Jason Fried: Never Read Another Resume | Hacker News Reader

Jason Fried: Never Read Another Resume

inc.com

127 pointsseanmccann65 comments

Broken down to bullets:

* Don't hire until you've had to endure the pain of doing the job well yourself. If you don't know how to do the job right, you don't know how to hire for it.

* Don't hire just to capture talent. You'll only end up alienating the talent.

* Stay as small as you can.

* The resume form makes everyone look good, which means it doesn't tell you anything useful.

* Cover letters on the other hand tell you lots, and, incidentally, also tell you how well people can write.

* Sometimes the best candidates distinguish themselves with effort. Their most recent designer hire made this mini-site while applying: http://jasonzimdars.com/svn/

* Questions are good, but beware people who ask too many "how do I...?" questions as opposed to "why...?" questions.

* Test drive if you can. They hired designers for 1-week projects at $1500 before extending FT offers.

* Be flexible about where you hire (they're all over the place), if you can.

Of these points, #2 squares particularly well with my experience (there is a constant gold rush for top talent in software security), but the "how" vs. "why" thing rings false; all sharp questions are good, even if they're draining.

Glad to hear someone well-respected sticking up for cover letters, since there appears to be some controversy about whether they're valuable.

Cover letters on the other hand tell you lots, and, incidentally, also tell you how well people can write.

Also: if in doubt, hire the better writer.

I probably didn't include this (and I should have) because it's my least favorite of his hiring ideas. Being able to write intelligibly is critical and mandatory. Being able to write well is great. But there are other things that are equally great.

Also: If applying for a job, hire a writer.

I disagree with point 2. You only alienate the talent if you don't have a culture of exploration. On several occassions I've hired exceptionally bright people, with no clear idea what they might do. In every case they figure out what to do, usually by finding a gap that we didn't even know we had.

Some very smart people are just looking for a place where they can experiment and grow technically and do the basic things they love. If you can utilize these people without having them end up building and testing CRUD apps to justify the headcount, that's fine.

But other very smart people want not only to be doing interesting things, but also to be as close to the money as possible. What they work on needs to have an impact, and have some chance of setting the direction of the company.

If you accidentally hire that latter person into a role designed for the former person, they'll get bored, or, worse, irritated when they try to get close to the money and then rebuffed (or, worse, pigeonholed into something boring).

What I'm saying is, be careful with the notion that you can always find something for an A-player to do. Often, no.

I definitely agree, new minds bring new perspective and can actually spot issues you never thought of.

Definitely a principle of the lean startup, which leaves out the possibility of what potential bright minds can do to expand a company's horizon. This point mainly points out on core competency: do what you do best and let the others do what they're really good at.

But it doesn't leave room for opening to other perspectives and untapped creative ideas from different sources.

Did Einstein really help the patent office?

There is a degree of truth in this point. I will also add, though, that some of our best hires aren't doing anything remotely like what we hired them to do...

>> "The resume form makes everyone look good, which means it doesn't tell you anything useful."

I disagree. I've seen hundreds of truly awful resumes.

I mean, clearly you're right, but since 50%+ of the really excellent resumes are also from awful candidates, there's still no usable signal.

Surely a resume aids as a reasonable first pass. Throw out all the people who clearly know nothing about computers. Sure, there's other, possibly better ways to do that, but it seems like a reasonable way to clear out most of the unsuitable applicants quickly.

The idea is that the mistake is having a process that involves resumes in the first place.

It probably depends on what you mean by 'resume'. A bit of paper that tells prospective employees about what hot shit you've done, with plenty links to the work seems useful. Just like a dating profile seems useful as a first pass.

A formal resume which says what qualifications you got and what skills you think you have, I agree, isn't very useful at all.

I can't even fathom doing that much work up front, just to get hired by someone else. I must be missing something. Maybe they liked the redesign so much, they gave him a signing bonus to bring it to the table.

Given the number of opportunities (people interested in me interviewing, not job offers) that I come across which also seem compelling, the idea of making an in depth cover letter or completing a small project for each one seems a little absurd. Oh, and quit my job to work for you for a week in the hopes of getting a full time offer? Yeah, no thanks.

Yeah, you guys are both making the mistake of thinking that we're talking about yet-another-tech-job.

