14 ms·

The Way We Hire Is All Wrong

168 points by mhr_online 12y ago

bsder 12y ago
While I do agree that the interview process is arbitrary, I think that having a 50% success rate indicts far more than that. If "success" is a coin flip, that means that EVERYTHING inside a company failed--interviewing, hiring, training, management, everything. If even one of those things was working, the success rate should be better than a coin flip.
- annnnd 12y ago
  I think the part about the coin flip is misleading on two counts: 1) if you chose randomly from the pool of job applications, does OP really think you have 50% chance to fail / not fail? (probability doesn't work this way) 2) what does it mean that the hire "failed"? EDIT: I do agree with the general sentiment of the article though.
- skolor 12y ago
  I'm a little unclear what "success" is. Does the quote just mean within 18 months 50% of employees have left the company? Surely it doesn't mean that 50% of employees are getting fired after 18 months. A median employment length of 18 months seems low but ultimately within a reasonable range to me.
- ecaradec 12y ago
  You can't deduce that because oncologist patients often die in 18 month, oncologist are lesser doctors. Patient died because they were so sick when they arrive that there wasn't a lot of hope left. 50% success rate doesn't indicate that recruiting is like throwing a coin flip. If there are only 10% of people that can do the job across interviewee, then throwing a coin would get you just 10% of people able to do the job. However if there was a pool were 80% of people are able to do the job, getting 50% would be worse than picking anyone randomly. Bayesian logic :)
biot 12y ago
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859199 for a great discussion (329 comments) on Brooke Allen's APL hiring story.
namelezz 12y ago
How to tell if you are incompetent?
- fsloth 12y ago
  If this is about populations, I would say incompetence is a poor metric. I would measure competence, so that sorting in order of competence just leaves some individuals in the end - in the scope of the metric. They are then least competent. It's way easier to point out to competence than incompetence. I would use as a prime measure of competence finishing things (projects, software, assignments). While failure to complete things can be due to various facts (including the possibility that the deliverable was impossible to complete in the first place) completion, delivering, is a clear, logical measure. So, to me, true artists ship, shipping is a good measure of competence but lack of deliverables does not prove incompetence, it just means lack of evidence for competence. "Incompetent" as a word has a really nasty sound to it. Also, people learn, so several failed projects can actually lead eventually to a success and delivery, if the person is able and willing.
whiddershins 12y ago
What a bizarre and compelling story. Glad to have read it. Meanwhile I think the hiring problem/solution is staring us right in the face. What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default? Isn't it perhaps weird that there is an assumption companies and employees should bind their fates together, and, if it doesn't work out, one or both parties is pretty screwed because of an investment of time and money which will likely result in a person being unemployed and/or a company paying a person far beyond when they are providing value. This is like getting married after one date. Every time. If employees were assumed to be exploring many things simultaneously, both sides would have plenty of chances to gather meaningful data about the employer/employee relationship, and if it is really a great fit, a long term employment arrangement could be worked out, with a contract that reflects mutual responsibilities revolving around this shift to an all-eggs-in-one-basket situation for the employee - and likely a corresponding move to much more critical functions being performed for the company. I cynically suspect the current concept of full-time work evolved to suit employers, it allows them to manipulate and scare employees, especially when (for example) health insurance is at stake. Employers naturally have more data about salaries and so forth, in general most employers have many employees, while most employees only have one employer. That is inherently asymmetrical. Now that certain skill sets are harder to hire for, it is hurting everyone. But the situation was never that great from the beginning, let's figure out a way to make it better for everyone.
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  Many companies hire contractors and then turn them into permanent employees.
  - aswerty 12y ago
    While that sounds like a reasonable hiring approach most of the contractors I know (in the UK and Ireland) wouldn't take permanency because contractors earn significantly more. Maybe it's a bit different in the US though.
    - crdoconnor 12y ago
lordnacho 12y ago
One thing I've wondered is why companies hire people one at a time. Barely anyone works alone on anything, yet to decide whether to hire someone, you invite people individually through a funnel process and expect them to be able to work together. The best teams are not necessarily the ones with the most Ivy Leaguers on them. Why don't more companies let the applicants self-organise, and then hire the best teams?
- jib 12y ago
  Because often you are not hiring a team, you only have so much work/budget. And if you do, odds are you will need to break up the team a short while afterwards for some other needs. And you want to merge them into existing teams anyways, to not lose institutional knowledge. I think almost all "hire a team" hirings happen as aquihires - if the team has proven that they can deliver something over time - great, buy their company. I dont see how ability to organise as a team could be done in a short enough time that you could evaluate them on anything other than "is someone in the group good at organising a team". At which point I'd probably just want to hire that guy anyways, because I know I can split them off and have him organise another team too.
- onion2k 12y ago
  One thing I've wondered is why companies hire people one at a time. Because people leave one at a time.
- fsloth 12y ago
  "Hiring a team" is typically called outsourcing or consulting.
- obiefernandez 12y ago
  Extreme case: Hire the A-team of programming http://atsytp.strikingly.com/ http://atsytp.strikingly.com/
  - deleted 12y ago
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  - 12y ago
exo762 12y ago
> In 2012, for example, consulting firm Leadership IQ announced it had tracked 20,000 new hires over time and discovered that 46% of them had failed within 18 months. In other words, most recruiting practices are about as effective as a coin toss. This does not take into account amount of candidates that have been rejected.
- aaron695 12y ago
  Yes, it's a nonsense statement. Like the Google stories, which also are not true. Shame, the Staffup Weekend in itself would have been an interesting writeup.
lultimouomo 12y ago
Published 2 days ago, link to previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8947958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8947958
auggierose 12y ago
