12 ms·

Software Raises Bar for Hiring

94 points by imjk 14y ago

rmATinnovafy 14y ago
I'd like to see software engineers who are part of the hiring process in their company apply for their own position anonymously. Go through the whole enchilada: the phone interview, the code tests, the puzzles, the questions regarding optimization and performance, etc. Let's see if they can pass all the hurdles. I have $100 here that says most won't (if any). * If we can't hire people due to a broken system, how do we expect to succeed?
- btian 14y ago
  I'll add another $100. I think the fundamental problem is that employers are unwilling to take on someone unless they are absolutely certain that the candidate is the right person because firing is extremely difficult and complicated (with potential for law suits) if the new hire does not prove to be a good fit.
  - misnome 14y ago
    I thought this was what probationary periods were for; evaluating a new employee with the opportunity to not continue their employment at the end of it.
  - xsmasher 14y ago
    It's not just lawsuits. Getting a new hire equipped and up to speed takes resources, and drains productivity away from existing employees. Also, once you've done a little training the sunk costs fallacy can kick in, even if you wouldn't hire them in hindsight.
  - mjwalshe 14y ago
    What in America the land of "at will" employment I find that very hard to believe.
  - georgieporgie 14y ago
    I hear people talk about the supposed legal risks of hiring and firing. I've personally seen a number of firings, and I've never seen a single issue arise. While I'm not going to claim that nobody ever sues or shoots up the place, I think the frequency with which this happens is grossly overestimated. Along the same lines as myth of the burglar who sues the homeowner, and masses of MBAs abusing a single court case to rationalize their sociopathic and short-sighted business decisions.
- EliRivers 14y ago
  That makes no sense to me. I know exactly what skills my company needs (or rather, what the hiring people look for on the CV). I know exactly what the interview is looking for. I know exactly what programming language to brush up on, and I know the complete set of coding problems set in the interview. I know it so well that the last person I recommended (for the recruitment bounty) breezed through after I tipped her off on the coding questions. I could get through the whole process easily. I doubt I'm the only person. What kind of people set questions in interviews without knowing what answer they're hoping for? How do they know if the candidate is any good if they don't know the answer themselves? That sounds.... well, it sounds insane.
  - antidoh 14y ago
    > What kind of people set questions in interviews without knowing what answer they're hoping for? The kind of people who want to "see how you think."
  - why-el 14y ago
    I think you are missing the point. The challenge is to design a set of hurdles that are equivalent to those faced by potential hires, not the exact ones. Of course you ought to know what your company asks for. Furthermore, I don't think its all about the questions. Part of the challenge is to design the exact same circumstances, i.e. puzzles, phone interviews, travelling, amount of time to review what the company requires, length of interviews, and so on.
  - codexon 14y ago
    breezed through after I tipped her off on the coding questions I probably botched an interview where they expected me to come up with an RB tree fast enough (it was a company that has posted on HN). Tipping people off to questions is cheating the test, so you have some people trying to temporarily bulk memorize algorithms that they'll forget in another month before an interview. Does anyone else not find this stupid?
    - rhizome 14y ago
      Did you ask them when the last time was that they had to use an RB tree in their software?
- gcheong 14y ago
  Well if I am working at a place that would tend to imply I did get through all that. Why would my chances be less a second time around? That said, I do agree that the hiring process is rather broken, just not sure that this would be a good test to show that.
- chubbard 14y ago
  Yea I have to agree with other posters. This is easy money for most software engineers because they have exactly the skills that will be posted on the ads, criteria that are checked, etc. I think even your challenge misses the point of the article which is when we post wanted ads we put down such specific skill sets that if we rigidly stick those skill sets, just like our software does, we'll miss the people that can grow into those roles. The irony is that software engineers are so much rarer than everyone else in the market we can easily be hand screened thus bypassing the very software we created. Finding software engineers is really hard because there are so few so either you don't get a lot of people applying, which makes it easy to screen by hand, or you set the bar very low to get people in the door. Then you go through 6 months to find the right person. If you aren't a software person its much much harder to find a job because there are so many other people looking for jobs. You have to compete much harder, downward wage pressure, etc. Hence the volume increasingly demands automated solutions that make it even harder to get past the screeners. I happen to agree with this article that we do a poor job of specifying the skills that are absolutely mandatory vs. what's nice to have. If we back off on rigid skill set we can find great people than can grow into a job.
- crusso 14y ago
  I've been on the hiring manager's side and the employee's side, more the former than the latter. I don't get your beef. The phone interviews are there to screen the 80% of the applicants who don't merit the time of my team to interview them. The puzzles are there to watch people think on their feet. The detailed questions are to see if you're looking at someone superficial or someone with deep knowledge of the subject matter. The programming challenges are to see if the applicant wants the job badly enough to spend a couple of hours working on a programming problem that can then be used as a showcase for how they write some software. Earlier in my career, I didn't have all those interview techniques in place. When I started, hiring people was a complete crap shoot and I ended up with some total lemons. Like the warning labels on products you buy, each interview technique I added to the process was the result of a lame hire that in hindsight, I could have avoided had I used that technique. The last job I had to interview for used all the techniques above. I found the interview process to be thorough and challenging. I appreciated the rigor of the interview process since it meant that the people hiring really gave a shit about the quality of the people joining their small team. I got the job. In point of fact, if they hadn't had a thorough interview process, I probably would have passed on the job offer since that would have been an indication to me that they were naive and didn't have their crap together. Do you want to send me your $100 via Paypal?
