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Comment by pluc | Hacker News Reader

How about trusting candidates' experience? If they say they have 20 years of experience in X and you hire them, you'll know very quickly if that was a lie. Those tests are so insulting to the relationship you're pretending to want to build. Why would I bother putting false information on my resume that has the potential to get me hired and get tested daily? Isn't that why there's a probation period?!

I have 20 years of experience in X but prove it? Why's the burden on me to prove what I've already told you? Are you saying I'm a liar? If my date of birth is on my cv do you expect a birth certificate to validate that information too?

Anyway, that's always been my philosophy - hire on facts and fit, fire quickly if anything was wrong - and it's been pretty smooth. The great thing that it does is it prevents testing for futile thing that you will never use in your position and that are just elitist criteria or vanity wishes.

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> How about trusting candidates' experience?

The reason this philosophy is misguided is not that candidates flat out lie all the time (though that happens too), but more that resumes are crafted to inflate, exaggerate and obfuscate to make the candidate seem more qualified than they might actually be for the position upon closer scrutiny. I say I have 20 years of experience in X, but 4 of those years were just hobby projects in high school, 4 studying in university, another 5 in entry-level positions in a semi-related industry, etc etc. It would be a huge waste of time in obviously unnecessary hirings+firings to blindly trust stated experience on a resume without verifying its accuracy first.

I agree, but I think that's partly a chicken & egg problem. People wouldn't inflate their resume if HR was a little more H and a little less R.

This is something that only makes sense after you've spent significant time on the hiring side of the table.

Engineers who are 100% honest, overly humble, and fortunate enough to have only worked at top-quality companies tend to not understand the need for verifying the skills that people put on their resume.

In the real world, some of the best candidates have the worst resumes. Some of the worst candidates have the best resumes. And perhaps most dangerously, some of the worst hires tend to be the best at lying and exaggerating because they've used their charisma to get them through life.

Making bad hires is a very costly mistake for the team. Not only do you lose out on months of team-building and project progress, but it's bad for morale to see people hired and fired quickly. In reality, bad hires are going to stick around for 6-12 months or more at any company of moderate size company.

Also, not all experience is created equal. It's shockingly common for applicants to claim 5+ years of experience in something, only to discover that they only touched that topic a couple times per year for 5 straight years, for example.

> If my date of birth is on my cv do you expect a birth certificate to validate that information too?

US hiring practices expect to see something that validates your birthdate, so kind of.

Fast firing can work, but none of the places I've worked were prepared to do it. Similar to what a sibling commenter posted, years of experience is something, but what you got out of it is another. There are plenty of people who have spent a lot of time doing something and not gotten much experience. In my mind, a good interview process figures out where the candidate actually is with regards to experience and capability, if they fit with the company, if the company fits with them, with as minimal a time commitment for both sides as possible.

It's not great for either party if someone is hired and fired in a month.

> There are plenty of people who have spent a lot of time doing something and not gotten much experience.

Indeed. People also underestimate just how quickly you can learn in the right environment.

> you'll know very quickly if that was a lie

Yes, and the way that I know this is by performing the tests you're arguing against. I've interviewed plenty of people that could converse fluently in buzzwords, but could not write code. In the actual job, it's necessary to be able to write code.

You would be surprised how many people with 20 years of experience can barely perform at junior level

You can have 20 years of experience or 20 one year experiences.

You can also be straight up lying about having 20 years (or any) experience. Most people won't be doing this, but it seems like a basic feature of a hiring process to have some kind of check against this.

The check is what the candidate says, isn't it? If the candidate lies, you will know the day you hire them

Isn't the idea that you know before you hire them so that you hire the right person?

Yeah, but you know when you obtain the information - which would be reading it on their resume or talking through it with the candidate. Asking them to confirm what you've been told is my issue with this whole thing

Also common is someone with 20 years at the same company that's has been coasting. Maybe they still work on a decades old enterprise app and have no relevant recent experience.

Lots of jobs aren't all that demanding.

When asking someone with 20 years experience to do junior level problems, you're likely measuring something that devalues the experience tremendously

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