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First of all, I definitely agree that resumes are woefully overused and overrated. They have structural problems and incentivize people to use "negative selecti

by tikhonj 11y ago

First of all, I definitely agree that resumes are woefully overused and overrated. They have structural problems and incentivize people to use "negative selection" criteria where people are eliminated based on not having a specific feature rather than selected for excelling on something¹. This article neatly demonstrates that resumes are not necessary and that not using them can unlock new sorts of candidates. However, I don't think there's a conclusion to be made about the actual method used here. I suspect that it worked because it was different, not because it carried a fundamentally strong signal. If everyone did this, project descriptions would be gamed even more than resumes—it would select for people who prepared for the selection process² more than anything else. This reminds me of various captcha strategies I've seen used by small forums to great effect—solving some math, typing a word into a text box, choosing a popular character's picture… etc. They all work, perfectly. But only because spammers don't care about the small fry: it's not worth their time to modify their bots for your little site. If any given captcha becomes used widely—or your forum grows big enough—they will bypass it trivially. Now, an essay like this isn't quite as bad as a captcha, but the idea is the same: it works because it's new and different. If everybody used it, it would probably be a step back. Ultimately, I think the real moral is that more companies should do their own thing, even if that thing is not great in the abstract. Being different carries a value of its own, and it breeds biodiversity that's healthy for the system as a whole. (Of course, many of the things companies try are really bad for various reasons, but that's a different story…) ¹ In particular, most people have a bunch of "red flags" they look for with, at best, cursory rationale—everything from passing on people who didn't go to the right school to those who have breaks in their work history, based on "common sense" or "experience" rather than anything meaningful. Most of these criteria seem counter-productive. ² I also think this is really true for college admissions and especially the admissions essay. A project blurb for hiring is more or less the same idea in a new context.

