3 ms·

I understand the point you are making, but it feels like employer lazyness to me. A decent employer should be able to see the potential (2) when meeting (1), at

by hrktb 11y ago

I understand the point you are making, but it feels like employer lazyness to me. A decent employer should be able to see the potential (2) when meeting (1), at least within two or three interviews. That lazyness can be appropriate if as an employer you have an infinite supply of very good candidates. But IMO that's a pretty rare case, and even then you have to weed out good candidates from not so good ones, and pay attention to a mountain of other non obvious factors. Like, past performance is not everything. You might get better work from someone stepping up to a new position than a burned out veteran holding that same position for years already. Or someone unemployed for a long time seeking back a job might stay longer than the freshman already choosing between a dozen of other companies. And even if the candidate inps not the best fit for the job, you might want him/her for diversity in your team, etc. etc. There's so many things that could impact how an employee is doing in your job, focusing only on 'proven' skills when choosing candidates is usually a bad choice IMO. The exception would be if you don't intend to keep the new employee for too long anyway, but then that's a bad sign for you business I think.

golergka 11y ago
> I understand the point you are making, but it feels like employer lazyness to me. A decent employer should be able to see the potential (2) when meeting (1), at least within two or three interviews. It's not lazyness, it's a different strategy. Some companies decide to spend a lot of resources on hiring, and they are able to find great candidates where others wouldn't look, and thus they get a strategic advantage. Usually, that's a part of their overall strategy. But other companies decide that they are in a different situation, and would spend their resources on different areas. These companies don't want to find a special superstar; instead of increasing reward (in hiring) they look to minimise the risks. And adjusting for correlating factors (degree, experience, etc), they get just like that: the minimise the risk. > Like, past performance is not everything. You might get better work from someone stepping up to a new position than a burned out veteran holding that same position for years already. You might. But we're speaking about company strategy here. The company will make hundreds, thousands of hiring decisions. So we should think about them in terms of a statistical sample. What these companies want is not to increase the probability of high reward, but to reduce a standard deviation on these results: even if the results will be worse on average, it's important that they won't reach a certain low limit. Overall, I'd like to suggest you to think about the process differently: don't think about it as a decision that applied in your particular case, but think about it as a set of principles that should carry the company through the years, while it hires a lot of people. I think all this makes a lot more sense this way.
- hrktb 11y ago
  You are right about minimizing risks and making easier hiring decisions, having a more scalable process. But this strategy only works if you don't intend to keep employees for a long time and these employee don't individually hold much of the value you produce. They might stick for years, but it's not the case you'll be optimizing for. I think well fit employees don't stay if they don't grow with the company, but these employee won't be easy to find with a risk averse hiring process (or you have entry jobs with very low needed qualifications, but then you have very small hiring risks anyway) Then if you're ok with only keeping a decent performance in average, it will harder and harder to even keep your hiring bar at the same level, as you'll have more and more unmotivated employees in your rank, and you'll have to give more and more perks for really motivated people to come in and work for you. In my experience, even companies hiring hundreds of people every year actually spend quite a lot of time reviewing profiles and care a lot about getting the right people for the job, at least for any non entry level position.

by hrktb 11y ago

golergka 11y ago

> I understand the point you are making, but it feels like employer lazyness to me. A decent employer should be able to see the potential (2) when meeting (1), at least within two or three interviews. It's not lazyness, it's a different strategy. Some companies decide to spend a lot of resources on hiring, and they are able to find great candidates where others wouldn't look, and thus they get a strategic advantage. Usually, that's a part of their overall strategy. But other companies decide that they are in a different situation, and would spend their resources on different areas. These companies don't want to find a special superstar; instead of increasing reward (in hiring) they look to minimise the risks. And adjusting for correlating factors (degree, experience, etc), they get just like that: the minimise the risk. > Like, past performance is not everything. You might get better work from someone stepping up to a new position than a burned out veteran holding that same position for years already. You might. But we're speaking about company strategy here. The company will make hundreds, thousands of hiring decisions. So we should think about them in terms of a statistical sample. What these companies want is not to increase the probability of high reward, but to reduce a standard deviation on these results: even if the results will be worse on average, it's important that they won't reach a certain low limit. Overall, I'd like to suggest you to think about the process differently: don't think about it as a decision that applied in your particular case, but think about it as a set of principles that should carry the company through the years, while it hires a lot of people. I think all this makes a lot more sense this way.

hrktb 11y ago
You are right about minimizing risks and making easier hiring decisions, having a more scalable process. But this strategy only works if you don't intend to keep employees for a long time and these employee don't individually hold much of the value you produce. They might stick for years, but it's not the case you'll be optimizing for. I think well fit employees don't stay if they don't grow with the company, but these employee won't be easy to find with a risk averse hiring process (or you have entry jobs with very low needed qualifications, but then you have very small hiring risks anyway) Then if you're ok with only keeping a decent performance in average, it will harder and harder to even keep your hiring bar at the same level, as you'll have more and more unmotivated employees in your rank, and you'll have to give more and more perks for really motivated people to come in and work for you. In my experience, even companies hiring hundreds of people every year actually spend quite a lot of time reviewing profiles and care a lot about getting the right people for the job, at least for any non entry level position.