4 ms·

You may not have a better way, but one has existed for decades, maybe longer. Combine a personal interview with a company that's worth working for and you'll ha

by mnm1 7y ago

You may not have a better way, but one has existed for decades, maybe longer. Combine a personal interview with a company that's worth working for and you'll have no problem finding qualified candidates. This means one phone screen of about 30-60 minutes to both introduce the candidate and decide if they are worth a follow-up with the team followed by a one hour interview with the whole engineering team more focused on technical capabilities directly related to the job. Finally, just to be sure, a one hour take-home assignment that is simple just to make sure they are not bullshitting. This last one only goes to the top few candidates of which one will be chosen (assuming they can code the simple assignment). People have been hiring this way (ok minus the coding assignment) for decades, maybe even a century or more. And you know what? It works. Now on to the second requirement: having a company that's worth working for. That means a company that at least partially values its employees. The best way to do this if you don't have FAANG money? Remote work. Ideally for everyone. That guarantees your pool of hiring (even if limited to certain locations for artificial reasons) is much higher and the demand for the job will be huge. Other things that make a company worth working for: good salary, yearly raises, performance bonuses, 40 or less working hours a week, flexible schedule, decent managers who understand engineering, interesting tech, etc. Note that none of those is out of reach of any company, even the smallest small-business. So yeah, let's stop with this bullshit that we don't know or can't think of a better way to hire. That's idiotic and frankly, closed-minded. Let's stop pretending like there aren't a ton of qualified candidates just waiting to be hired when there are so many. Let's give people a chance for once to prove that they can do the job. Not everyone will work out, but you know what, in the US with at-will employment, that is not a big deal. Doesn't work out, fire them. Easy fucking peasy. If you can't do that, you shouldn't be leading a team/company. My company currently works this way and we have had NO problem hiring. Whenever we want a great candidate, we go from resumes to hired in less than a month. There is nothing special about us. We don't pay top dollar. We don't even have a lot of the perks I listed above, but we have enough of them that candidates love us and we have no problem attracting great talent (the top one being remote work, of course). If a company isn't willing to make itself desirable, I have no pity for them. It's like never showering or grooming and expecting to find a hot girlfriend. Highly unlikely.

jlokier 7y ago
> Whenever we want a great candidate, we go from resumes to hired in less than a month. A month is considered fast?! I guess as long as the great candidate you're hiring is not looking at other options. A recently saw a recruiter lamenting that their clients needed to be told that if they don't make a hiring decision within 2-3 days of introduction, they tend to miss out on the best engineers, who get offers from elsewhere within the week and take them.
- mnm1 7y ago
  It's not? Because I see people here complaining about open positions that stay open for months to years, or that they can't find candidates at all. The breakdown is roughly 1 week for phone screens, 1 week for main interviews, 1 week for the follow-up coding test / code review with a candidate, then the offer. So 3-4 weeks from start to finish. I simply don't see how it could possibly go any faster. We are still doing other work in the meantime. We also need to consider multiple candidates. More than a couple of interviews a day is simply too tiring to evaluate candidates fairly. I've never seen a company move any faster than two to three weeks in dozens and dozens of interviews with all types of candidates and all types of companies from startups to FAANG. Anecdotal reports from recruiters notwithstanding, I think it's incredibly fast. If candidates can't wait (we've had one that we liked that took another offer), it's not a big deal at all. There are tons of qualified candidates out there. Each time we've hired the last three times, we've had three equally capable candidates. If one of them drops out, it makes the decision that much easier. After all, at that stage, it's impossible to say one is better than another. That can only be said after working with someone for some time. We've even gone back and hired candidates that initially were our runner up when the first choice didn't work out due to non work-related issues.
  - jlokier 7y ago
    Fair enough. If you have a steady stream of equally capable, qualified candidates, it's a buyer's market and you don't need to do anything. Carry on :-) There are other companies who complain that they can't find qualified candidates though. Some of those have those positions that stay open for months. Those are the ones the recruiters urge to change practices so they have a chance at getting "the best" engineers, on the rare occasions "the best" interview with them. The seller's market situation, where buyers need to compete. It sounds like you don't have that problem though.

by mnm1 7y ago

jlokier 7y ago

> Whenever we want a great candidate, we go from resumes to hired in less than a month. A month is considered fast?! I guess as long as the great candidate you're hiring is not looking at other options. A recently saw a recruiter lamenting that their clients needed to be told that if they don't make a hiring decision within 2-3 days of introduction, they tend to miss out on the best engineers, who get offers from elsewhere within the week and take them.

mnm1 7y ago
It's not? Because I see people here complaining about open positions that stay open for months to years, or that they can't find candidates at all. The breakdown is roughly 1 week for phone screens, 1 week for main interviews, 1 week for the follow-up coding test / code review with a candidate, then the offer. So 3-4 weeks from start to finish. I simply don't see how it could possibly go any faster. We are still doing other work in the meantime. We also need to consider multiple candidates. More than a couple of interviews a day is simply too tiring to evaluate candidates fairly. I've never seen a company move any faster than two to three weeks in dozens and dozens of interviews with all types of candidates and all types of companies from startups to FAANG. Anecdotal reports from recruiters notwithstanding, I think it's incredibly fast. If candidates can't wait (we've had one that we liked that took another offer), it's not a big deal at all. There are tons of qualified candidates out there. Each time we've hired the last three times, we've had three equally capable candidates. If one of them drops out, it makes the decision that much easier. After all, at that stage, it's impossible to say one is better than another. That can only be said after working with someone for some time. We've even gone back and hired candidates that initially were our runner up when the first choice didn't work out due to non work-related issues.
- jlokier 7y ago
  Fair enough. If you have a steady stream of equally capable, qualified candidates, it's a buyer's market and you don't need to do anything. Carry on :-) There are other companies who complain that they can't find qualified candidates though. Some of those have those positions that stay open for months. Those are the ones the recruiters urge to change practices so they have a chance at getting "the best" engineers, on the rare occasions "the best" interview with them. The seller's market situation, where buyers need to compete. It sounds like you don't have that problem though.