I didn't even read the story after this gem: "In 2012, for example, consulting firm Leadership IQ announced it had tracked 20,000 new hires over time and discovered that 46% of them had failed within 18 months. In other words, most recruiting practices are about as effective as a coin toss." Now, what's wrong with this reasoning? :-)
- brohee 12y ago
  Yeah they fail to understand that should the recruitment be a coin toss, 80% would fail. This is because the good candidates resume are hidden in a forest of bad resume, from people submitting resume for jobs they are obviously unqualified for. Pretty well explained in http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDevelopers.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...
- jia_min 12y ago
  You might be interested in this utility app that calculates the probability of a successful hire created by an I/O Psychologist: https://morgan.shinyapps.io/utility_calculator/ https://morgan.shinyapps.io/utility_calculator/ It takes the base rate of successful performance into account.
askinakhan 12y ago
I strongly believe that hiring should be based on data. Based on the following 5 factors: 1.Intellect 2.Values 3.Motivations 4.Behaviours 5.Experience With these factors you can determine a persons Cultural Fit and predicted future performance. In fact, you could automate this through technology. For example, for predicting future performance we could test the high performers in our company then we have a template for what motivations and behaviours high performers are likely to exhibit. Based on this we can then assess new comers and map them against high performers. The more highly correlated they are, the more likely you should be to hire them. For culture, if you currently like the culture of your company you could simply assess the values of all your employees, average them and assess new applicants against this and depending on correlation, hire them or not. This could be done through a CFT (Cultural Fit Tool) But this is just one suggestion. Software that enables this could work quite well IMO.
- skj 12y ago
  Any system that classifies people who have knowledge of the system will be gamed. eg the endless battle between Google search quality and SEO hackers.
- pjc50 12y ago
  1.Intellect 2.Values 3.Motivations 4.Behaviours 5.Experience All of those are extremely subjective. And trying to replicate your existing staff will give you an unimaginative company of yes-men.
  - baudehlo 12y ago
    Because our current processes have resulted in such diversity in the workspace? /s
- baudehlo 12y ago
  I have no idea why this comment got so downvoted. This is exactly the software I've spent the last year building and it works incredibly well for our customers.
  - 12y ago
FLUX-YOU 12y ago
>Staffup Weekend put the lie to Stein’s pronouncement. As Nicholson later wrote me, “The fact that people stayed for 48 hours to work on something put them head and shoulders above the thousands of applications we receive, because the participants are people who show up and see things through.” And this event is an attempt to make showing up for a 48 hour 'work trial' a norm. This favors the younger, single population, and while you're working on whatever this event is, you are not putting more resumes out. There's the potential for abuse in getting free work out of applicants from other people mimicking this event. (How long until we're tossed into an arena with bows and arrows only to survive and rewrite every algorithm from a CS degree on a whiteboard?) Although the 46% percentage figure was shown in this thread to be wrong/bad, even if you consider hiring as a coin-toss, your success still depends on how many resumes you can put out there. You have to balance the time it takes to tailor your resume to the company versus moving on and finding the next company to submit a resume to. At the extremes, some people don't tailor at all and throw their resume and cover letter at everyone in a suit. Others will do deep-dive research and make 27 drafts of a resume/cover to the point where they already know more about the company than the person who may hire them. I still think there's significant coin-tossery going on: if the companies are having to filter everyone because there is so much volume, then you must at least do as much as you can to increase your own output. The 'trick' then is to just know someone who can put in a good word (and it really has always been an option) This may work for some job sectors as a novel hiring process (it's certainly overblown for retail/fast food) but if it scales up, you'll end up taking significant bargaining power from individuals. To say nothing if companies start replacing their current employees with the winners from these kinds of events.
- deleted 12y ago
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- ansible 12y ago
  And this event is an attempt to make showing up for a 48 hour 'work trial' a norm. This favors the younger, single population, and while you're working on whatever this event is, you are not putting more resumes out. There's the potential for abuse in getting free work out of applicants from other people mimicking this event. Totally agree. Sounds like each applicant should be getting paid or something. Even so, dropping the rest of your life for two days stinks. You have to balance the time it takes to tailor your resume to the company versus moving on and finding the next company to submit a resume to. At the extremes, some people don't tailor at all and throw their resume and cover letter at everyone in a suit. Others will do deep-dive research and make 27 drafts of a resume/cover to the point where they already know more about the company than the person who may hire them. You know, there should be an app for that. Something where you can just put in everything, and then when sending out one resume to a particular company, it would help you customize it for them. Maybe you could feed in the job ad, and the app uses some fancy NLP to then select which topics you should emphasize on your resume. It should also keep track of what version you've sent out to whom, so that you can view it when talking to the potential employer on the phone.
wink 12y ago
Is it me or is there no author name? I mean, it could be deliberately anonymous but then that's usually noted. It was a really interesting read but I am probably just being grumpy and not a fan of medium.
- fecak 12y ago
  It's in the "footer" of the page continuously as you scroll the entire article. Name is Deborah Branscum.
  - wink 12y ago
    Oh my, thanks. On a different monitor now I see the light gray "WRITTEN ON JAN 26 BY" on white background.
barrkel 12y ago
It's not clear what the author of the story did. Mr Programmer did the programming and Ms UX did project management and UI. She's an "ideas person", isn't she.
VLM 12y ago
