But otherwise, I can't fathom how anyone that is willing to "speak up their mind, challenge manager" would ever consider to apply for a position that radiate manager/HR/recruiter incompetence (and no tech team feedback on the posting?)
People who challenge manager, TL, speaks up because it's their business(or they see it that way) and affects them. Can't see how those kind of people would waste their time voicing their content to a company they spent <10min checking the job postings for.
Becoming a friend or not is not a causal relation to competence, but rather to your preference. And in this context makes me doubt that what underwater said in his comment might be the real goal: >They're good for determining if the test taker is the test author, and not much else.
More plausible that you only wanted to hire, well, people just like you (and that's why you became friends). Not withstanding the glaring obvious survivor bias. But if it worked, who am I to question it.
> If you want to hire warm bodies to write code then this is not a good way.
Yea but my point wasn't (or yours either) to hire warm bodies, but people that "speak up their mind, challenge manager". And we are talking how efficient(or inefficient) this is, and how many false negatives this method produce. and if your pool of applicants is big enough, it will produce true positives anyway, irrelevant of the efficiency of the filter.
Personally I think even "agreeableness" personality test mumbo-jumbo would be a better metric/filter for gaining people with "speak up their mind, challenge manager" characteristics.
People go through three phases: 1. they are too scared to challenge authority 2. they are not scared of challenging authority 3. they realize they can just go somewhere else
Mature, intelligent Phase 3 people will only challenge authority if they know they're secure in doing so---if they trust you. But why should they trust you? They've never met you, you're just a job ad.
Sounds like mssundaram is just the person you need to hire then.
Comport yourself like a professional.
I'm happy to speak up if something isn't right, but if that happens too often, I'll speak up using my feet.
If an ad or interview gives me a vibe that most of my job is going to involve telling people they are wrong, I'll choose a different job.
As a candidate I spend about the same amount of time on reviewing job positions as you do on resumes. When I'm looking for candidates I don't interview every resume I see, it's like 50:1 on contacts. As a candidate it's the same.
I currently filter out any company who doesn't have pricing on the website for instance. I don't want to work for a purely enterprise sales based company as I hate working with them as a customer.
In your case at best I might say your position has impossible requirements to be helpful. But I did that in the early days if java and was given many excuses. None of them led to interviews and I don't think any of them changed their postings.
Tldr, you're just convincing me more that I wouldn't want to work with you.
If I insert a joke into a job spec, I don’t want it to seem like I’m an idiot. I assume that any competent people I want to work with will value non-idiots and not want to work with idiots.
In this case you weren’t an idiot, but just testing people’s grit or honesty or whatnot. But I would just assume the spec was written by an oblivious HR person who, at best, or perhaps an oblivious hiring manager. So I would have only applied if I really needed the money.
Let me give you an example. I am a pilot and I was flying to Long Beach a few weeks back. It was morning with a low marine layer so there was only one option - ILS 30. The controller was doing a harD job of merging small planes like myself and big iron (Southwest, Delta, etc) going to the same runway. The Cessna in front of me got vectors (and accepted!) to fly 10 miles into the ocean for spacing. When I heard it on the radio my first thought the was “their engine quits and they better know how to swim”. When controller asked me to follow that Cessna, my reply was “unable, don’t have my swimsuit today, but I can do left or right 360 for spacing”. The Cessna pilot accepted controllers directions without asking any questions putting himself and passengers at risk. Very few software engineers face life or death decisions, but I still like people who ask questions ;)
I mean they got an unmaintainable, over-engineered and elitist Scala codebase as a result but hey, at least hiring was a bit easier.
Only time I hear about better than real-time experience being required, it's people making fun of whoever wrote the requirement.