  - rmATinnovafy 14y ago
    I don't have a beef with it. I also think that of you apply to the jobs posted on HN, you will get my point. Sadly, I don't use Paypal. You can make a donation to your local hackerspace with the $100 that you will soon lose. Good luck. PS. Have you ever asked the people you have interviewed what they think about the process?
    - mgkimsal 14y ago
      "Have you ever asked the people you have interviewed what they think about the process?", especially, perhaps, the people you didn't hire? Almost without exception, people who don't get hired never hear back from a company as to why. Yes, I know all about "everyone's afraid to get sued for saying something wrong". So... develop a neutral feedback form to candidates as to why they were passed over, skills the interviewer(s) thought were lacking, etc. This will mean that people can get better, perhaps get another job (yes, maybe at a competitor, but also maybe somewhere else entirely), and continue to earn income, pay taxes, and contribute to society in a productive way. Some people can contribute without a job, sure, but right now most people need jobs. Telling someone "we're sorry - we had 8 candidates apply for this position, and we ended up taking on someone with more experience in X, Y and Z compared to your experience level. We wish you the best of luck in your job search". This would be courteous, professional and helpful all at the same time. Between my own experience and that of several colleagues, fewer than 5% of employers ever provide something even remotely useful in terms of feedback. How do we expect the job seeking population to get better without providing feedback mechanisms for them to learn from?
- noonespecial 14y ago
  You might find out something frightening. Getting the job mostly just came down to luck.
  - rmATinnovafy 14y ago
    Exactly. Maybe the CEO got a not so gentle nudge from the investors to hurry up and hire somebody and you were the one they were interviewing next. Stuff like that happens a lot. The process is more about outside factors than the actual interviewing process itself.
  - entangld 14y ago
    People in the real world realize that outside factors have a lot to do with hiring. But when these conversations turn into arguments it all comes down to some applicants being more "qualified." There are lots of reasons people get hired to do jobs they've never done before and lot of those reasons are subjective.
- philwelch 14y ago
  In most cases that's how the engineers got hired on in the first place, so I don't understand your beef. Plus, what you really want is to hire people better than the ones you already have.
- anonymoushn 14y ago
  I've never received an offer to work as a software engineer other than by going through the whole interview process. My impression was that the vast majority of other people who became software engineers at the companies I applied to had done the same. I'll take your bet, if you are still inclined to give away money.
- mahyarm 14y ago
  Most of them had to go through the same thing to be hired.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jmorton 14y ago
I think it is strange to rely on HR and recruiters as a filter. I would prefer someone to introduce themselves to the entire company: tell me what you can do and what you want to do, send me a reference to any relevant portfolio, and I'll take it from there. Hopefully this approach will discourage overly tailored cover letters, who knows. The article talks about this specifically, "the trick is parroting all the words in the job description but not just copying and pasting the text" This is pretty much why I started building They Meet You (theymeetyou.com) during my spare time. The way the site works right now is pretty simple. You can write a message that is meant for anyone at a company (@customink.com), anyone that proves they have an email address there can read it and exchange their contact info.
- TDL 14y ago
  While I think the problems discussed in the article need some resolution there is another issue that they do not discuss and which you allude to. Too many people are leading with their resumes and, more or less, blindly applying to jobs. Getting to know people in the industry you want to work in and the companies you would like to work at is a significantly better approach.
tristan_juricek 14y ago
This just smacks of big dumb companies trying to "automate away" HR and not really paying attention to the consequences. And, candidates not figuring out HR systems. What I fear, however, is that this isn't really a problem for the executives for a public company. Their real compensation these days is all tied to stock prices; I don't see the incentive to really care about HR. How does adding people change the stock price? (Usually I only hear about it from the other way; cutting jobs to cut costs.) Have you ever heard of investor pressure to hire candidates?
- TDL 14y ago
  It becomes an issue when there are too many vacancies and revenues begin to fall. Most c-level executives don't have their comp tied to stock prices, but to revenue growth (which is as bad as having it tied stock prices.) That being said, this definitely a heavy case of big & dumb.
  - sokoloff 14y ago
    Every C-level exec with share-based (RSU or option) compensation quite clearly has their comp tied to share prices. I doubt very many C-level execs at public companies have no share-based comp.
pnathan 14y ago
One thing I hope to be able to do in my career is, as I come into points where I am hiring, I can look at everything in my resume queue without having some software or some unqualified individual tell me who is qualified and who isn't. I hope to be able to spread a wide net to find the best... not a fine net to find a unicorn.
yumraj 14y ago