"We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess." Something overlooked is the millions (billions?) of non-productive labor hours that go into the failed traditional hiring process, when even the smartest guys in the room have to admit that upon statistical analysis its all a waste of time. That's an enormous staggering financial drain on the economy. Overall, across the entire economy, the overall minimum cost mode of hiring would appear to be a union work hall. So employer shows up and the dude who's been sitting there unemployed the longest is hired. This would require incompetent people to admit their own incompetence, so its never going to be implemented, we're all above average here and just because no one else can do traditional hiring correctly doesn't mean I won't be the first to ever get it right because I've been told since birth I'm a special snowflake and I have the participation trophies to prove it, etc. I'm not saying we have to unionize (whole nother topic) but stealing the union work hall "technology" would seem a very wise idea.
- jia_min 12y ago
  From the NYT's article quoting Laszlo Bock: "Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring." Google made the classic mistake of using the interviewer as the predictor of interest. Meanwhile, decades of research has shown it's not who does the asking but how and what you ask. For example, structured interviews are about 50% more predictive of job performance (r = .51) compared to unstructured interviews (i.e., the way almost everyone interviews; r = .38). So why did Google run this experiment when they had an army of Industrial/Organizational Psychologists who already knew the research? They wanted to collect their own data and test the theories on their own employees, which I encourage and applaud.
  - wnissen 12y ago
    Do you have a cite for this? I thought Google looked at interviewers and found that no particular interviewer did any better than any other, except, literally, one guy in a narrow sub-specialty. That's quite a lot different than concluding a 50% success rate is no better than chance, which I agree would be problematic at best, flat wrong at worst if the expected occurrence was low.
iolothebard 12y ago
The way people hire is all wrong in my opinion too, this is even worse.
- owennoah 12y ago
  May I ask why? And more what you feel is a good third way?
vonnik 12y ago
Nicholson here. I sponsored Staffup Weekend, brought Brooke Allen to SF, and helped Deborah Branscum write her story for Medium. I did it because I'm the in-house recruiter for FutureAdvisor (https://www.futureadvisor.com https://www.futureadvisor.com), and recruiting is a mess. FutureAdvisor hired me to do PR. But after we raised our Series B last year, our main problem was converting capital to talent, so that's what I did. I didn't choose recruiting; recruiting chose me. Just like it will choose many of the hackers on this thread who become entrepreneurs. I hope they can learn from our story. The first thing a new recruiter notices is that recruiting is incredibly wasteful. It wastes time, emotion and money (contingency-based recruiters charge employers about 25% of a hire's first year salary, so they're paying an extra $35K to hire a software engineer at $140K). It wastes them for both the candidates and the hiring managers. Many of the flaws of the process arise from that wastefulness. The problem at the heart of recruiting is how to gather good information about strangers in order to make a long-term commitment. It's basically the same problem you have when you're dating. And, just as in dating, there's a lot of noise in the market. Everyone's beautiful with a little Photoshop. It takes a long time to get to learn who they really are, and what they can do. To illustrate how wasteful the job market is, just imagine that both candidates and recruiters are sending out very similar, only slightly tailored information to every person on their list, day after day. If someone bites, then you escalate commitment and do a preliminary phone call. I, as a recruiter, take the call with the candidate, because we don't know how good they are yet, and I cannot waste my engineers' time. We are strapped. That's why we need to hire people. (Non-technical recruiters get a lot of hate from technical candidates who do not understand this.) If the candidate answers all the questions right that I have been instructed to ask, then I pass them on to the engineers for two technical interviews. If those go well, we invite them in for an onsite visit. In 90% of all cases, the onsite visit results either the company or the candidate rejecting the other. At that point, almost all the information they have gathered about each other is thrown out and never thought of again. (Sure, Glassdoor has some reviews and tips, but they're minimal.) That's the waste. Those rejections do not necessarily imply that the company or the candidate is bad, or unsuitable to work with at all, just that they're not quite the right fit. It's just like dating. Sometimes the chemistry ain't right. That doesn't mean anyone's a bad person. There are a couple ways that we, singly and collectively, can try to solve this problem. And they all have to do with how the information is processed. Employers who trust each other could join together in a cross-referral system where they share candidates who were talented but not quite the right fit. FutureAdvisor is part of a couple of those networks, like YC, and they work OK. Their main purpose is to get total strangers one step further toward entering the circle of trust. Candidates could do the same for each other. It would be a sort of viral networking, where within a circle of trust, everybody's contacts become everyone else's contacts. In both cases, information that one candidate or employer has gathered at great cost to themselves can be shared, rather than thrown away. Another aspect of the job market is that companies and candidates are asking for the wrong information. Google used to ask for GPAs and Ivy League pedigrees, both crappy metrics. The great thing about professions like programming and design is that you can show your stuff. (Bizdev and middle managers, as a counter example, have a much harder time providing a portfolio of what they do.) With makers, at least there's a baseline. All hiring managers need to do, after they look at your Github, is figure out whether you are in fact the person who coded it, and how much time it takes you to solve similar problems. Another way of saying this: The only thing that correlates with performance is performance. And that's all that good companies should care about. So how do they obtain that information in an efficient way? Batch processing. Staffup Weekend was an attempt at batch processing. We wanted to see a lot of people work at the same time. We made the event free. We asked people to create something they cared about. The ones that came, did so voluntarily. Whether they got a job or not, they walked away having done something they wanted to do. It was a pretty good experience. But it could have been a lot better. I wish that other employers had been involved, to make it more valuable for the candidates who attended (we invited other companies, but got little response.) I could have given better feedback on the work people did. On a meta level, teams were invited to create tools to fix the job market. One group created a Chrome plugin called Contactr.io, which shows you the emails of company founders when you visit their corporate website. There are probably a lot of other ways to fix things. I hope someone on Hacker News will found something that makes hiring and getting a job easier. That person will become rich, famous and universally loved. I also hope that someone reading this post is an infrastructure engineer with AWS, Linux, Bash and Ruby under his or her belt. If that's you, please write: chris dot nicholson at futureadvisor dot com. Only you can save us, Obi-Wan. https://boards.greenhouse.io/futureadvisor/jobs/26313#.VMkv_MbZvTA https://boards.greenhouse.io/futureadvisor/jobs/26313#.VMkv_...
