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I've tried all manner of things, on both sides of the equation. In the end I don't think a big company can do it, and I don't think a small company can scale i
by dasil003 8y ago
I've tried all manner of things, on both sides of the equation. In the end I don't think a big company can do it, and I don't think a small company can scale it. It's a classic market for lemons problem on both sides. And to make matters worse you now have massive cargo culting of Google's hiring practice across the board, leading to job interviews turning into a hugely expensive, time sucking endeavour and the signal from that style of interview steadily being eroded by massive study efforts on the part of candidates.
If you're just coming out of college then I think Triplebyte is a decent value to get your foot in the door someplace popular that looks good on a resume, but once you have some experience you run into the same problem that you get with all recruiters which is that they don't truly understand either the candidate or the role, resulting in miscommunication on both sides.
Personally I think unless you are a name brand with dozens to hundreds of applications coming in for every role every day, there is no substitute for rolling up your sleeves and doing the recruiting yourself. When candidates talk to hiring managers directly, the signal to noise ratio is an order of magnitude higher for both sides. As an engineering leader, doing hands-on sourcing is a super power with huge opportunity for arbitrage in a massively competitive market.
- rgoulter 8y ago"market for lemons" is a great term, just in case people aren't aware of it. I was introduced to it by this good piece on Medium: https://medium.com/@thogge/one-mental-model-to-rule-them-all-6cf1ec9e6889 https://medium.com/@thogge/one-mental-model-to-rule-them-all... (I'd appreciate if anyone posted links they like better). I'm not sure I understand it applying in this case. Bad candidates are always looking for a job, but good candidates rarely need to look for a job. (So, job applicants are largely lemons). Good companies have lower turnover, so rarely need the positions filled?
- plasticchris 8y agoI think it dates back to Joel, here's another good take on it: https://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/ https://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/
- otras 8y agoFrom the article you linked, it looks like the term dates to George Akerlof's paper, The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism (Nobel prize winning 1970 paper). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
- plasticchris 8y agoThe term does, but not it's application to software hiring...
- otras 8y agoI misread your pronoun. Thanks for clarifying!
- rgoulter 8y agoAh. Dan Luu disagrees with Joel's "great devs are never on the market" (based on his experience). The article is great. Although, I'm not sure how useful the advice of "Hiring great employees is easy. Want better employees? Pay more" is. -- I'm also curious about what the "can't find a good team?" part would be (other than "don't ask for such a high salary").