A Plan for Résumé Spam
raganwald.posterous.com
raganwald.posterous.com
Things - 'tptacek - is - OK - with is a very poor measurement of how good an idea is or isn't (unless it involves Javascript crypto in which case I am right), but I thought you might want the data point. I like to think of myself as an A-player (or at least an A- player), and I'd skip talking to your company if I knew it did something like this.
For what it's worth, I think a better way to supply talent to your team is not to depend on a steady inflow of resumes to begin with, but to actively recruit. We do classes, we give talks, and I yell at people on Hacker News; all of these things have outperformed job reqs for us on recruiting.
PARTICULARLY not if through those other people there is a reasonably high chance of it getting back to my employer.
You could avoid that by having the service not provide any level of detail, just a "yes/no, this person passed threshold X requests in time T." But if that got popular then I guarantee that craptastic employers would get the bright idea of, after hiring people, having lots of fake companies report interviewing them. This would make their current employees have trouble getting interviewed elsewhere.
The initial idea, as presented, would likely fail to succeed once people were aware of the risk. The amended version could succeed, but there are high odds of some abuse.
The pertinent question then is whether the abused version is worse than the current reality. My gut says that most employers won't abuse it, and it would prove to be at least a somewhat useful filter. So despite my negative tone, it at least has a chance.
If I was a truly unscrupulous job seeker, I'd set myself up as an employer, get a bunch of resumes in my field and sabotage anyone with a skill set similar to mine. Presto, the field is wide-open now!
And, again: stop trying to hire people by reading resumes. Resumes are worthless.
There are huge inefficiencies in everything. That doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem. The only ones who think that hiring is a problem are those who haven't solved it.
Think of it as a bell curve (what a surprise). Some companies suck. Most are mediocre. But a few have it figured out.
I've been on both sides of this process more times than I can count and I've noticed that the companies that do it well have a lot in common:
- They rely on up front third party aptitude and personality screening to eliminate 95% to 98%. They pay, but it's a bargain.
- They use interview quantity (lots of them, by phone and in person).
- They use interview quality (peers, supervisors, customers getting well below the "surface").
- They use variety (interviews, testing, get-togethers).
- They check references without a canned checklist (logic path driven, in-depth).
- They use HR primarily for formalities.
- They take their time.
- They "solve a long term problem" for all parties involved.
I admire your desire to solve a problem that affects so many, but I wonder if your approach is the best way. Maybe it's better for the mediocre to do what already works by copying the excellent. Then they wouldn't have such a big problem to solve.
Now, I don't use illegal drugs; Hell, I could easily pass one of those 'hair tests' that see if you have used marijuana in the last few years. Still, as an employee, my assumption is that if you require a drug test or similar, you are not a company that will respect me as an employee. My assumption if you made me take a 'personality test' would be that your company is run by idiots.
The rest seems to be pretty good advice, assuming that you are a company that can't just hire people as a contractor, and then let them go if they don't work out.
this is what I do at my company: If someone looks good, I hire them for a short project. If they don't do well, they get paid for their time and sent on their way. Personally, I think it's more respectful than grilling someone for 4 or 8 hours without pay, and it probably gives me a better idea of how good they are.
If it is a big company, HR practices will have nothing to do with anything else in the company, so don't judge the department you will be working in by what HR makes you do. On the other hand, a company that lets HR have free reign to do anything, may cause endless suffering as HR feel the need to make themselves more "integrated".
I recently interviewed for a developer in a government position, and decided that the people doing the interview are the ones are out of their depth, and should be unemployed. They clearly had to technical understanding where it was required for their job, and got very confused by the simplest question.
HR is one of those neglected things, if they've gotten that right then they tend to have other things right. It's also something that you hope will be invisible and will "just work" when you're there... you want it to be friendly, respectful, and efficient.
I would say that if HR appears from the outset to be burdened by needless bureaucracy (an aptitude test when you acknowledge the position/department/legislature may not require it) definitely checks the box of reflecting a corporate culture that allows such crud to creep in.
I don't go for any positions that: 1) Require me to jump through silly hoops when there is no benefit from anyone to doing so. 2) Bog me down in bureaucracy before I've even begun. 3) Require me to give access to any personal data that they do not have the legal right to ask for.
On that last one, I'm talking about social networking credentials, overly invasive background checks that don't relate to the position and so on. I was fine with the Home Office and GCHQ asking questions about my finances, running criminal record checks and contacting friends and family as part of a security vetting process that they have the legal mandate to perform... but I wouldn't be fine with a large company performing such things.
When I interviewed at Google there was no third party aptitude and personality screening. There was also not an incredible amount of variety. And I don't know how the reference check went. But the rest of your list looks accurate.
Even so, I guarantee that Google has not solved hiring by a country mile. The biggest single problem is that (for obvious reason) they are willing to settle for a lot more false negatives than false positives. But getting the false negative rate down would be huge if they could do it.
I find myself often forgetting how dysfunctional a lot of organizations are, only to be spectacularly reminded of it, again and again. And there are people at those organizations who know they aren't going to be able to overhaul hiring, but they have a budget, and they have a problem, and there are not a lot of great options. Those are the target customers for something like this, not Google and Foursquare and AirBnB.
Other employers can enter names from resumés they have received, and find out if that applicant made it to the final lap on any recent interviews.
There's no direct benefit to companies putting the names in, but it could be seen as a 'pay it forward' sort of service -- if you benefitted from this, please put your finalists in after you choose your hire.
One important distinction the service would have to make is not allow browsing of names, only specific name-lookup, so job-seekers can only be found by companies they're applying to.