While I agree that this indeed sounds like a problem, and a genuine one at that, for the HN community this should also sound like an opportunity, to create a resume sorting systems that is much much better than the ones out there. Are there startups already looking at this problem? If not, why not? And, who's up for a challenge?
- its_so_on 14y ago
  The thing is, it's not a resume-sorting problem at all. Most people aren't even qualified to be who they are. In general, people aren't qualified to do their jobs. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be doing them, or be hired to do them. It means the qualification system is broken.
- rmATinnovafy 14y ago
  The problem is not the software. The problem are the employers. Everyone wants the perfect candidate. But no candidate is perfect. Everyone has good skills and bad baggage to carry from job to job. The aim should be to find people who will add to the team rather than building a perfect team. You can't do that with software (yet).
  - yumraj 14y ago
    Well you're agreeing with me when you say "yet", and hence my comment about opportunity. The problem is the software and the software is not going to go away. The opportunity is to make the software more intelligent so that the output is more in line with what would work.
    - rhizome 14y ago
      Why haven't DICE or Indeed.com or whoever seem to have done any work on that front? I'm thinking the ROI isn't there.
      - tomjen3 14y ago
        Considering that it costs 20% for a match by a recruitment company, there is enourmous ROI for a program like that. It would almost be as good as the ability to print money. Not to mention the cost you could get for the unemployed to sign up ("It costs you on average 2k/month not to use our service").
chuckp 14y ago
Most companies will put a litany of skill sets on the requirements list, however what they are really looking for is what crusso pointed out, someone with critical thinking skills. Be it a customer service rep, or a software engineer, when the employer says "Do X" if you don't know how to do it, figure it out. So many people will just sit there and stare into their screen or at a wall. That is the type of person these tests are designed to weed out. As others pointed out, if you are not willing to put in the effort and jump through the hoops, why bother, either you feel your too good for the job and won't apply yourself, or you lack the basic understanding of problem solving and troubleshooting.
- randomdata 14y ago
  Maybe in theory, but I read a couple of posts on HN in just the last few days of people complaining that potential hires they were interviewing couldn't even rhyme off things like basic data structures. If critical thinking was the skill being sought, rote memorization seems like it shouldn't have any emphasis at all. You can always look up data structures, or whatever, but that is often not good enough.
nhangen 14y ago
This is spot on. I've been on both sides of the fence, and in multiple disciplines. The strange thing I found is that finding a job as a developer has been just as difficult, if not more so, than finding a non-technical job. On the non-technical side, the basic requirements are exactly that - basic. Have some experience, a certification or two, and a specialized degree. That doesn't make it easy, but it makes the path somewhat concrete. And on the technical side, there are very few companies willing to hire entry level developers. They all seem to want code ninjas, which is fine, but here's the thing...if I'm a code ninja, why would I work for someone else when I could build something of my own without the requirement of commuting to an office and clocking in/out. On the employer side, I've found far less people applying for technical jobs than non-technical jobs. It has taken much longer to fill mid-level technical positions than entry-mid level non-technical positions. Building a team is difficult. Joining a team is difficult. It's a very strange time indeed.
- crusso 14y ago
  > The strange thing I found is that finding a job as a developer has been just as difficult, if not more so, than finding a non-technical job. It's easier to bullshit when interviewing for non-technical jobs. Technical jobs have mostly-objective tests you can give to candidates where they have to program stuff, solve equations, etc. Non-technical jobs have squishy mostly-subjective tests that aren't very reliable at gauging anything.
alister 14y ago
There's a failure of logic in this article that no one is pointing out. If employers are so picky that they can't find anyone to hire, then they will have to lower their standards if they want to hire anyone. There might be a delay--like the guy that waits for the supermodel to come along, but eventually settling for the pretty girl next door. Ultimately the problem is self-correcting.
- kfk 14y ago
  And employers are not that picky either. Most of the things they ask, at least in Europe, are pretty basic. For a finance is usually a bachelor, English skills, some prove you are not a lazy ass. Of course, requirements go up with better positions, but this article deceives into thinking that employers are looking for stars even in entry level jobs, it doesn't look like that to me. I am still convinced the problem is on the employee side...
nostromo 14y ago
The US should find ways to make employers less risk-averse. There are lots of ways worth exploring. For example: maybe if you fire someone in the first 6 months you are immune from wrongful termination lawsuits and don't have to pay higher unemployment insurance. A lot of resistance to firing is also caused by moral concerns -- we could fix that by making sure these fired workers are still eligible for unemployment. This would be extra beneficial for young people, who really just need to get a foot in the door to prove themselves -- they need someone to take a risk. Well, maybe we should reduce the risk.
- Locke1689 14y ago
  Most US states are at-will states, meaning they're already immune from wrongful termination, except for discriminatory reasons. No matter how long the employee has been there.
  - mikeryan 14y ago
