4 ms·
There are a lot of 'hiring is broken' posts and this is a decent one, but I don't think I'm alone in feeling that none of them convincingly identify the problem
by beefman 12y ago
There are a lot of 'hiring is broken' posts and this is a decent one, but I don't think I'm alone in feeling that none of them convincingly identify the problem, let alone solve it.[1] So I'll do that here.
Hiring isn't broken because people use the wrong interview questions. It's broken because firms are engaging in a zero-sum battle for talent. But if what you're doing is worth a damn, it should be worth a damn when ordinary people do it. If what distinguishes your company is that you've managed to hire smarter people, maybe your company isn't so great.[2][3]
The proper hiring criterion is pretty simple: do the people who will be working with the candidate like her? In Blink, Gladwell presented good evidence that formal interview process isn't any more objective than this. And when you think about it, what would "objective" even mean?
There's also an issue with the labor market -- in particular, the difficulty of firing. You're much better off hiring liberally and firing candidates that don't work out. If all firms did this, the labor market would be more efficient and firing wouldn't be so bad.
Apple is a good example. Their profit per employee is second only to Netflix among large tech companies, and this includes a significant fraction of retail personnel. Apple's profit per engineer is probably higher than Netflix's, and that's remarkable considering they're over twenty times bigger.
Does Apple achieve this with some optimized interview format? Higher salaries? Onsite massage? No, they do it with better products (and a command and control governance model...).
It means that the software industry isn't nearly as innovative as it thinks it is. This is actually so obvious it's the subject of popular jokes ('like airbnb for pet food' etc). It's also obvious when you consider the ratio of effort spent building tools to products. All the latest frameworks but... Where are the apps? Where are the apps that are even half as feature-rich as a typical Windows application from the '90s? Google Plus still can't keep which things I've +1'd straight.
[1] It reminds me of the situation with essays claiming to explain why privacy is important even if you 'have nothing to hide'. See https://gist.github.com/clumma/414f0c9a8fedf9ba9db5 https://gist.github.com/clumma/414f0c9a8fedf9ba9db5
[2] https://twitter.com/clumma/status/139082596587012096 https://twitter.com/clumma/status/139082596587012096
[3] Or worse, that you've managed to deprive your competition of smart people. Google has done this -- hired people without having work for them to do, on the reasoning that something might come up and at least they won't be working for the competition.
- Iftheshoefits 12y agoI think hiring is broken for a different reason: workers, whether in software or any other industry, are viewed as less-than-equal ("second-class citizens"). Except in rare cases the entire hiring process in software especially, from start to finish, just about everywhere I've ever interviewed, seems to me designed to find reasons to reject candidates, and as a side-effect is (perhaps unintentionally) also designed to demean and diminish human beings. It's just a toxic environment.
- beefman 12y agoI agree. But why are they so choosy, and why do they complain about a lack of qualified candidates when their rejection rates are so high? I think it's the zero-sum game I mentioned. Firms are trying to outhire each other, like talent is some magic wand that can replace compelling products. There's a lot of snake oil in the industry, like SEO (now called "data science"), meant to substitute for things like vision, leadership, and customer service.
- dougabug 12y agoI don't know if it's exactly a zero-sum game, but the rate at which talent is created doesn't seem to be amazingly high given that there are over 7 billion people on Earth. Certainly the talent pool seems to be a small fraction of the population. Top universities, which for the most part feed the tech industry, face a similar problem at an earlier stage in the pipeline. It's been noted that less prestigious universities tend to draw their faculty from a very narrow selection of elite universities. The education and labor markets are linked, and inefficient in ways which perhaps reflect the same underlying cause: scarcity of people with apparent ability, and self-interest wanting to profit from oligopolistic control of this incalculably valuable limited resource.
- vonmoltke 12y agoI think part of the problem is that hiring bars are unrealistically high. Pulling numbers out of my ass for illustration, it's like companies that control 10% of the software engineering jobs all only want to hire the top 5% of software engineers. They can't all get their way, so the top 5%[1] bounces between these companies whilst the companies whine about "talent shortages". [1] Should be noted that it isn't the entire group, since some will choose to work for organizations outside this group because the work is more interesting or fulfilling.