... especially if you're going to be talking to people who are presently employed...
A few years back there was a case where a group of companies (I think in the construction sector) were prosecuted for operating a cartel because they co-operated in developing a blacklist of "trouble-maker" employees (as a do-not-hire list).
One that would keep me up at night is an employer who 'tastes' their employee's resume by sending it to a fake job ad. If it has a positive spray score of any magnitude, they have just learned that the employee is job seeking. Bad!
The crux of the problem is that there isn't a way to directly quantify what is absolutely needed for a job position, and in turn, there isn't a way for an applicant to demonstrate they meet those qualifications, short of the person doing the job. The need for human interpretation is too ingrained in the current process, even with the filtering mechanisms in place
This varies according to job. E.g. for a programming job, the employer could ask applicants to solve a programming problem, such as FizzBuzz (or something harder).
The ideal scenario is the applicant mashes a button and gets a list of job they're truly qualified and a good fit for (as in, highly likely to get a phone screen on) and the hiring company can mash the same button. Everyone keeps trying to find new ways to invent or improve the button. No filter or screen is going to work until companies can definitively measure the quality of applicants between two postings for the same job (e.g., A/B test job position listings) and candidates determine if they are qualified based on that.
There's a lot of problems to solve, but the biggest by far is the fact that 90% of the jobs out there have only "can breath, assistance to breath is ok" and "can show up" as the hard skills that are required. I'm not kidding, go spend a couple of hours on Monster, or Craigslist...at least programmer jobs have <arbitrary number of years> in <technology X>...most jobs don't.
There are certainly some complications that would come along with this, but there would be far fewer than with keeping a database of everyone who has ever applied for any job.
I don't love the idea, and I know quite a few people have tried making it work unsuccessfully, but I still think it's far more realistic.
But seriously, there is an equivalent strategy, and that is putting up a small road block such as writing a test application. The problem is that many qualified people won't do it. Those who are currently employed are the least motivated to pay in time or money to submit an application.
Either way, if you're trying to reduce the number of spam applications, this is certainly a great way of doing it, and it's much much simpler than building a massive database.
That said, it might be hard to figure out when hiring company has failed the applicant.
Stanford University, for example: $90 fee X 20,000 applicants = $1,800,000
I would have assumed that my universities' costs would be offset by the $40,000 I'm paying every year for the next four years, rather than erroneous fees that aren't tallied in the advertised total cost of attendance.
Basically, your tuition could be even higher if they dropped the fee to apply.
Doesn't make that much sense, since we're all prolly gnna change jobs 5 maybe 10 times. I hope I don't get married 5 or 10 times.
Maybe job applicants could put a note on their resumés saying what they want to be doing in 3 to 5 years.
This policy is, of course, roughly equivalent to only dating people who are living with someone else.
Slightly more accurate but you know.... I'm going to claim poetic license. The underlying sentiment seems to be correct even if there is some room to argue the simile isn't 100% isomorphic to reality.
The equivalent in this case would be people who did good work, but at a company that went under for reasons out of their control.
Whenever you're involved with many options to choose something, and the other party has the chance to reject you, you have an interesting problem. Am I missing any big ones besides housing, courtship and employment? I guess higher education could be considered, but it's a little lopsided: more of a few-to-many relationship.
One approach to getting started would be to provide resume screening services to employers. I'm sure there are a bunch of service businesses like that today, but if you solve the problem like it is an NLP problem rather than an HR problem, that could be a differentiator.
At a large enough enterprise, I'm sure there are people who are applying for a bunch of different positions over an extended period of time, and just being able to solve that problem intelligently for that one enterprise is something that must be useful for some big firm out there. So I don't think you need to have a bunch of employers on the system to get started.
But that doesn't address the real challenge, which seems to be that your service provides clear benefits to the employer, but not for the employee. The employer gets better candidates, more efficiently, and almost every business that's hiring acknowledges that they have trouble finding enough good candidates.
What about the potential employee? Why would they want to participate in this sort of system vs. the status quo? That seems like the challenge to me, more than legal issues, or the employer side of the equation.
There is definitely terrific potential here, exactly because hiring is currently so inefficient: it'll be really interesting see how this idea develops.
Avoid ye, for here be dragons.
Being in a profession that automates things, we (self included) tend to try to automate things that don't automate well, or do things by remote control that should be done in person. One case in point was my son when he was in grade school. There was a lot of difficulty for all involved for him to focus on his homework. Finally, I hit on a pretty simple and essentially zero-technology solution. I would sit in his room with him, not supervising him so much as being there for him to ask whatever question he wanted. Many interesting questions came up, and some were even related to his homework, but his grades skyrocketed. This was about support and not about being the other room and loudly saying "get back to your homework".
So if you have a mental bias towards automatability, this method sounds "inefficient", but perhaps that is a false efficiency.
Similarly, successful hiring is forming a relationship. A relevant book is "Confessions of a Headhunter" in which the author tells of tracking executives for quite some time before an actual approach is made. Now that is particularly expensive as executives are a smaller percentage of a population than startup dudes and dudettes, but that seems to be a better direction to go than trying to do this by remote control.
Incidentally, the introduction to that book tells of the author's sailing experience in which he nearly won a race against severely better boats, and failed to do so simply because he didn't happen to think that he could.
Second, there's the obvious problem of privacy: it's a huge problem for passive candidates (again, who are often -- but not always -- best of the best) and a problem for candidates who apply for tough-to-get positions, have a bad day (or the person interviewing them has a bad day) and now become "damaged goods" by the virtue of a publicly known rejection (which could be no indication of their lack of competence).
No employee involvement would be required.