For yet-another-dev-job or yet-another-QA-job or yet-another-design-job at a cool-sounding company that nobody thinks is going to change their lives, you're right. It's a sellers market for talent. The prospective employer should be the one going to extreme lengths to hire people.

Some people aren't looking for yet-another-job. They have a laser focus on one or two companies that they want to work for --- and not only that, but they know exactly what role they want in those companies. They (gasp) aren't even necessarily looking at the job reqs. They're walking up to 37s and saying "I could really kick ass helping you with your interfaces, here's why, let's get talking."

So, two things:

(1) Fried is saying, you want to run your company in such a way that you're getting exposed to those kinds of people. Which means, you're running a very tight ship with a small number of people so that any ANY hire is going to end up having a dramatic role in the company. You can't be Google and expect people to build mini-sites to get an interchangeable-product dev role.

(2) As a potential employee, you want to consider whether you want to spend your career bouncing from job-req job to job-req job. This isn't touchy-feely startup-y 37signals-y talk here; the entire book "What Color Is Your Parachute" has "get jobs this way" as its theme. Pick a company you think will be awesome, and then sell yourself to that company. You'll be happier than trying to fit yourself into one of the "available" jobs in the industry.

If it's true that this advice is only relevant for "supercool" companies like 37Signals, then that should be included either as advice ("become supercool like us") or as a disclaimer.

But I don't think being a supercool company is any reason to treat your candidates disrespectfully either. It's one way to make sure you only get childless employees though. Only a truly irresponsible parent would ever quit his job to work for a company for a trial period, no matter how much they mght like it.

You're totally missing the point(s), so I must be communicating it badly. I'm sorry.

There are two points here.

First: if you are an employer:

Don't hire often. Hire only when you absolutely need to. That way, the people you hire are assured to be critical to your business. Roles where people can be business-critical are inherently more attractive to strong candidates. Strong candidates + business-critical roles = organic hiring, where you simply don't have to put out a req and take the best of the results.

You also need to be a successful business (not "supercool") and you also need to be a good place to work (again, not "supercool"). But lots of successful businesses with good work environments run a recruiting system that forces them to select the best candidate out of a pile of resumes after posting a req, and that sucks.

More importantly:

If you are a prospective employee:

Consider a career-style where you don't ever look at job reqs. Don't look to see who's hiring. You don't care. Instead, you think about what you do best, and where you could be most effective doing it. Are you an animator? Pixar!

Then, beat down their doors and get a job there.

You are going through more effort than normal job seekers do. But at the same time, you are getting more degrees of freedom with your own career, and an assurance that you are really going to fit wherever you land.

Lots of companies won't be able to hire you if you approach them this way. Good. Those companies are assuredly not staffed with people who beat down the doors to get in. You don't want to work there.

I'm not making that mistake, although you probably couldn't tell from what I wrote. I just think that if you are that talented, why do you want to waste your self-promotion efforts securing yourself a job working for someone else, when you could work for yourself or start a company with someone?

Because starting your own company is incredibly difficult and risky, and because established companies offer a lot of opportunities that you are very unlikely to obtain on your own. That said: I started a company.

> * Don't hire until you've had to endure the pain of doing the job well yourself. If you don't know how to do the job right, you don't know how to hire for it.

Sounds completely unworkable. A quaint aphorism but nothing more - never hire a company lawyer unless you've been to law school and worked as the company lawyer yourself?? If you can't plant the flowerbeds outside your office well yourself then you can't hire a gardener??

That sounds like the writer has not clue what they're talking about; I must have misunderstood!?

We're talking about key roles, not support roles. Lawyer is not a key role unless you're building a patent troll firm, and in that case you damn well better know how to litigate yourself.

Read the actual article, not just the bullet point. It was given as a "rule of thumb," not a solid Law Of Hiring. Fried's point is that if you have no knowledge of a given field, you don't even know if you actually want that kind of employee, much less whether a candidate suits your goals or not.

The example he gives is hiring a "business development" specialist who would evaluate the side deals and the like — stuff that is supposed to help your business grow but isn't part of its core. They were totally flummoxed when they tried to hire a candidate, so they decided to try it out themselves. They realized that they weren't generally interested in this kind of business development. They just thought they wanted it because it was a black box with an aura of "things businesses should do" around it.