BrookeTAllen 12y ago
https://medium.com/@BrookeTAllen/give-us-your-tired-your-poor-your-overly-automated-b08e067ca18e https://medium.com/@BrookeTAllen/give-us-your-tired-your-poo...
BrookeTAllen 12y ago
This is awesome; I am so thrilled you are talking about this. I am preparing a response to Deborah’s article; working title: A Hackathon Cannot Fix a Broken Hiring Process. But the Right Experiences Can. You see, in 2004 my life changed when I started caring about the people I did not hire. You discussed that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859199 But the thing you probably don’t get, and I didn't get until much later, is that I did not create a hiring process. And it sure wasn't a contest with a job at the end (as many of you think). It was an experience. For the people who engaged with the experience it was life-changing. For those who didn't it wasn't. Certainly for the people I hired it was life changing. Changing jobs will change your life – what would be the point otherwise? And certainly going from unemployment to employment changes your life; how could it not? And working for me will definitely change your life because I grok this better than almost anyone you’ll ever meet. But I want to change everyone’s life whether they work for me or not because I never wanted to be a programmer, or an analyst, or a hedge fund manager or all those other things I have had the accidental good fortune of becoming. All I've ever wanted to be since the sixth grade is a teacher. See this: http://internationalfamilymag.com/IFarchives/archives/sep07/stories.htm http://internationalfamilymag.com/IFarchives/archives/sep07/... Most of the attendees experienced a hackathon because they couldn't figure out how to experience anything else. After all, this was held in the Bay Area in 2014. The exact same thing could have been held in London in 1842 and yet nobody could have possibly experienced a hackathon back then. When you read her article, notice that Deborah poses a question but doesn't answer it. She talks about her experience of the other attendees but doesn't offer to introduce any of them to readers who might be hiring. She ends the article with a really good suggestion that someone should create Smartup Weekend to slap some sense into employers. She asks, “Who wants in?” But she doesn't even buy the domain name. Doesn't she know that you shouldn't mention a domain name you don’t own in a coffee shop anywhere near San Francisco because the guy next to you will buy it and then try to sell it to you for $10,000. And NEVER EVER do that in print. (Of course, as soon as I read her piece I snapped up SmartupWeekend.com and I offer to transfer it to anyone who can convince me they will actually build something rather than just talk about it. I’ll give it to you for free on condition that if you don’t do much with it then I get it back.) In short, so far Deborah has reported on her experience, but hasn't fully ENGAGED WITH IT. Deborah’s experience of Staffup Weekend is only beginning now. I am confident that someday she will see that weekend as a pivotal point in her life. I’m less sure about the rest of the attendees because I have seen no evidence they have engaged with the experience as anything but a contest they have lost. After all, Deborah organized a 1-month reunion and nobody showed up. There is still hope if these folks reflect on what happened, refer to their notes (surely they took notes), then refactor the whole thing and reflect on what they can still learn. But even if they don’t do that, I’m sure every one of them could be excellent employees under the right circumstances because, as Woody Allen says, 80% of success is showing up and they did way more than that. You can see everyone here: http://staffupweekend.org/2014/11/22/report-on-staffup-san-francisco-nov-1-2-2014/ http://staffupweekend.org/2014/11/22/report-on-staffup-san-f... If you’d like to meet any of them then let me know. I’ll gladly make the introduction.
dlwj 12y ago
The thing I didn't realize about the hiring process before going through it a couple times is that it's not an inherently evil process or system. It's just that no one knows what the hell they are doing. It's Hanlon's razor. The initial filtering is done by HR people only looking for keywords and looking for canned answers to basic questions. They can also be done by recruiters hired by a hiring manager who hired every recruiter, thus inundating themselves with resumes by their own fault thinking more would be better The phone screen will check you for "status". Having an Ivy League education will help because even if you fail completely the hiring manager won't lose face. If he takes a chance on a non-ivy league he will be roasted for wasting company resources. You will also have to claim to be very very passionate thus over-promising and in a position of constant not-good-enough-its-an-honor-to-work-here. After they decide to bring you in, random people are chosen based on their free time to interview you. The list will usually include an extroverted person who tries to be buddy-buddy too soon and feels stiffed unless the other person has a similar personality. A puzzle lover who looked up an answer to a riddle before-hand and uses it to gauge your IQ. A new person who googled some good questions to ask just a few minutes before and makes sure he knows the answer. An H1B employee who doesn't speak that clearly and assumes you are an idiot when you ask a simple question to be repeated. Finally a boss type will come in and make a final decision. The process is semi-democratic in that her yes cannot go against many no's but her no can veto the yes's. ---- Nowhere in this chain do people actually care. People are just trying to do their jobs. The hiring manager is trying to fill in slots b/c a project manager is behind schedule and needs and excuse. The interviewers want to "have beers with you" thus gauging your integrated-ness into american culture. Startup hiring is also fundamentally different and confusing. Young 20s make the best friends in their college days and often seek that same level of camaraderie in colleagues. However the resume process doesn't lend itself to that. You are essentially blind dating. Startups escape the large system failures of large companies and so can focus on product rather than system management, but they also have to relearn many thing or else follow a heuristic script in semblance of a skeleton system. (e.g. top schools only) ---- Broadly speaking however, jobs are becoming more and more sparse because tools allow one person to do the job of many. One very very smart person that is. It's already happening with many developer positions. Good tools for IT allow developers to do IT work, creating a merged "devOps" position. Easier web frameworks allow designers and developers to be merged. Good testing tools and frameworks gets rid of QAs. The merged positions reduce the amount of time required for these tasks but the new tool-user has to be super qualified.