function_seven 11y ago
> This reminds me of various captcha strategies I've seen used by small forums to great effect—solving some math, typing a word into a text box, choosing a popular character's picture… etc. They all work, perfectly. But only because spammers don't care about the small fry: it's not worth their time to modify their bots for your little site. If any given captcha becomes used widely—or your forum grows big enough—they will bypass it trivially. Which reminds me of Jeff Atwood's original "captcha"[1] on the Coding Horror blog. It was a static image of the word "orange" every time. It was the most trivially defeatable captcha ever, but he didn't care because it worked. It would have been senseless for him to invest time and effort into implementing a complex captcha engine, when the existing solution was filtering spam bots just fine. [1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/captcha-is-dead-long-live-captcha/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/captcha-is-dead-long-live-captc...
- StavrosK 11y ago
  I don't even go that far, I usually just add a field hidden with CSS that rejects the form if there's anything in it. Works perfectly.
  - flashman 11y ago
    My password manager loves to fill those in, for some reason.
    - StavrosK 11y ago
      That happens if they're named "username", "password", "address" or something similar.
      - prawn 11y ago
        I use "subject". Spam bots love it.
  - pbreit 11y ago
    Yeah, the image is still user-hostile and generally unnecessary.
analog31 11y ago
However, I don't think there's a conclusion to be made about the actual method used here. I suspect that it worked because it was different, not because it carried a fundamentally strong signal. If everyone did this, project descriptions would be gamed even more than resumes—it would select for people who prepared for the selection process² more than anything else. I find myself almost irresistably drawn towards the conclusion that people will game the hiring process, because it is a game. It has winners and losers. Everybody is trying to make themselves look better than everybody else, even to the point of making themselves look better than they really are: Job candidates, employers, internal and external recruiters, everybody who is selling a hiring product, etc. Everybody is trying to emphasize their positives and hide their negatives, while searching for the negatives of the others. A drawback to "do your own thing" is that it is enormously inefficient for candidates, and the results may turn out to be based on the luck of a particular candidate guessing a particular employer's game is, or being generally better at games. I don't know a solution. What strikes me is that as broken as the system seems, we still manage to hire good people most of the time.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  The funny part is, in good old game theory fashion, the prime motivator for hiding your negatives and trumping up your positives is everyone else is doing it, so you must as well just to keep up.
- cbhl 11y ago
  The process being broken isn't a deal-breaker for companies, which can still hire from the 90% that can deal with the broken system. It's a deal-breaker for the 10% that are bad at playing the game / jumping hoops / resume writing / interviews, because they can't get a job.
  - stcredzero 11y ago
    It's not so rosy for companies. The situation is akin to the one in large companies and bureaucracies where all numbers and estimates in all communications become "padded" and largely fictionalized -- precisely because "everyone is doing it." In such broken games, signals lose their meaning, and everyone ultimately loses. In academia, someone observed this: "The revolutionary idea of one generation becomes just the stuff you say to get tenure in the next generation."
ionforce 11y ago
This is kind of like the Google/Python effect. Early in Google's hiring, they heavily selected for Python, which was a relatively new language at the time. It's debatable if there was something technically unique or strong about Python at the time. But many of the people who knew it at the time also happened to be programming enthusiasts, Google's right kind of crowd. It's similar how ingredient X isn't as important as X's relationship to the status quo. Almost... hipster hiring in a way. Oh no!
rwallace 11y ago
Yes, it logically follows from simple economic principles: if you're competing with other companies for good candidates (which you are), your hit rate will go up if you look for signals that your competitors ignore or reject, because that gives you access to a pool that hasn't already been picked clean. So if most companies prefer candidates who have a college degree, look for candidates who haven't. If most companies are looking for experience in some mainstream language, look for candidates who have experience in something quirky and unusual. If most companies discriminate against candidates outside the age range of 20 to 39, look for candidates outside that age range. I'll add a note that it's not necessary for every company to do something different. It's perfectly okay for your company to copy the way this one did things. It's perfectly okay for five or ten companies to do that. Only if a large fraction of the market starts copying a particular strategy, do you need to switch to something else.
- firebones 11y ago
  What about resume styles that focus on "You should hire me if you need X..." with a listing of strengths rather than rote "Seeking a position that Y". Then the CV builds towards that with concrete examples. That'd be a strategy that would better suit both the hunters and the hunted.
  - Tloewald 11y ago
    Targeting CVs is already a good idea as a job candidate.
tome 11y ago
> breaks in their work history I find this a funny one. At one previous job the head of HR would highlight "breaks in work history" on the CV with a pen, three months here, six months there, as though that meant something.
- moron4hire 11y ago
  I have talked to several HR directors (heh, though not as a job candidate, just people around in bars) who would see my last 3 years of very successful freelancing as a "break in work history". I'm probably unhirable at most of the places near where I live (Washington DC) but I'm actually fine with that.
mikehawkins 11y ago
"Ultimately, I think the real moral is that more companies should do their own thing, even if that thing is not great in the abstract. Being different carries a value of its own, and it breeds biodiversity that's healthy for the system as a whole. (Of course, many of the things companies try are really bad for various reasons, but that's a different story…)" This really resonated with me - especially as a start up, doing what feels right just makes sense, especially when that's consistent with your team's culture and even sense of humor. Real example - when we're not getting a sense of the 'real' person we're interviewing, we take them out for a friendly game of foosball. It's brilliant at removing nerves, but also gives us great insights into their team skills, competitiveness, and more.

by tikhonj 11y ago

function_seven 11y ago

> This reminds me of various captcha strategies I've seen used by small forums to great effect—solving some math, typing a word into a text box, choosing a popular character's picture… etc. They all work, perfectly. But only because spammers don't care about the small fry: it's not worth their time to modify their bots for your little site. If any given captcha becomes used widely—or your forum grows big enough—they will bypass it trivially. Which reminds me of Jeff Atwood's original "captcha"[1] on the Coding Horror blog. It was a static image of the word "orange" every time. It was the most trivially defeatable captcha ever, but he didn't care because it worked. It would have been senseless for him to invest time and effort into implementing a complex captcha engine, when the existing solution was filtering spam bots just fine. [1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/captcha-is-dead-long-live-captcha/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/captcha-is-dead-long-live-captc...

