- Extremely time consuming and it still could be a long shot to find the right person. I have worked in teams where we gave up trying to hire due to time issues (recruiters were useless)
- Hiring without a real purpose. Sometimes, hiring managers themselves don't know why they want to hire. This is dangerous as hiring someone without a specific purpose could be bad for both parties. Yes, it happens and happens a lot in enterprisy companies. I know one of my hiring managers once wanted to hire just to build his team in a specific location. Ended up not working out very well.
- Finding the right person again is really really hard. Sometimes you are looking for a very specific skill because you have project deadlines. Sometimes, you are ok with someone more broad but again, this depends on the need. Lot of hiring managers fail this test as well.
- Difficult to hire and retain good talent in a volatile market specially in tech. If you don't offer details of the job including salary etc specifically, it it harder to attract good talent.
Overall, my take on hiring is that there has to be a direct interest from the hiring managers in actually interviewing, testing and hiring candidates which is time consuming and never a slam dunk. Lot of pain happens when frankly, there is not much interest from the hiring managers and things are "outsourced" to a recruiter/agency. Not to say all recruiters/agencies are bad but 95% are. I know some really good ones though.
The biggest issue I see again and again is time. Hiring good people is hard. Hiring good people fast is really hard. Hiring lots of good people fast is really fucking hard.
Ultimately it takes a huge amount of time to source, filter, screen, interview and hire good people. A lot of early stage founders complain that hiring ends up being their biggest time sink. As a result, right now in London (UK) there's an enormous demand for internal talent people to come on board and take over that responsibility as external agencies are an inefficient and expensive solution.
Putting time to one side, my biggest issue is not so much the finding, screening or interviewing part, it's the engagement part. Give me a job brief, a short chat with the engineering lead and a couple of hours in front of my laptop and I'll create a significant list of potentially appropriate candidates. even if the engineering lead reduces that list by half, convincing those people to have a conversation is an incredibly difficult thing as the majority of 'good' engineers are already in work and know that there is a world of opportunities out there if they could be bothered to look so why should they care about you and your random opportunity?
* Advertise your above market rates
* Advertise your generous referral bonus system
* Be very clear about the role (responsibilities, domain, org structure, etc)
* Poach from the pool of employees from respected, established companies. Ideally with 2+ years (they've basically done the vetting for you, and you know they've survived at least 2 review cycles)
* Avoid long drawn out interviews, any in person interviews should be treated like a final sanity check before an offer, like management interviews are.
Not getting fired at a company for 2 years is an extremely easy thing to do and means almost nothing. To the contrary I've hired some extremely talented people that have previously fired just a couple months on the job.
Quite honestly, saying recruiting is not hard makes me think you are just not very intelligent.
If we put them through a hands on assessment, they only find cross-site scripting errors with the most basic payloads (for example) and fail to assess with more abstract thinking (like design flaws that are not part of the OWASP Top Ten).
Out of ten candidates I interviewed, only one knew what same origin policy is (this is foundational). I'm not asking about elliptic curve cryptography here, and I'm pretty generous with assuming people are just really anxious.
I've considered that I'm too harsh, looking for the wrong signals, interpreting noise as signal and trying to match for folks like myself instead of an objective bar. Every time I revise to try and reach the platonic ideal of an interview where:
1. There is a short hands on assessment,
2. There is a phone interview with basic theory and no trick questions,
3. We eliminate as much "culture fit" hunting as possible,
4. We basically go totally rèsumè blind,
...we still fail to interview folks who can reliably find find SQL injection in a deliberately vulnerable MySQL database.
I think it's pipeline issue, personally, but I'm open to suggestions that my interview methodology sucks. I'm a big fan of 'tptacek's hiring style.
Every time I get hopeful, something goes wrong and we have wasted 10 or so hours that week (or more) collectively evaluating this individual. The closer we get to the final interview or hiring decision, the more disappointing and inefficient it gets.