168 points by mhr_online 12y ago

bsder 12y ago

While I do agree that the interview process is arbitrary, I think that having a 50% success rate indicts far more than that. If "success" is a coin flip, that means that EVERYTHING inside a company failed--interviewing, hiring, training, management, everything. If even one of those things was working, the success rate should be better than a coin flip.

annnnd 12y ago
I think the part about the coin flip is misleading on two counts: 1) if you chose randomly from the pool of job applications, does OP really think you have 50% chance to fail / not fail? (probability doesn't work this way) 2) what does it mean that the hire "failed"? EDIT: I do agree with the general sentiment of the article though.
skolor 12y ago
I'm a little unclear what "success" is. Does the quote just mean within 18 months 50% of employees have left the company? Surely it doesn't mean that 50% of employees are getting fired after 18 months. A median employment length of 18 months seems low but ultimately within a reasonable range to me.
ecaradec 12y ago
You can't deduce that because oncologist patients often die in 18 month, oncologist are lesser doctors. Patient died because they were so sick when they arrive that there wasn't a lot of hope left. 50% success rate doesn't indicate that recruiting is like throwing a coin flip. If there are only 10% of people that can do the job across interviewee, then throwing a coin would get you just 10% of people able to do the job. However if there was a pool were 80% of people are able to do the job, getting 50% would be worse than picking anyone randomly. Bayesian logic :)

biot 12y ago

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859199 for a great discussion (329 comments) on Brooke Allen's APL hiring story.

namelezz 12y ago

How to tell if you are incompetent?

fsloth 12y ago
If this is about populations, I would say incompetence is a poor metric. I would measure competence, so that sorting in order of competence just leaves some individuals in the end - in the scope of the metric. They are then least competent. It's way easier to point out to competence than incompetence. I would use as a prime measure of competence finishing things (projects, software, assignments). While failure to complete things can be due to various facts (including the possibility that the deliverable was impossible to complete in the first place) completion, delivering, is a clear, logical measure. So, to me, true artists ship, shipping is a good measure of competence but lack of deliverables does not prove incompetence, it just means lack of evidence for competence. "Incompetent" as a word has a really nasty sound to it. Also, people learn, so several failed projects can actually lead eventually to a success and delivery, if the person is able and willing.

whiddershins 12y ago

What a bizarre and compelling story. Glad to have read it. Meanwhile I think the hiring problem/solution is staring us right in the face. What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default? Isn't it perhaps weird that there is an assumption companies and employees should bind their fates together, and, if it doesn't work out, one or both parties is pretty screwed because of an investment of time and money which will likely result in a person being unemployed and/or a company paying a person far beyond when they are providing value. This is like getting married after one date. Every time. If employees were assumed to be exploring many things simultaneously, both sides would have plenty of chances to gather meaningful data about the employer/employee relationship, and if it is really a great fit, a long term employment arrangement could be worked out, with a contract that reflects mutual responsibilities revolving around this shift to an all-eggs-in-one-basket situation for the employee - and likely a corresponding move to much more critical functions being performed for the company. I cynically suspect the current concept of full-time work evolved to suit employers, it allows them to manipulate and scare employees, especially when (for example) health insurance is at stake. Employers naturally have more data about salaries and so forth, in general most employers have many employees, while most employees only have one employer. That is inherently asymmetrical. Now that certain skill sets are harder to hire for, it is hurting everyone. But the situation was never that great from the beginning, let's figure out a way to make it better for everyone.

crdoconnor 12y ago
Many companies hire contractors and then turn them into permanent employees.
- aswerty 12y ago
  While that sounds like a reasonable hiring approach most of the contractors I know (in the UK and Ireland) wouldn't take permanency because contractors earn significantly more. Maybe it's a bit different in the US though.
  - crdoconnor 12y ago

lordnacho 12y ago

One thing I've wondered is why companies hire people one at a time. Barely anyone works alone on anything, yet to decide whether to hire someone, you invite people individually through a funnel process and expect them to be able to work together. The best teams are not necessarily the ones with the most Ivy Leaguers on them. Why don't more companies let the applicants self-organise, and then hire the best teams?

jib 12y ago
Because often you are not hiring a team, you only have so much work/budget. And if you do, odds are you will need to break up the team a short while afterwards for some other needs. And you want to merge them into existing teams anyways, to not lose institutional knowledge. I think almost all "hire a team" hirings happen as aquihires - if the team has proven that they can deliver something over time - great, buy their company. I dont see how ability to organise as a team could be done in a short enough time that you could evaluate them on anything other than "is someone in the group good at organising a team". At which point I'd probably just want to hire that guy anyways, because I know I can split them off and have him organise another team too.
onion2k 12y ago
One thing I've wondered is why companies hire people one at a time. Because people leave one at a time.
fsloth 12y ago
"Hiring a team" is typically called outsourcing or consulting.
obiefernandez 12y ago
Extreme case: Hire the A-team of programming http://atsytp.strikingly.com/ http://atsytp.strikingly.com/
- deleted 12y ago
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exo762 12y ago

> In 2012, for example, consulting firm Leadership IQ announced it had tracked 20,000 new hires over time and discovered that 46% of them had failed within 18 months. In other words, most recruiting practices are about as effective as a coin toss. This does not take into account amount of candidates that have been rejected.

aaron695 12y ago
Yes, it's a nonsense statement. Like the Google stories, which also are not true. Shame, the Staffup Weekend in itself would have been an interesting writeup.

