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Resumes are fine, it's really in how you treat them. When I read resumes I generally ignore where people have worked and gone to school and instead look for wh
by a-dub 11y ago
Resumes are fine, it's really in how you treat them. When I read resumes I generally ignore where people have worked and gone to school and instead look for what they have done. If there's either a good match between the general type of stuff they've done in the past and what the role is, or if there's stuff on there that is interesting enough such that I'd enjoy hearing about it, I give a thumbs up.
When I interview, I tend to spend most of the time asking in depth questions about the projects I find most interesting on the resume. What was easy? What was hard? X sounds like it would be a problem, how did you solve it? What was fun? What was headbangonthewall miserable? Generally this gives a sense as to whether or not there's any bullshitting going on, and gives a sense for whether or not the candidate has a good head for thinking about hard problems.
Finally, I'll ask a few questions to probe for "difficult-to-work-with" red flags and finish with a few fairly easy "technical challenges" that offer opportunity for the candidate to either walk about having solved the problem, or walk away having solved the problem and demonstrated understanding of the solution from top to bottom.
- __z 11y agoWhat kind of "difficult-to-work-with" questions do you ask? I'd like to filter out these people but I'm not sure what sorts of questions to ask to suss that out.
- a-dub 11y agoBasically I goad them into complaining about past bad work experiences and then pay close attention for subtle clues that may indicate that they are systemically disrespectful or unwilling to compromise on things that don't seem worth fighting for. Were they bothered by people, situations or outcomes? Tell me about the most frustrating time when you needed a thing, or consensus on a thing, and you had to go through way too much to get it. Tell me about the most frustrating time when you needed a thing, or consensus on a thing, and no matter how hard you pushed, you never got it. And, of course: The fastest way to be shown the door around here is to be an agitator of your colleagues on the grounds of race, sex, religion or any other attribute that has little to do with work. Nobody here is in the business of policing behavior and nobody wants to be. This requires perhaps more discipline than other places as the hammer falls harder and quicker here if things go awry, so it demands either heightened discretion or a heightened sense of self awareness and awareness of those around you. Do you think you would be able to work under such conditions?
- vonmoltke 11y agoWhat about the opposite, someone who has no answer for either of those because they have never pushed hard enough for something or is too willing to roll over whenever someone higher up insists on something?
- a-dub 11y agoIf that were a problem, they'd be unlikely to have interesting projects on their resume or would have failed the "talk about your interesting projects" phase. In other words: it wouldn't matter if they were easy to work with in that case because they wouldn't be considered a good candidate for the job.
- puredemo 11y agoSo you want super laid back people who surround themselves with productive geniuses.
- kagamine 11y agoEvery single time I read these recruitment threads on HN or anywhere else it always comes back to "who can bullshit the most" and "can you solve this ridiculous problem you will never encounter while employed here". Glad to see an article about trying something different in recruitment, it is a BS industry, partly because it is so difficult to measure "success" and follow up the process with meaningful data.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- puredemo 11y agoSO THESE INDIANS MAN. YOU EVER WORK WITH INDIANS?! THEY SAY YES TO EVERYTHING! DOESN'T MATTER IF THEY UNDERSTAND IT OR NOT. OH MY GOD, NEVER AGAIN. Actual quote from an interview ^
- 11y ago
- resu_nimda 11y agoIt sounds like you're saying "resumes are fine, as long as you ignore most of the stuff that is considered important in contemporary resume culture." It's broken at a conceptual level, even if there are functional workarounds. The experiment from the article basically does what you describe, cuts out the stuff to ignore and goes straight to the project history. It would be beneficial for this to spread even if some people can suss it out in the current process, because there is still a large culture of looking heavily at things like alma mater and GPA.
- a-dub 11y agoI'm happy with it staying status quo. Less competition makes it easier to hire the good ones. : )
- resu_nimda 11y agoAha, I was going to add a note about competitive advantage, but we're trying to improve the industry as a whole! Cooperation not competition! :)