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> Instead, it seems optimal to acknowledge that there will always be more qualified candidates than there are open positions This is a wrong assumption, in my

> Instead, it seems optimal to acknowledge that there will always be more qualified candidates than there are open positions This is a wrong assumption, in my experience. As a rule of thumb, for not-principal/staff SWE roles, I would estimate that it takes: 1. 10+ resumes to find someone worth phone-screening 2. 10ish phone screens screens to find someone worth an in-person interview 3. 3ish in-persons to find someone worth an offer. In other words, a hiring manager has to look at 300+ resumes to find one qualified candidate. So... imagine you get a reference from someone you trust. You go from 1 in 300 odds of finding someone who is basically qualified to 1 in 3. This is after recruiters have pre-screened the resumes, btw. The candidate pool for Step #1 excludes all the people who apply to a senior SWE role with no Github portfolio, no relevant claimed skills, no degree and no work experience other than Burger King. I'm curious to hear other people's experience, but I've literally never been in the position of "Do we hire candidate A or candidate B for this tech role?" It's always "Do we think A is good enough, or should we keep looking?" > but I'm not going to pretend there's any kind of even remotely objective or precise way of determining who maximally fits into that position. Sure, defining who is "optimal" is challenging but that's a cop-out. The situation is usually: Person A can't finish FizzBuzz (literally FizzBuzz) in 45 minutes in any language in coderpad, while Person B can do FizzBuzz, some easy recursion problem and maybe some kind of stats brain teaser. There is no world in which both of those candidates are "approximately the same".

TameAntelope 5y ago
You really have to talk to the people in charge of your hiring pipelines if it takes 300 resumes to find one qualified candidate... Every single position I've ever hired for has had multiple people make it all the way through, often more like 3-5.
- labcomputer 5y ago
  I thought you wanted companies to cast a broader net. Now you're saying that it's too broad? > Every single position I've ever hired for has had multiple people make it all the way through, often more like 3-5. Do you hire for tech roles? Software engineers, data scientists, analysts and the like? Also, having 3-5 people make it through your process isn't meaningful. You can always find n people make it all the way through if you wait long enough. The problem just that the (n-1)-th person will generally take another offer by the time you find the n-th person. Like I said, I have never been in the position of having two qualified candidates at the same time for one role and having to pick which one I like better. My experience, by the way, seems to match that of everyone I'd discussed this with in real life.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    The experience you have is part of the broken system that discriminates against qualified candidates because of their race and gender. I'm not surprised you and everyone you know conducts yourself in this discriminatory way, it's all too common in the industry. You have to proactively attempt to break this cycle in order to make any real progress, and a few ways to do that include being intentional about how you find qualified candidates (growing your recruitment pipeline to source from non-traditional groups), and changing your interview process in ways that allow for candidates who are qualified to move forward together, rather than do some kind of false stack ranking of your candidates, creating this incorrect notion that "only one" person for any given role is qualified, which is objectively untrue. Stack ranking is bullshit when applied to employee performance, why would it be anything but bullshit when applied to the interview process?

TameAntelope 5y ago

You really have to talk to the people in charge of your hiring pipelines if it takes 300 resumes to find one qualified candidate... Every single position I've ever hired for has had multiple people make it all the way through, often more like 3-5.

labcomputer 5y ago
I thought you wanted companies to cast a broader net. Now you're saying that it's too broad? > Every single position I've ever hired for has had multiple people make it all the way through, often more like 3-5. Do you hire for tech roles? Software engineers, data scientists, analysts and the like? Also, having 3-5 people make it through your process isn't meaningful. You can always find n people make it all the way through if you wait long enough. The problem just that the (n-1)-th person will generally take another offer by the time you find the n-th person. Like I said, I have never been in the position of having two qualified candidates at the same time for one role and having to pick which one I like better. My experience, by the way, seems to match that of everyone I'd discussed this with in real life.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  The experience you have is part of the broken system that discriminates against qualified candidates because of their race and gender. I'm not surprised you and everyone you know conducts yourself in this discriminatory way, it's all too common in the industry. You have to proactively attempt to break this cycle in order to make any real progress, and a few ways to do that include being intentional about how you find qualified candidates (growing your recruitment pipeline to source from non-traditional groups), and changing your interview process in ways that allow for candidates who are qualified to move forward together, rather than do some kind of false stack ranking of your candidates, creating this incorrect notion that "only one" person for any given role is qualified, which is objectively untrue. Stack ranking is bullshit when applied to employee performance, why would it be anything but bullshit when applied to the interview process?