lultimouomo 12y ago

Published 2 days ago, link to previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8947958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8947958

auggierose 12y ago

I didn't even read the story after this gem: "In 2012, for example, consulting firm Leadership IQ announced it had tracked 20,000 new hires over time and discovered that 46% of them had failed within 18 months. In other words, most recruiting practices are about as effective as a coin toss." Now, what's wrong with this reasoning? :-)

brohee 12y ago
Yeah they fail to understand that should the recruitment be a coin toss, 80% would fail. This is because the good candidates resume are hidden in a forest of bad resume, from people submitting resume for jobs they are obviously unqualified for. Pretty well explained in http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDevelopers.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...
jia_min 12y ago
You might be interested in this utility app that calculates the probability of a successful hire created by an I/O Psychologist: https://morgan.shinyapps.io/utility_calculator/ https://morgan.shinyapps.io/utility_calculator/ It takes the base rate of successful performance into account.

askinakhan 12y ago

I strongly believe that hiring should be based on data. Based on the following 5 factors: 1.Intellect 2.Values 3.Motivations 4.Behaviours 5.Experience With these factors you can determine a persons Cultural Fit and predicted future performance. In fact, you could automate this through technology. For example, for predicting future performance we could test the high performers in our company then we have a template for what motivations and behaviours high performers are likely to exhibit. Based on this we can then assess new comers and map them against high performers. The more highly correlated they are, the more likely you should be to hire them. For culture, if you currently like the culture of your company you could simply assess the values of all your employees, average them and assess new applicants against this and depending on correlation, hire them or not. This could be done through a CFT (Cultural Fit Tool) But this is just one suggestion. Software that enables this could work quite well IMO.

skj 12y ago
Any system that classifies people who have knowledge of the system will be gamed. eg the endless battle between Google search quality and SEO hackers.
pjc50 12y ago
1.Intellect 2.Values 3.Motivations 4.Behaviours 5.Experience All of those are extremely subjective. And trying to replicate your existing staff will give you an unimaginative company of yes-men.
- baudehlo 12y ago
  Because our current processes have resulted in such diversity in the workspace? /s
baudehlo 12y ago
I have no idea why this comment got so downvoted. This is exactly the software I've spent the last year building and it works incredibly well for our customers.
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FLUX-YOU 12y ago

>Staffup Weekend put the lie to Stein’s pronouncement. As Nicholson later wrote me, “The fact that people stayed for 48 hours to work on something put them head and shoulders above the thousands of applications we receive, because the participants are people who show up and see things through.” And this event is an attempt to make showing up for a 48 hour 'work trial' a norm. This favors the younger, single population, and while you're working on whatever this event is, you are not putting more resumes out. There's the potential for abuse in getting free work out of applicants from other people mimicking this event. (How long until we're tossed into an arena with bows and arrows only to survive and rewrite every algorithm from a CS degree on a whiteboard?) Although the 46% percentage figure was shown in this thread to be wrong/bad, even if you consider hiring as a coin-toss, your success still depends on how many resumes you can put out there. You have to balance the time it takes to tailor your resume to the company versus moving on and finding the next company to submit a resume to. At the extremes, some people don't tailor at all and throw their resume and cover letter at everyone in a suit. Others will do deep-dive research and make 27 drafts of a resume/cover to the point where they already know more about the company than the person who may hire them. I still think there's significant coin-tossery going on: if the companies are having to filter everyone because there is so much volume, then you must at least do as much as you can to increase your own output. The 'trick' then is to just know someone who can put in a good word (and it really has always been an option) This may work for some job sectors as a novel hiring process (it's certainly overblown for retail/fast food) but if it scales up, you'll end up taking significant bargaining power from individuals. To say nothing if companies start replacing their current employees with the winners from these kinds of events.

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ansible 12y ago
And this event is an attempt to make showing up for a 48 hour 'work trial' a norm. This favors the younger, single population, and while you're working on whatever this event is, you are not putting more resumes out. There's the potential for abuse in getting free work out of applicants from other people mimicking this event. Totally agree. Sounds like each applicant should be getting paid or something. Even so, dropping the rest of your life for two days stinks. You have to balance the time it takes to tailor your resume to the company versus moving on and finding the next company to submit a resume to. At the extremes, some people don't tailor at all and throw their resume and cover letter at everyone in a suit. Others will do deep-dive research and make 27 drafts of a resume/cover to the point where they already know more about the company than the person who may hire them. You know, there should be an app for that. Something where you can just put in everything, and then when sending out one resume to a particular company, it would help you customize it for them. Maybe you could feed in the job ad, and the app uses some fancy NLP to then select which topics you should emphasize on your resume. It should also keep track of what version you've sent out to whom, so that you can view it when talking to the potential employer on the phone.

wink 12y ago

Is it me or is there no author name? I mean, it could be deliberately anonymous but then that's usually noted. It was a really interesting read but I am probably just being grumpy and not a fan of medium.

fecak 12y ago
It's in the "footer" of the page continuously as you scroll the entire article. Name is Deborah Branscum.
- wink 12y ago
  Oh my, thanks. On a different monitor now I see the light gray "WRITTEN ON JAN 26 BY" on white background.

barrkel 12y ago

It's not clear what the author of the story did. Mr Programmer did the programming and Ms UX did project management and UI. She's an "ideas person", isn't she.

