I don't understand why "public creativity" would be something you'd screen for in an engineering role.
But if someone has it, you're likely to take it into account. So as a candidate it's useful.
But... of course I look beyond the resume that the candidate has sent me. Which means that, as a candidate, a relatively easy way to stand out is to have a small amount of public creativity on display for hiring managers to spot.
Sometimes a candidate might interview poorly because they get nervous... but there's clear evidence out there of their skills and experience which can help guide a second round of interviews that help avoid missing out on great talent.
Let's say I have 10 resumes, and I only want to dedicate phone screens to 5 of them and in-person interviews to 2 or 3 (because my time is finite).
If you have some public writing or public code, you are much likely to make it to the phone screen stage.
If you're confident that your resume speaks for itself already, you are free to ignore my advice.
I had assumed that most other hiring managers are affected by this factor in a similar way to me, but maybe I'm wrong about that.
Is there a signal which suggests that "public creativity" equals "good engineer", particularly when the resume already speaks for itself? Or is it purely to compensate, as you suggest, for a possibly poor interview performance?
I'm honestly skeptical that such a signal exists (but can be convinced otherwise), except insofar that a person may be invited to give talks _because_ they have demonstrated strong engineering skills or talent -- whereupon, yet again, their resume should speak for itself.
I do believe that candidates with public creativity are more likely to make for a promising interview. Thinking back, I can't remember many cases where a candidate with some evidence of public creativity bombed the interview completely.
IE, unless the role is explicitly "go be the face of the company and smile on youtube and praise our products and their awesomeness", no one cares about your github resume since they've barely looked at your resume before the interview. Just try and demonstrate you know what you're talking about during the interview and can relate some real world experiences in a sane manner, and you're halfway there.
My employer once hired someone into a leadership role who we all knew from conferences and press coverage. We were pretty excited to land such a high-profile guy.
Turned out, he spent most of his time prepping and going to conferences, and working on his press coverage. Very little actual work got done, and we quietly parted ways with him in less than a year.
In retrospect, it’s a bit of a “well duh” moment, connecting the dots. But at the time, we all just assumed that there must be incredible substance for him to have such a high profile.
I took a big lesson from that: people who are good at building an audience would be a great hire if you need to build an audience. If you need something else, don’t assume the audience (or conference organizers, or reporters) have actually vetted that person for the skills you need. They probably didn’t.
Ultimately, he ended up as an executive at another company, with responsibility for raising their profile and finding new clients. His skills and inclinations are perfect for that.
Obviously there is a market for these people to exist and for companies who want to pseudo acquire their audience.
I wonder what the total number of these folks are in our industry and worldwide…
Job/coding interviews are very difficult to do well, and many people such as myself tend to perform poorly due to the stress of the interview (so much that I’d rather stay in a mediocre position than go through the agony of interviewing — I hate it with every fiber of by being, and it correlates 0% to my in-job performance).
It’s just more data, which is especially useful if you’re on the fence with someone. You can also see creativity which isn’t something you can test well for in an interview — especially technical interviews.
False. It correlates directly to your job performance, unless you're YAML developer.
Not only does it not in my case, I don’t know how you could even make such a claim without knowing me, my work, and how I perform in such interviews… and that’s just me. Much has been written on this subject with similar anecdotes as well as quantitative research done by Google’s HR department. Clearly 0% is an exaggeration at large, but it’s well documented to be a poor correlate.
Interviews don't tend to include writing - and strong communicators who get nervous during interviewers may end up at a disadvantage.
I've done a lot of tech interviews lately, which is where I get at ability to do the work. But when a hiring team is trying to pick among the people who do approximately as well on that, then other factors can help.
At that stage, I definitely like to see things that indicate people are excited about something enough to just make a thing (a library, a small project, a blog post). If that's related to our domain or tech stack, even better. But even without that it's a plus in that it's a sign I can just give them a user problem or a technical issue and trust they'll go off and do something good with it.
When I was a founder it was incredibly hard to find people who are "available" and skilled because they feared listing themselves as available on LinkedIn.
When I'm not a founder and skilled it's incredibly hard to get to hiring managers. Usually I get warm intros from people within companies I'm interested in, it works way better, and usually often results in jumping straight to the on-site interview step.
Why isn't there a central website where you can just post your name-redacted-resume, accomplishments, and (optionally) target location and salary range anonymously, and if someone wants to reach out, then you can reveal your real name and e-mail?
Or better yet a Tinder-like interface where companies swipe candidates and candidates swipe companies, albeit with no photos, just a name-redacted resume?