    While "At-Will" in theory means that they're immune from wrongful termination, there's some major exceptions in most of those states. See "Covenant of good faith and fair dealing" (which in some states mean you have to be fired for 'just cause') and "Implied contract exceptions". I say these not to indicate you're wrong, mostly to make sure the entrepreneurs around here understand that even in a lot of "At-Will" states they might not be able fire completely with impunity. w/r/t the GP as long as the rules around a trial period are set via an employee handbook or in the contract, generally in the US we're fairly free to try people out and let them go, the US is actually more liberal in this then a lot of European countries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  You'd end up seeing a lot of 5 month and 29 day employment terms for people. It'd be no effective difference than 'contract and perhaps hire later', except so many people are averse to 'contract' work for reasons (sometimes valid ones) that have little to do with the work and more to do with the culture of 'benefits'. I don't quite know how we as a culture do it, but we need to wean ourselves off of 'employer-provided benefits'. Getting back to a more consumer-driven market vs large employer group-driven market will make our job/work situations easier for generations to come.
tokenadult 14y ago
The underlying problem is that most companies rely on hiring procedures that are empirically demonstrated to be suboptimal. Companies rely on industry tradition or the gut feelings of the boss rather than on research to decide hiring practices. The review article "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings" http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%... sums up, current to 1998, much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring practices. There are many kinds of hiring screens, such as resume reviews for job experience, telephone interviews, in-person interviews, checks for academic credentials, and so on. Most of the most commonly used means for screening job applicants, such as those mentioned in the submitted (like matching job titles in previous positions) are basically useless. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations. The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well (but only about at the 0.5 level, standing alone). One is a general cognitive ability test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general cognitive ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than anything else that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes. For legal reasons in the United States (the same consideration does not apply in other countries), it is difficult to give job applicants a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of a hiring process. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case in the United States Supreme Court http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196978&q=Griggs+Duke+Power&hl=en&as_sdt=2,24 http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196... held that cognitive ability tests used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring process had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring process might be illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants and is not supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job. Companies outside the United States are regulated by different laws. So don't set up stupid HR procedures like those described in the submitted article, even if those stupid procedures can be automated. Instead, figure out how to give applicants a work sample test, or figure out how to validate a general cognitive ability test for the applicants you desire to hire. Automating USEFUL processes can be helpful. There is no reason to automate a process that is not worth doing.
abalone 14y ago
Software that discards applicants based on simple keyword mismatch doesn't "raise the bar."
greghinch 14y ago
"His son, now 25 years old, graduated in 2010 with a degree in classics from St. John's College and couldn't find a job." This is the problem right here. Gee I wonder why you couldn't find a job in "Classics"? Because there aren't any, at least with an undergraduate degree. People pay you to work because you can perform a given task with a level of quality and consistency. We tell kids that they should study whatever makes them happy in college, but then when they graduate and can't find a job it's not their fault. Fine you study your BS degree, but don't expect to be handed a job when you graduate. Expect to work some menial job, or do what this kid did, go back to school and learn a trade. You'll have to prove to someone that you have some employable skill if you want to earn money. Having a job isn't a right.
ilaksh 14y ago
He makes good points about the software filtering out qualified applicants, but I don't think that is the underlying problem. The underlying problem is that there is a lot of unemployment and therefore too many people applying for too few jobs. We just don't need that many people to order around anymore now that we have so much hardware and software automation. The public education system is designed to create wage slaves, and is effectively doing that, but we don't need that many anymore. Another part of it of course is just that we are in an 'economic' down period and therefore have to be extremely selective when hiring since no one can afford any dead weight or even to do much training. The entire 'economic' model has been invalidated by technology.
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  The public education system is designed to create wage slaves, and is effectively doing that, but we don't need that many anymore. The other half of the problem is that our economy creates very few sources of income for the supposed "creative class", the newest Class of the New. If we say that our economy has evolved beyond the need for factory workers and we now need artists, writers, and hackers, we need to actually work on creating jobs for artists, writers and hackers (as distinct from mediocre programmers).
  - ilaksh 14y ago
    Well.. I actually think that anything that qualifies as a job is more or less going in the category of wage slave. I just think that the extreme hierarchies and subservience are unnecessary and detrimental. I think we need to examine our basic assumptions and have a realistic perspective about the actual level of suffering that is currently going on in the world. We need to see the extreme inequality as being unacceptable and move away from the Social Darwinian rationalizations.
    - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
      I agree with you, but then we have to overthrow capitalism completely. Unfortunately, socialism is considered impolite on HN.