VLM 12y ago

"We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess." Something overlooked is the millions (billions?) of non-productive labor hours that go into the failed traditional hiring process, when even the smartest guys in the room have to admit that upon statistical analysis its all a waste of time. That's an enormous staggering financial drain on the economy. Overall, across the entire economy, the overall minimum cost mode of hiring would appear to be a union work hall. So employer shows up and the dude who's been sitting there unemployed the longest is hired. This would require incompetent people to admit their own incompetence, so its never going to be implemented, we're all above average here and just because no one else can do traditional hiring correctly doesn't mean I won't be the first to ever get it right because I've been told since birth I'm a special snowflake and I have the participation trophies to prove it, etc. I'm not saying we have to unionize (whole nother topic) but stealing the union work hall "technology" would seem a very wise idea.

jia_min 12y ago
From the NYT's article quoting Laszlo Bock: "Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring." Google made the classic mistake of using the interviewer as the predictor of interest. Meanwhile, decades of research has shown it's not who does the asking but how and what you ask. For example, structured interviews are about 50% more predictive of job performance (r = .51) compared to unstructured interviews (i.e., the way almost everyone interviews; r = .38). So why did Google run this experiment when they had an army of Industrial/Organizational Psychologists who already knew the research? They wanted to collect their own data and test the theories on their own employees, which I encourage and applaud.
- wnissen 12y ago
  Do you have a cite for this? I thought Google looked at interviewers and found that no particular interviewer did any better than any other, except, literally, one guy in a narrow sub-specialty. That's quite a lot different than concluding a 50% success rate is no better than chance, which I agree would be problematic at best, flat wrong at worst if the expected occurrence was low.

iolothebard 12y ago

The way people hire is all wrong in my opinion too, this is even worse.

owennoah 12y ago
May I ask why? And more what you feel is a good third way?

vonnik 12y ago

Nicholson here. I sponsored Staffup Weekend, brought Brooke Allen to SF, and helped Deborah Branscum write her story for Medium. I did it because I'm the in-house recruiter for FutureAdvisor (https://www.futureadvisor.com https://www.futureadvisor.com), and recruiting is a mess. FutureAdvisor hired me to do PR. But after we raised our Series B last year, our main problem was converting capital to talent, so that's what I did. I didn't choose recruiting; recruiting chose me. Just like it will choose many of the hackers on this thread who become entrepreneurs. I hope they can learn from our story. The first thing a new recruiter notices is that recruiting is incredibly wasteful. It wastes time, emotion and money (contingency-based recruiters charge employers about 25% of a hire's first year salary, so they're paying an extra $35K to hire a software engineer at $140K). It wastes them for both the candidates and the hiring managers. Many of the flaws of the process arise from that wastefulness. The problem at the heart of recruiting is how to gather good information about strangers in order to make a long-term commitment. It's basically the same problem you have when you're dating. And, just as in dating, there's a lot of noise in the market. Everyone's beautiful with a little Photoshop. It takes a long time to get to learn who they really are, and what they can do. To illustrate how wasteful the job market is, just imagine that both candidates and recruiters are sending out very similar, only slightly tailored information to every person on their list, day after day. If someone bites, then you escalate commitment and do a preliminary phone call. I, as a recruiter, take the call with the candidate, because we don't know how good they are yet, and I cannot waste my engineers' time. We are strapped. That's why we need to hire people. (Non-technical recruiters get a lot of hate from technical candidates who do not understand this.) If the candidate answers all the questions right that I have been instructed to ask, then I pass them on to the engineers for two technical interviews. If those go well, we invite them in for an onsite visit. In 90% of all cases, the onsite visit results either the company or the candidate rejecting the other. At that point, almost all the information they have gathered about each other is thrown out and never thought of again. (Sure, Glassdoor has some reviews and tips, but they're minimal.) That's the waste. Those rejections do not necessarily imply that the company or the candidate is bad, or unsuitable to work with at all, just that they're not quite the right fit. It's just like dating. Sometimes the chemistry ain't right. That doesn't mean anyone's a bad person. There are a couple ways that we, singly and collectively, can try to solve this problem. And they all have to do with how the information is processed. Employers who trust each other could join together in a cross-referral system where they share candidates who were talented but not quite the right fit. FutureAdvisor is part of a couple of those networks, like YC, and they work OK. Their main purpose is to get total strangers one step further toward entering the circle of trust. Candidates could do the same for each other. It would be a sort of viral networking, where within a circle of trust, everybody's contacts become everyone else's contacts. In both cases, information that one candidate or employer has gathered at great cost to themselves can be shared, rather than thrown away. Another aspect of the job market is that companies and candidates are asking for the wrong information. Google used to ask for GPAs and Ivy League pedigrees, both crappy metrics. The great thing about professions like programming and design is that you can show your stuff. (Bizdev and middle managers, as a counter example, have a much harder time providing a portfolio of what they do.) With makers, at least there's a baseline. All hiring managers need to do, after they look at your Github, is figure out whether you are in fact the person who coded it, and how much time it takes you to solve similar problems. Another way of saying this: The only thing that correlates with performance is performance. And that's all that good companies should care about. So how do they obtain that information in an efficient way? Batch processing. Staffup Weekend was an attempt at batch processing. We wanted to see a lot of people work at the same time. We made the event free. We asked people to create something they cared about. The ones that came, did so voluntarily. Whether they got a job or not, they walked away having done something they wanted to do. It was a pretty good experience. But it could have been a lot better. I wish that other employers had been involved, to make it more valuable for the candidates who attended (we invited other companies, but got little response.) I could have given better feedback on the work people did. On a meta level, teams were invited to create tools to fix the job market. One group created a Chrome plugin called Contactr.io, which shows you the emails of company founders when you visit their corporate website. There are probably a lot of other ways to fix things. I hope someone on Hacker News will found something that makes hiring and getting a job easier. That person will become rich, famous and universally loved. I also hope that someone reading this post is an infrastructure engineer with AWS, Linux, Bash and Ruby under his or her belt. If that's you, please write: chris dot nicholson at futureadvisor dot com. Only you can save us, Obi-Wan. https://boards.greenhouse.io/futureadvisor/jobs/26313#.VMkv_MbZvTA https://boards.greenhouse.io/futureadvisor/jobs/26313#.VMkv_...

