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Let's be honest, the alternative to having an open hiring process, i.e. resumes, is nepotism and hiring your chums and the chums of your contacts. Which does de

Let's be honest, the alternative to having an open hiring process, i.e. resumes, is nepotism and hiring your chums and the chums of your contacts. Which does describe the hiring process in a lot of startups. Ethical issues aside, the problem with this is that it shrinks the pool of potential hires down drastically, to people who look like you, think like you, and know roughly the same things as you. Great if your customers also fit into this bracket, not so great if they don't. However I think the OP drastically underestimates the proportion of wholly unqualified on paper people who apply for most jobs. I'd put it at 50% for most and up to 90% for some. So you can see why people go down the nepotism + chums route. As someone who has a deeply weird CV and life experiences / social circle that is pretty much orthogonal to most techies it can be difficult, as the nepotism / chums route is not available. But just writing a cover letter to the JD and company gets me a fair way usually.

heleninboodler 4y ago
But let's also be honest: startup founders aren't hiring "their chums" out of some unethical sense of helping their friends who don't deserve it, they're hiring people they know and who they have good reason to believe are going to help them succeed. The fact that their chums tend to be people who look like them and think like them is an unfortunate side effect of this, but the idea of getting candidates via networking is not fundamentally wrong when the goal is finding people you think are going to contribute. Personal experience with a candidate is a very strong bit of signal in an otherwise very flawed process.
- r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
  It's not a fundamentally bad idea from a practical point of view (like I said, I'll leave the ethics out of it), but I think it is not as good an idea as a lot of people think as it narrows the field so much. Also the signal that people get, unless they have worked directly with a person, rather than just chatted with them at a networking event or know them from their childhood, is I would argue "belongs to my tribe", rather than "good at x"
  - heleninboodler 4y ago
    Yes, that's totally fair. But I'll say that I've taken or been offered "networking-enhanced" job opportunities in startups a handful of times, and they were always people I knew and had worked with directly, or in one case, someone who was extremely close to a person I had worked with directly. "Chatted with someone at a networking event" seems like an extremely weak signal, and I'd be suspicious of that type of hire.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  > But let's also be honest I don't think that is being honest. > aren't hiring "their chums" out of some unethical sense of helping their friends who don't deserve it, they're hiring people they know and who they have good reason to believe are going to help them succeed No one says "I'm going to unethically help people who don't deserve it," so let's discard that part. They're cheating at the normal hiring practice, not allowing other candidates in, because they think it gives them some sort of advantage. And that doesn't look entirely ethical. It's only deemed "business unethical" if someone can prove discrimination in court, though. And that's honest.
  - heleninboodler 4y ago
    > They're cheating at the normal hiring practice, not allowing other candidates in, because they think it gives them some sort of advantage. No, they're not "cheating," they are taking a shortcut to a known good candidate so they can get their job done quickly. If you need an employee and you know of one that would meet your needs, you have no obligation to search far and wide just in case there's someone else who's just as qualified out of some sense of fairness. The fact that some organizations behave as if that's a requirement is simply a self-imposed (or sometimes contractually-imposed by some other org e.g. via government contract) safety mechanism that helps reduce the opportunity for corruption (or the appearance of corruption).

heleninboodler 4y ago

But let's also be honest: startup founders aren't hiring "their chums" out of some unethical sense of helping their friends who don't deserve it, they're hiring people they know and who they have good reason to believe are going to help them succeed. The fact that their chums tend to be people who look like them and think like them is an unfortunate side effect of this, but the idea of getting candidates via networking is not fundamentally wrong when the goal is finding people you think are going to contribute. Personal experience with a candidate is a very strong bit of signal in an otherwise very flawed process.

r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
It's not a fundamentally bad idea from a practical point of view (like I said, I'll leave the ethics out of it), but I think it is not as good an idea as a lot of people think as it narrows the field so much. Also the signal that people get, unless they have worked directly with a person, rather than just chatted with them at a networking event or know them from their childhood, is I would argue "belongs to my tribe", rather than "good at x"
- heleninboodler 4y ago
  Yes, that's totally fair. But I'll say that I've taken or been offered "networking-enhanced" job opportunities in startups a handful of times, and they were always people I knew and had worked with directly, or in one case, someone who was extremely close to a person I had worked with directly. "Chatted with someone at a networking event" seems like an extremely weak signal, and I'd be suspicious of that type of hire.
drewcoo 4y ago
> But let's also be honest I don't think that is being honest. > aren't hiring "their chums" out of some unethical sense of helping their friends who don't deserve it, they're hiring people they know and who they have good reason to believe are going to help them succeed No one says "I'm going to unethically help people who don't deserve it," so let's discard that part. They're cheating at the normal hiring practice, not allowing other candidates in, because they think it gives them some sort of advantage. And that doesn't look entirely ethical. It's only deemed "business unethical" if someone can prove discrimination in court, though. And that's honest.
- heleninboodler 4y ago
  > They're cheating at the normal hiring practice, not allowing other candidates in, because they think it gives them some sort of advantage. No, they're not "cheating," they are taking a shortcut to a known good candidate so they can get their job done quickly. If you need an employee and you know of one that would meet your needs, you have no obligation to search far and wide just in case there's someone else who's just as qualified out of some sense of fairness. The fact that some organizations behave as if that's a requirement is simply a self-imposed (or sometimes contractually-imposed by some other org e.g. via government contract) safety mechanism that helps reduce the opportunity for corruption (or the appearance of corruption).