94 points by imjk 14y ago

I'd like to see software engineers who are part of the hiring process in their company apply for their own position anonymously. Go through the whole enchilada: the phone interview, the code tests, the puzzles, the questions regarding optimization and performance, etc. Let's see if they can pass all the hurdles. I have $100 here that says most won't (if any). * If we can't hire people due to a broken system, how do we expect to succeed?

btian 14y ago
I'll add another $100. I think the fundamental problem is that employers are unwilling to take on someone unless they are absolutely certain that the candidate is the right person because firing is extremely difficult and complicated (with potential for law suits) if the new hire does not prove to be a good fit.
- misnome 14y ago
  I thought this was what probationary periods were for; evaluating a new employee with the opportunity to not continue their employment at the end of it.
- xsmasher 14y ago
  It's not just lawsuits. Getting a new hire equipped and up to speed takes resources, and drains productivity away from existing employees. Also, once you've done a little training the sunk costs fallacy can kick in, even if you wouldn't hire them in hindsight.
- mjwalshe 14y ago
  What in America the land of "at will" employment I find that very hard to believe.
- georgieporgie 14y ago
  I hear people talk about the supposed legal risks of hiring and firing. I've personally seen a number of firings, and I've never seen a single issue arise. While I'm not going to claim that nobody ever sues or shoots up the place, I think the frequency with which this happens is grossly overestimated. Along the same lines as myth of the burglar who sues the homeowner, and masses of MBAs abusing a single court case to rationalize their sociopathic and short-sighted business decisions.
EliRivers 14y ago
That makes no sense to me. I know exactly what skills my company needs (or rather, what the hiring people look for on the CV). I know exactly what the interview is looking for. I know exactly what programming language to brush up on, and I know the complete set of coding problems set in the interview. I know it so well that the last person I recommended (for the recruitment bounty) breezed through after I tipped her off on the coding questions. I could get through the whole process easily. I doubt I'm the only person. What kind of people set questions in interviews without knowing what answer they're hoping for? How do they know if the candidate is any good if they don't know the answer themselves? That sounds.... well, it sounds insane.
- antidoh 14y ago
  > What kind of people set questions in interviews without knowing what answer they're hoping for? The kind of people who want to "see how you think."
- why-el 14y ago
  I think you are missing the point. The challenge is to design a set of hurdles that are equivalent to those faced by potential hires, not the exact ones. Of course you ought to know what your company asks for. Furthermore, I don't think its all about the questions. Part of the challenge is to design the exact same circumstances, i.e. puzzles, phone interviews, travelling, amount of time to review what the company requires, length of interviews, and so on.
- codexon 14y ago
  breezed through after I tipped her off on the coding questions I probably botched an interview where they expected me to come up with an RB tree fast enough (it was a company that has posted on HN). Tipping people off to questions is cheating the test, so you have some people trying to temporarily bulk memorize algorithms that they'll forget in another month before an interview. Does anyone else not find this stupid?
  - rhizome 14y ago
    Did you ask them when the last time was that they had to use an RB tree in their software?
gcheong 14y ago
Well if I am working at a place that would tend to imply I did get through all that. Why would my chances be less a second time around? That said, I do agree that the hiring process is rather broken, just not sure that this would be a good test to show that.
chubbard 14y ago
Yea I have to agree with other posters. This is easy money for most software engineers because they have exactly the skills that will be posted on the ads, criteria that are checked, etc. I think even your challenge misses the point of the article which is when we post wanted ads we put down such specific skill sets that if we rigidly stick those skill sets, just like our software does, we'll miss the people that can grow into those roles. The irony is that software engineers are so much rarer than everyone else in the market we can easily be hand screened thus bypassing the very software we created. Finding software engineers is really hard because there are so few so either you don't get a lot of people applying, which makes it easy to screen by hand, or you set the bar very low to get people in the door. Then you go through 6 months to find the right person. If you aren't a software person its much much harder to find a job because there are so many other people looking for jobs. You have to compete much harder, downward wage pressure, etc. Hence the volume increasingly demands automated solutions that make it even harder to get past the screeners. I happen to agree with this article that we do a poor job of specifying the skills that are absolutely mandatory vs. what's nice to have. If we back off on rigid skill set we can find great people than can grow into a job.
crusso 14y ago
I've been on the hiring manager's side and the employee's side, more the former than the latter. I don't get your beef. The phone interviews are there to screen the 80% of the applicants who don't merit the time of my team to interview them. The puzzles are there to watch people think on their feet. The detailed questions are to see if you're looking at someone superficial or someone with deep knowledge of the subject matter. The programming challenges are to see if the applicant wants the job badly enough to spend a couple of hours working on a programming problem that can then be used as a showcase for how they write some software. Earlier in my career, I didn't have all those interview techniques in place. When I started, hiring people was a complete crap shoot and I ended up with some total lemons. Like the warning labels on products you buy, each interview technique I added to the process was the result of a lame hire that in hindsight, I could have avoided had I used that technique. The last job I had to interview for used all the techniques above. I found the interview process to be thorough and challenging. I appreciated the rigor of the interview process since it meant that the people hiring really gave a shit about the quality of the people joining their small team. I got the job. In point of fact, if they hadn't had a thorough interview process, I probably would have passed on the job offer since that would have been an indication to me that they were naive and didn't have their crap together. Do you want to send me your $100 via Paypal?
- rmATinnovafy 14y ago
  I don't have a beef with it. I also think that of you apply to the jobs posted on HN, you will get my point. Sadly, I don't use Paypal. You can make a donation to your local hackerspace with the $100 that you will soon lose. Good luck. PS. Have you ever asked the people you have interviewed what they think about the process?
  - mgkimsal 14y ago
    "Have you ever asked the people you have interviewed what they think about the process?", especially, perhaps, the people you didn't hire? Almost without exception, people who don't get hired never hear back from a company as to why. Yes, I know all about "everyone's afraid to get sued for saying something wrong". So... develop a neutral feedback form to candidates as to why they were passed over, skills the interviewer(s) thought were lacking, etc. This will mean that people can get better, perhaps get another job (yes, maybe at a competitor, but also maybe somewhere else entirely), and continue to earn income, pay taxes, and contribute to society in a productive way. Some people can contribute without a job, sure, but right now most people need jobs. Telling someone "we're sorry - we had 8 candidates apply for this position, and we ended up taking on someone with more experience in X, Y and Z compared to your experience level. We wish you the best of luck in your job search". This would be courteous, professional and helpful all at the same time. Between my own experience and that of several colleagues, fewer than 5% of employers ever provide something even remotely useful in terms of feedback. How do we expect the job seeking population to get better without providing feedback mechanisms for them to learn from?
noonespecial 14y ago
You might find out something frightening. Getting the job mostly just came down to luck.
- rmATinnovafy 14y ago
  Exactly. Maybe the CEO got a not so gentle nudge from the investors to hurry up and hire somebody and you were the one they were interviewing next. Stuff like that happens a lot. The process is more about outside factors than the actual interviewing process itself.
- entangld 14y ago
  People in the real world realize that outside factors have a lot to do with hiring. But when these conversations turn into arguments it all comes down to some applicants being more "qualified." There are lots of reasons people get hired to do jobs they've never done before and lot of those reasons are subjective.
philwelch 14y ago
In most cases that's how the engineers got hired on in the first place, so I don't understand your beef. Plus, what you really want is to hire people better than the ones you already have.
anonymoushn 14y ago
I've never received an offer to work as a software engineer other than by going through the whole interview process. My impression was that the vast majority of other people who became software engineers at the companies I applied to had done the same. I'll take your bet, if you are still inclined to give away money.
mahyarm 14y ago
Most of them had to go through the same thing to be hired.