He also says that having all the employees do tech support to begin with made it a lot easier to hire dedicated support people, because then the people doing the hiring had a very clear idea what they needed.

Most companies shouldn't hire in-house counsel, or an in-house gardener.

Start-up founders will have signed (and presumably read) quite a few legal documents (and even written a few themselves) before they hire a real lawyer. They should have had a real lawyer look over a few things first (on a consulting basis), as may be required by their E&O insurance, but they will have done quite a bit of "lawyerish" work themselves.

They may have also emptied the bins, unplugged the toilets, watered the potplants, and done a lot of other routine maintenance work.

There are very few jobs that can't be done (to a certain extent) by a non-professional. Practicing medicine is one obvious professional-only profession, but even then there are gray areas. Before you hire a company doctor, should you look into getting a sick bay, and doing a first aid course?

> http://jasonzimdars.com/svn/

I was impressed by this and it gave me some business ideas. It's probably worth at least a quick scan for almost everyone.

The first one makes sense from a practical point of view but still I find it quite depressing.

"If you don't know how to do the job right, you don't know how to hire for it."

This means that if you work for them you will do things which they could also do (possibly better), they just don't have time for it. Basically you are selling your time.

"do only what only you can do" (Dijkstra) and all that ...

Ah, the joys of grammatical ambiguity.

If we're going to be picky, isn't it orthographical ambiguity?

[Edit: rephrased]

Having read RyanMcGreal's comment above I now realise there is grammatical ambiguity as well as orthographic :)

Is there a word for ambiguity ambiguity? (i.e. Which type of ambiguity?)

Ambiguity ambiguity sounds like semantic ambiguity, but there are lots of different kinds of that. There's a book that disambiguates ambiguity ambiguity, by W. Empson (math geek turned lit prof), Seven Types of Ambiguity.

You just reminded me of why the Internet is an incredible invention.

Having read tome's comment above, I went and looked up "orthography". :)

I'm having second thoughts about the small stack of resumes by Jason Fried that are still sitting on my desk.

I think it's just grammatical incorrectness, I mean, shouldn't the title of an article be offset in some way?

Someone changed the title, so if the parent comment doesn't make sense to you, the original title was:

Never Read Another Resume By Jason Fried

This is just as compelling an argument that you never write another resume. Or, to make the conclusion a little less doctrinaire, spend more time on networking and creating things that you can present to prospective employers to convince them to employ you beyond the confines of the 1-2 page resume that nobody reads anyhow.

I must admit that these days I pretty much refuse to supply resumes. I really don't feel like a resume reflects at all who I am or what I can do...

A resume is supposed to reflect who you are and what you can do. If yours doesn't, you are doing it wrong.

That's quite probably true. But I am a web-developer, not a resume-writer.

If I don't give someone a resume, they can't make any assumptions based on it. If instead I send them to my personal website, or to my GitHub account then they can ony make assumptions off of the concrete things that I have done. That's very much how I prefer it...

I disagree that nobody reads the resume. Last year I was looking for a job. During interviews I received enough detailed comments on things in my resume (see http://elem.com/~btilly/BenTilly.pdf for said resume) that I knew that people had read it. Furthermore they had followed through and actually read things I linked to in it!

That said, it took a lot of work to get my resume to the point where that happened. And you have to be able to back up your resume.

That's an interesting resume. Gave me some ideas to improve mine. Thanks!

Almost all the suggestions on hiring in this article are pretty good. The one where I would differ is:

  We're happy to skip over the perfect catch 
  if we don't have the perfect job for the person to do.

If you already know the person is 'perfect' for your organization, and have the financial capacity to hire him/her, you should go for it (IMO). I would think of it as an investment that would help my business in the longer run.

Right now, a company might be content with their current suite of products, but constant innovation is required in our industry to stay ahead. It could be in the existing products or coming up with completely new solutions.

If people working on existing products have their plates full most of the times, they 'might' not be able to devote as much time as they would like on coming up with newer things, that could further improve the bottom line.

I'm going to second this. If you hire mediocre people without enough work, you'll waste money, it's true, but consider Google. They hire brilliant people, and through their 20% time they end up with amazing things (I think Gmail and Maps are two examples).