BrookeTAllen 12y ago

https://medium.com/@BrookeTAllen/give-us-your-tired-your-poor-your-overly-automated-b08e067ca18e https://medium.com/@BrookeTAllen/give-us-your-tired-your-poo...

BrookeTAllen 12y ago

This is awesome; I am so thrilled you are talking about this. I am preparing a response to Deborah’s article; working title: A Hackathon Cannot Fix a Broken Hiring Process. But the Right Experiences Can. You see, in 2004 my life changed when I started caring about the people I did not hire. You discussed that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859199 But the thing you probably don’t get, and I didn't get until much later, is that I did not create a hiring process. And it sure wasn't a contest with a job at the end (as many of you think). It was an experience. For the people who engaged with the experience it was life-changing. For those who didn't it wasn't. Certainly for the people I hired it was life changing. Changing jobs will change your life – what would be the point otherwise? And certainly going from unemployment to employment changes your life; how could it not? And working for me will definitely change your life because I grok this better than almost anyone you’ll ever meet. But I want to change everyone’s life whether they work for me or not because I never wanted to be a programmer, or an analyst, or a hedge fund manager or all those other things I have had the accidental good fortune of becoming. All I've ever wanted to be since the sixth grade is a teacher. See this: http://internationalfamilymag.com/IFarchives/archives/sep07/stories.htm http://internationalfamilymag.com/IFarchives/archives/sep07/... Most of the attendees experienced a hackathon because they couldn't figure out how to experience anything else. After all, this was held in the Bay Area in 2014. The exact same thing could have been held in London in 1842 and yet nobody could have possibly experienced a hackathon back then. When you read her article, notice that Deborah poses a question but doesn't answer it. She talks about her experience of the other attendees but doesn't offer to introduce any of them to readers who might be hiring. She ends the article with a really good suggestion that someone should create Smartup Weekend to slap some sense into employers. She asks, “Who wants in?” But she doesn't even buy the domain name. Doesn't she know that you shouldn't mention a domain name you don’t own in a coffee shop anywhere near San Francisco because the guy next to you will buy it and then try to sell it to you for $10,000. And NEVER EVER do that in print. (Of course, as soon as I read her piece I snapped up SmartupWeekend.com and I offer to transfer it to anyone who can convince me they will actually build something rather than just talk about it. I’ll give it to you for free on condition that if you don’t do much with it then I get it back.) In short, so far Deborah has reported on her experience, but hasn't fully ENGAGED WITH IT. Deborah’s experience of Staffup Weekend is only beginning now. I am confident that someday she will see that weekend as a pivotal point in her life. I’m less sure about the rest of the attendees because I have seen no evidence they have engaged with the experience as anything but a contest they have lost. After all, Deborah organized a 1-month reunion and nobody showed up. There is still hope if these folks reflect on what happened, refer to their notes (surely they took notes), then refactor the whole thing and reflect on what they can still learn. But even if they don’t do that, I’m sure every one of them could be excellent employees under the right circumstances because, as Woody Allen says, 80% of success is showing up and they did way more than that. You can see everyone here: http://staffupweekend.org/2014/11/22/report-on-staffup-san-francisco-nov-1-2-2014/ http://staffupweekend.org/2014/11/22/report-on-staffup-san-f... If you’d like to meet any of them then let me know. I’ll gladly make the introduction.

dlwj 12y ago

The thing I didn't realize about the hiring process before going through it a couple times is that it's not an inherently evil process or system. It's just that no one knows what the hell they are doing. It's Hanlon's razor. The initial filtering is done by HR people only looking for keywords and looking for canned answers to basic questions. They can also be done by recruiters hired by a hiring manager who hired every recruiter, thus inundating themselves with resumes by their own fault thinking more would be better The phone screen will check you for "status". Having an Ivy League education will help because even if you fail completely the hiring manager won't lose face. If he takes a chance on a non-ivy league he will be roasted for wasting company resources. You will also have to claim to be very very passionate thus over-promising and in a position of constant not-good-enough-its-an-honor-to-work-here. After they decide to bring you in, random people are chosen based on their free time to interview you. The list will usually include an extroverted person who tries to be buddy-buddy too soon and feels stiffed unless the other person has a similar personality. A puzzle lover who looked up an answer to a riddle before-hand and uses it to gauge your IQ. A new person who googled some good questions to ask just a few minutes before and makes sure he knows the answer. An H1B employee who doesn't speak that clearly and assumes you are an idiot when you ask a simple question to be repeated. Finally a boss type will come in and make a final decision. The process is semi-democratic in that her yes cannot go against many no's but her no can veto the yes's. ---- Nowhere in this chain do people actually care. People are just trying to do their jobs. The hiring manager is trying to fill in slots b/c a project manager is behind schedule and needs and excuse. The interviewers want to "have beers with you" thus gauging your integrated-ness into american culture. Startup hiring is also fundamentally different and confusing. Young 20s make the best friends in their college days and often seek that same level of camaraderie in colleagues. However the resume process doesn't lend itself to that. You are essentially blind dating. Startups escape the large system failures of large companies and so can focus on product rather than system management, but they also have to relearn many thing or else follow a heuristic script in semblance of a skeleton system. (e.g. top schools only) ---- Broadly speaking however, jobs are becoming more and more sparse because tools allow one person to do the job of many. One very very smart person that is. It's already happening with many developer positions. Good tools for IT allow developers to do IT work, creating a merged "devOps" position. Easier web frameworks allow designers and developers to be merged. Good testing tools and frameworks gets rid of QAs. The merged positions reduce the amount of time required for these tasks but the new tool-user has to be super qualified.