deleted 14y ago

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jmorton 14y ago

I think it is strange to rely on HR and recruiters as a filter. I would prefer someone to introduce themselves to the entire company: tell me what you can do and what you want to do, send me a reference to any relevant portfolio, and I'll take it from there. Hopefully this approach will discourage overly tailored cover letters, who knows. The article talks about this specifically, "the trick is parroting all the words in the job description but not just copying and pasting the text" This is pretty much why I started building They Meet You (theymeetyou.com) during my spare time. The way the site works right now is pretty simple. You can write a message that is meant for anyone at a company (@customink.com), anyone that proves they have an email address there can read it and exchange their contact info.

TDL 14y ago
While I think the problems discussed in the article need some resolution there is another issue that they do not discuss and which you allude to. Too many people are leading with their resumes and, more or less, blindly applying to jobs. Getting to know people in the industry you want to work in and the companies you would like to work at is a significantly better approach.

tristan_juricek 14y ago

This just smacks of big dumb companies trying to "automate away" HR and not really paying attention to the consequences. And, candidates not figuring out HR systems. What I fear, however, is that this isn't really a problem for the executives for a public company. Their real compensation these days is all tied to stock prices; I don't see the incentive to really care about HR. How does adding people change the stock price? (Usually I only hear about it from the other way; cutting jobs to cut costs.) Have you ever heard of investor pressure to hire candidates?