StavrosK 11y ago
I don't even go that far, I usually just add a field hidden with CSS that rejects the form if there's anything in it. Works perfectly.
- flashman 11y ago
  My password manager loves to fill those in, for some reason.
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    That happens if they're named "username", "password", "address" or something similar.
    - prawn 11y ago
      I use "subject". Spam bots love it.
- pbreit 11y ago
  Yeah, the image is still user-hostile and generally unnecessary.

analog31 11y ago

However, I don't think there's a conclusion to be made about the actual method used here. I suspect that it worked because it was different, not because it carried a fundamentally strong signal. If everyone did this, project descriptions would be gamed even more than resumes—it would select for people who prepared for the selection process² more than anything else. I find myself almost irresistably drawn towards the conclusion that people will game the hiring process, because it is a game. It has winners and losers. Everybody is trying to make themselves look better than everybody else, even to the point of making themselves look better than they really are: Job candidates, employers, internal and external recruiters, everybody who is selling a hiring product, etc. Everybody is trying to emphasize their positives and hide their negatives, while searching for the negatives of the others. A drawback to "do your own thing" is that it is enormously inefficient for candidates, and the results may turn out to be based on the luck of a particular candidate guessing a particular employer's game is, or being generally better at games. I don't know a solution. What strikes me is that as broken as the system seems, we still manage to hire good people most of the time.

sliverstorm 11y ago
The funny part is, in good old game theory fashion, the prime motivator for hiding your negatives and trumping up your positives is everyone else is doing it, so you must as well just to keep up.
cbhl 11y ago
The process being broken isn't a deal-breaker for companies, which can still hire from the 90% that can deal with the broken system. It's a deal-breaker for the 10% that are bad at playing the game / jumping hoops / resume writing / interviews, because they can't get a job.
- stcredzero 11y ago
  It's not so rosy for companies. The situation is akin to the one in large companies and bureaucracies where all numbers and estimates in all communications become "padded" and largely fictionalized -- precisely because "everyone is doing it." In such broken games, signals lose their meaning, and everyone ultimately loses. In academia, someone observed this: "The revolutionary idea of one generation becomes just the stuff you say to get tenure in the next generation."

ionforce 11y ago

This is kind of like the Google/Python effect. Early in Google's hiring, they heavily selected for Python, which was a relatively new language at the time. It's debatable if there was something technically unique or strong about Python at the time. But many of the people who knew it at the time also happened to be programming enthusiasts, Google's right kind of crowd. It's similar how ingredient X isn't as important as X's relationship to the status quo. Almost... hipster hiring in a way. Oh no!

rwallace 11y ago

Yes, it logically follows from simple economic principles: if you're competing with other companies for good candidates (which you are), your hit rate will go up if you look for signals that your competitors ignore or reject, because that gives you access to a pool that hasn't already been picked clean. So if most companies prefer candidates who have a college degree, look for candidates who haven't. If most companies are looking for experience in some mainstream language, look for candidates who have experience in something quirky and unusual. If most companies discriminate against candidates outside the age range of 20 to 39, look for candidates outside that age range. I'll add a note that it's not necessary for every company to do something different. It's perfectly okay for your company to copy the way this one did things. It's perfectly okay for five or ten companies to do that. Only if a large fraction of the market starts copying a particular strategy, do you need to switch to something else.

firebones 11y ago
What about resume styles that focus on "You should hire me if you need X..." with a listing of strengths rather than rote "Seeking a position that Y". Then the CV builds towards that with concrete examples. That'd be a strategy that would better suit both the hunters and the hunted.
- Tloewald 11y ago
  Targeting CVs is already a good idea as a job candidate.

tome 11y ago

> breaks in their work history I find this a funny one. At one previous job the head of HR would highlight "breaks in work history" on the CV with a pen, three months here, six months there, as though that meant something.

moron4hire 11y ago
I have talked to several HR directors (heh, though not as a job candidate, just people around in bars) who would see my last 3 years of very successful freelancing as a "break in work history". I'm probably unhirable at most of the places near where I live (Washington DC) but I'm actually fine with that.

mikehawkins 11y ago

"Ultimately, I think the real moral is that more companies should do their own thing, even if that thing is not great in the abstract. Being different carries a value of its own, and it breeds biodiversity that's healthy for the system as a whole. (Of course, many of the things companies try are really bad for various reasons, but that's a different story…)" This really resonated with me - especially as a start up, doing what feels right just makes sense, especially when that's consistent with your team's culture and even sense of humor. Real example - when we're not getting a sense of the 'real' person we're interviewing, we take them out for a friendly game of foosball. It's brilliant at removing nerves, but also gives us great insights into their team skills, competitiveness, and more.