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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I tried really hard to make it clear in this post that as a hiring manager it is your job to find great candidates who don't do this. So you shouldn't "screen" for this, in terms of filtering candidates based on whether or not they have evidence of public creativity.

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.

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I think in most companies my comment from the other week holds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27846776

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.

So the advantage in doing this is for candidates that don't interview well? That doesn't jive with the statement in the article that "you can give yourself a big advantage in terms of standing out from the crowd with a relatively small amount of work", which seems to imply that a hiring manager would prefer candidates with blogs or a twitter audience. When I'm reviewing resumes and someone lists their blog or twitter handle on their resume, I'm going to assume it's because they don't have concrete accomplishments to point to. It's not going to rescue a candidate who has a weak resume from being passed-over and it's not going to compensate for a candidate who made it to the technical interview but then couldn't solve the assigned problem. It's nice to see when someone posts a really great piece of code in their github, but I have no way of knowing whether they were even the person who wrote the code or not, so the technical interview is their chance to show me they have at least a basic grasp of coding. If they fail that, there's nothing short of a ten thousand star project in github that might make me reconsider a poor performance in the interview and that's never happened to me before. So I still don't understand the premise that candidates with a public presence should stand out more nor the premise that if I'm a candidate a small public presence would help me. I could be wrong - it could be that most managers like to see this sort of thing, but it's never been something I've screened for and I've yet to be convinced I should start.

The advice I gave in this article will work if I am your hiring manager.

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.

I'll rephrase the GP's question because I'm also curious, and I don't feel your response answered the question.

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 don't believe that public creativity is required for a good engineer.

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.

So if the hiring manager does not screen by this, what should I bother then? It does not give me any advantage because you are stating you are not screening for it for FOMO great engineers. Just in the eventuality of a tie? I doubt 1-2 blog posts will be the deciding factor.

For me, they will be. If I have ten candidates and only one of them has 1-2 blog posts about a technology I am using, that candidate is going to be one of the subset that gets an interview.

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