Now imagine what an excellent employee could do with 100% time and support from the rest of your organization.

Here's one strong possibility: noodle, get bored, then quit.

Consider the adverse selection problem here. People who can do valuable things with "100% time"? They're inherently valuable. Since they usually need to be pretty smart to be that valuable, they know they're valuable. Therefore: they are probably not looking for a W2 position as a base of operations.

Lots of people, many of them very smart, will salivate over the idea of a 100% self-directed R&D position. But smart or not, most of those people are not going to do well in that role, because: see last paragraph.

I think it's a selfish act to hire somebody just for the sake of that person being perfect for your organization.

Primarily, that person would not have ownership of anything for the immediate future.

Other companies may be perfect for this person and may actually have better work for him/her to do now.

I'm in the business of writing software. I would never hire the best purse designer in the world.

I think you read, hire someone at least tangentially related to your job, but I think they're actually saying do not hire someone who would become unhappy in their job.

So they are saying apples, and you're saying oranges, but we all can agree that hiring the perfect person for the wrong job/company is problematic.

Another rule of thumb: When in doubt, always hire the better writer.

OK, I'll bite. Why?

Communication skills are always important in a business, and often if people can write clearly and coherently about a topic it means they understand the topic clearly and coherently.

Because people that can express their ideas well are "better" than people that can't express their ideas as clearly.

...where "better" means any number of subjective things - easier to work with, capable of getting more done and faster, etc.

I agree with the "exhibits clear and concise thinking" points below, but I also think it has a lot to do with being a distributed company.

They communicate via email and Campfire all day, and their main marketing channel is their blog - which multiple people write for - so being able to write is of even greater importance for them.

37signals is a PR company first and foremost. Programming seems a secondary concern.

They say 3 million people use their software.

What are the elements of a truly good cover letter? Stuff beyond the cliched advice you get such as showing interest in the company/position and so on.

Are good cover letters "from the heart" (so to speak)? Is semi-formal but well-written language better?

"What we do look at are cover letters. Cover letters say it all. They immediately tell you if someone wants this job or just any job. And cover letters make something else very clear: They tell you who can and who can't write. Spell checkers can spell, but they can't write. Wordsmiths rise to the top quickly. Another rule of thumb: When in doubt, always hire the better writer."

Writing is critical in today's technologically, geographically dispersed world. Those who can write well can communicate their ideas and intentions well to their team and to their clients. There has been some ink covering the subject in various outlets over the last year or so.

it does seem a little short sighted to pay entire depts lots of over time because you can't find the perfect hire.

This is what my current employer does and I'm always amazed at the practice.

Isn't paying out twice as much in overtime more expensive than just hiring more people?

There are lots of costs with hiring another person (benefits, facilities, hr/legal, etc.) -- the fully loaded cost of a person may be twice their salary.

Yes, if you can hire people as good as the ones you already have. This is frequently not the case.

Maybe in the U.S... in parts of South America and Europe the administrative overhead of hiring new people (and the hefty penalties for firing) means that hiring has to be really, really well justified.

That of course makes for a less mobile market, a stagnation culture (IMO), and less entrepreneurism I suspect (though getting a state-paid job that can realistically mean 20 hrs/week of actual work and doing jobs on the side is very common).

I know a company that was outsourcing work to Argentina and was not entirely happy with said work. But they had a lot of knowledge sunk there.

Argentina decided to respond to the downturn by bringing in legislation that would make the cost of firing people even higher. That fact pushed the US company to fire the Argentina employees right away rather than waiting for it to get more expensive.

Unintended consequences and all that.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/never-read-another-resu...

Link with ads so they can get some small money for their content.

> Finally, we never let geography get in the way. We hire the best we can no matter where they are. We're based in Chicago, but we have programmers in Idaho and California, system administrators in North Carolina and downstate Illinois, designers in Oklahoma and Colorado, a writer in New York City, and others in Europe. This obviously wouldn't work for customer-facing folks, but for most everyone else, it does. The best are everywhere. It's up to you to find them.

This is so true, I don't understand tech companies from London or Miami or whatever that do not accept telecommuting and require someone from their own city. They're missing out on the best just so they can have face to face? Face to face is not required in programing!

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