TDL 14y ago
It becomes an issue when there are too many vacancies and revenues begin to fall. Most c-level executives don't have their comp tied to stock prices, but to revenue growth (which is as bad as having it tied stock prices.) That being said, this definitely a heavy case of big & dumb.
- sokoloff 14y ago
  Every C-level exec with share-based (RSU or option) compensation quite clearly has their comp tied to share prices. I doubt very many C-level execs at public companies have no share-based comp.

pnathan 14y ago

One thing I hope to be able to do in my career is, as I come into points where I am hiring, I can look at everything in my resume queue without having some software or some unqualified individual tell me who is qualified and who isn't. I hope to be able to spread a wide net to find the best... not a fine net to find a unicorn.

yumraj 14y ago

While I agree that this indeed sounds like a problem, and a genuine one at that, for the HN community this should also sound like an opportunity, to create a resume sorting systems that is much much better than the ones out there. Are there startups already looking at this problem? If not, why not? And, who's up for a challenge?

its_so_on 14y ago
The thing is, it's not a resume-sorting problem at all. Most people aren't even qualified to be who they are. In general, people aren't qualified to do their jobs. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be doing them, or be hired to do them. It means the qualification system is broken.
rmATinnovafy 14y ago
The problem is not the software. The problem are the employers. Everyone wants the perfect candidate. But no candidate is perfect. Everyone has good skills and bad baggage to carry from job to job. The aim should be to find people who will add to the team rather than building a perfect team. You can't do that with software (yet).
- yumraj 14y ago
  Well you're agreeing with me when you say "yet", and hence my comment about opportunity. The problem is the software and the software is not going to go away. The opportunity is to make the software more intelligent so that the output is more in line with what would work.
  - rhizome 14y ago
    Why haven't DICE or Indeed.com or whoever seem to have done any work on that front? I'm thinking the ROI isn't there.
    - tomjen3 14y ago
      Considering that it costs 20% for a match by a recruitment company, there is enourmous ROI for a program like that. It would almost be as good as the ability to print money. Not to mention the cost you could get for the unemployed to sign up ("It costs you on average 2k/month not to use our service").

chuckp 14y ago

Most companies will put a litany of skill sets on the requirements list, however what they are really looking for is what crusso pointed out, someone with critical thinking skills. Be it a customer service rep, or a software engineer, when the employer says "Do X" if you don't know how to do it, figure it out. So many people will just sit there and stare into their screen or at a wall. That is the type of person these tests are designed to weed out. As others pointed out, if you are not willing to put in the effort and jump through the hoops, why bother, either you feel your too good for the job and won't apply yourself, or you lack the basic understanding of problem solving and troubleshooting.

randomdata 14y ago
Maybe in theory, but I read a couple of posts on HN in just the last few days of people complaining that potential hires they were interviewing couldn't even rhyme off things like basic data structures. If critical thinking was the skill being sought, rote memorization seems like it shouldn't have any emphasis at all. You can always look up data structures, or whatever, but that is often not good enough.

nhangen 14y ago

This is spot on. I've been on both sides of the fence, and in multiple disciplines. The strange thing I found is that finding a job as a developer has been just as difficult, if not more so, than finding a non-technical job. On the non-technical side, the basic requirements are exactly that - basic. Have some experience, a certification or two, and a specialized degree. That doesn't make it easy, but it makes the path somewhat concrete. And on the technical side, there are very few companies willing to hire entry level developers. They all seem to want code ninjas, which is fine, but here's the thing...if I'm a code ninja, why would I work for someone else when I could build something of my own without the requirement of commuting to an office and clocking in/out. On the employer side, I've found far less people applying for technical jobs than non-technical jobs. It has taken much longer to fill mid-level technical positions than entry-mid level non-technical positions. Building a team is difficult. Joining a team is difficult. It's a very strange time indeed.

crusso 14y ago
> The strange thing I found is that finding a job as a developer has been just as difficult, if not more so, than finding a non-technical job. It's easier to bullshit when interviewing for non-technical jobs. Technical jobs have mostly-objective tests you can give to candidates where they have to program stuff, solve equations, etc. Non-technical jobs have squishy mostly-subjective tests that aren't very reliable at gauging anything.

alister 14y ago

There's a failure of logic in this article that no one is pointing out. If employers are so picky that they can't find anyone to hire, then they will have to lower their standards if they want to hire anyone. There might be a delay--like the guy that waits for the supermodel to come along, but eventually settling for the pretty girl next door. Ultimately the problem is self-correcting.

kfk 14y ago
And employers are not that picky either. Most of the things they ask, at least in Europe, are pretty basic. For a finance is usually a bachelor, English skills, some prove you are not a lazy ass. Of course, requirements go up with better positions, but this article deceives into thinking that employers are looking for stars even in entry level jobs, it doesn't look like that to me. I am still convinced the problem is on the employee side...

nostromo 14y ago

The US should find ways to make employers less risk-averse. There are lots of ways worth exploring. For example: maybe if you fire someone in the first 6 months you are immune from wrongful termination lawsuits and don't have to pay higher unemployment insurance. A lot of resistance to firing is also caused by moral concerns -- we could fix that by making sure these fired workers are still eligible for unemployment. This would be extra beneficial for young people, who really just need to get a foot in the door to prove themselves -- they need someone to take a risk. Well, maybe we should reduce the risk.

