out that collaboration is definitely worth while!
- exelius 8y ago
  Right to all of these; which is why you have to make it the hiring manager’s job to be very involved with the process. HR should be involved for governance purposes, but the manager and the team need to be involved with hiring new team members. Part of the problem is that no matter how careful you are, it seems whenever you bring in 10 candidates to interview, 1 is obviously overqualified and has higher salary expectations than you can offer, 2 are about right (but likely also have other offers), and the other 7 are varying shades of “sorry, not right now...” to “why did we even let you in the building?” It’s entirely normal to interview 10 candidates, make 2 offers, and get no accepts. That’s a huge waste of time on everyone’s behalf. But I have yet to see anyone find a way to significantly improve on this process, because as the OP states, everyone figures out to just start googling the answers to the questions.

slgeorge 8y ago

> "HR doesn’t know shit about tech, and dev managers don’t know shit about HR" This is the cause of a significant amount of waste, friction and general anger for both sides in my experience. Technologists are well-known for their TLA's, and HR teams have their own obfuscating discipline-specific terminology, assumptions and values. The incentives for external recruiters are obviously a problem and even for internal recruiters they are mostly measured on seats filled rather than long-term retention or the candidates performance. Hiring managers themselves are often extremely poor at describing or even understanding what it is they are trying to hire. They often struggle to provide clear and actionable feedback that can change the search. Figuring out that collaboration is definitely worth while!

exelius 8y ago
Right to all of these; which is why you have to make it the hiring manager’s job to be very involved with the process. HR should be involved for governance purposes, but the manager and the team need to be involved with hiring new team members. Part of the problem is that no matter how careful you are, it seems whenever you bring in 10 candidates to interview, 1 is obviously overqualified and has higher salary expectations than you can offer, 2 are about right (but likely also have other offers), and the other 7 are varying shades of “sorry, not right now...” to “why did we even let you in the building?” It’s entirely normal to interview 10 candidates, make 2 offers, and get no accepts. That’s a huge waste of time on everyone’s behalf. But I have yet to see anyone find a way to significantly improve on this process, because as the OP states, everyone figures out to just start googling the answers to the questions.