Locke1689 14y ago
Most US states are at-will states, meaning they're already immune from wrongful termination, except for discriminatory reasons. No matter how long the employee has been there.
- mikeryan 14y ago
  While "At-Will" in theory means that they're immune from wrongful termination, there's some major exceptions in most of those states. See "Covenant of good faith and fair dealing" (which in some states mean you have to be fired for 'just cause') and "Implied contract exceptions". I say these not to indicate you're wrong, mostly to make sure the entrepreneurs around here understand that even in a lot of "At-Will" states they might not be able fire completely with impunity. w/r/t the GP as long as the rules around a trial period are set via an employee handbook or in the contract, generally in the US we're fairly free to try people out and let them go, the US is actually more liberal in this then a lot of European countries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
mgkimsal 14y ago
You'd end up seeing a lot of 5 month and 29 day employment terms for people. It'd be no effective difference than 'contract and perhaps hire later', except so many people are averse to 'contract' work for reasons (sometimes valid ones) that have little to do with the work and more to do with the culture of 'benefits'. I don't quite know how we as a culture do it, but we need to wean ourselves off of 'employer-provided benefits'. Getting back to a more consumer-driven market vs large employer group-driven market will make our job/work situations easier for generations to come.

tokenadult 14y ago

The underlying problem is that most companies rely on hiring procedures that are empirically demonstrated to be suboptimal. Companies rely on industry tradition or the gut feelings of the boss rather than on research to decide hiring practices. The review article "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings" http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%... sums up, current to 1998, much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring practices. There are many kinds of hiring screens, such as resume reviews for job experience, telephone interviews, in-person interviews, checks for academic credentials, and so on. Most of the most commonly used means for screening job applicants, such as those mentioned in the submitted (like matching job titles in previous positions) are basically useless. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations. The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well (but only about at the 0.5 level, standing alone). One is a general cognitive ability test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general cognitive ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than anything else that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes. For legal reasons in the United States (the same consideration does not apply in other countries), it is difficult to give job applicants a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of a hiring process. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case in the United States Supreme Court http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196978&q=Griggs+Duke+Power&hl=en&as_sdt=2,24 http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196... held that cognitive ability tests used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring process had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring process might be illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants and is not supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job. Companies outside the United States are regulated by different laws. So don't set up stupid HR procedures like those described in the submitted article, even if those stupid procedures can be automated. Instead, figure out how to give applicants a work sample test, or figure out how to validate a general cognitive ability test for the applicants you desire to hire. Automating USEFUL processes can be helpful. There is no reason to automate a process that is not worth doing.

abalone 14y ago

Software that discards applicants based on simple keyword mismatch doesn't "raise the bar."

greghinch 14y ago

"His son, now 25 years old, graduated in 2010 with a degree in classics from St. John's College and couldn't find a job." This is the problem right here. Gee I wonder why you couldn't find a job in "Classics"? Because there aren't any, at least with an undergraduate degree. People pay you to work because you can perform a given task with a level of quality and consistency. We tell kids that they should study whatever makes them happy in college, but then when they graduate and can't find a job it's not their fault. Fine you study your BS degree, but don't expect to be handed a job when you graduate. Expect to work some menial job, or do what this kid did, go back to school and learn a trade. You'll have to prove to someone that you have some employable skill if you want to earn money. Having a job isn't a right.

ilaksh 14y ago

He makes good points about the software filtering out qualified applicants, but I don't think that is the underlying problem. The underlying problem is that there is a lot of unemployment and therefore too many people applying for too few jobs. We just don't need that many people to order around anymore now that we have so much hardware and software automation. The public education system is designed to create wage slaves, and is effectively doing that, but we don't need that many anymore. Another part of it of course is just that we are in an 'economic' down period and therefore have to be extremely selective when hiring since no one can afford any dead weight or even to do much training. The entire 'economic' model has been invalidated by technology.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago
The public education system is designed to create wage slaves, and is effectively doing that, but we don't need that many anymore. The other half of the problem is that our economy creates very few sources of income for the supposed "creative class", the newest Class of the New. If we say that our economy has evolved beyond the need for factory workers and we now need artists, writers, and hackers, we need to actually work on creating jobs for artists, writers and hackers (as distinct from mediocre programmers).
- ilaksh 14y ago
  Well.. I actually think that anything that qualifies as a job is more or less going in the category of wage slave. I just think that the extreme hierarchies and subservience are unnecessary and detrimental. I think we need to examine our basic assumptions and have a realistic perspective about the actual level of suffering that is currently going on in the world. We need to see the extreme inequality as being unacceptable and move away from the Social Darwinian rationalizations.
  - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
    I agree with you, but then we have to overthrow capitalism completely. Unfortunately, socialism is considered impolite on HN.