Why I Won't Hire You
golemtechnologies.com
golemtechnologies.com
If you can't narrow down resumes and phone interviews to candidates with better than a 1% chance of being accepted, then your interviewing pre-screening process is flawed. What other processes in our everyday work will also be flawed?
You send me a stupidly long resume
90% of all written correspondence (from customers, users, collaborators, vendors, etc.) is too long. Do you think they're all stupid, too?
You have annoyed me.
You're a manager. Your job is to properly deal with issues that would annoy others. Why would anyone want to work for someone so easily annoyed?
...do I really want to look forward to your rambling emails every day?
Do I really want to look forward to your sour attitude every day?
You can’t tell me why you like your current job
If I liked my current job, I wouldn't be here.
I don’t hire awesome people who don’t have the right skill mix.
Here's a clue: technologies change. By definition, anyone with the "right skill mix" won't have the "right skill mix" for long. Amesome people adapt. But how would you even know that if you don't hire them?
No career plans or vision
I've been programming for 33 years and still have no idea what I want to do when I grow up. This is an interview for an open job, not Dr. Phil.
If you don’t think well on your feet, spend some time reading through and practicing situational interview questions.
Are you serious? I'm a programmer, not an Americas Got Talent contestant. What you see is what you get.
If you are missing even one, I’m probably going to pass you up for someone who doesn’t.
Wait a minute. You want to hire perfect people, but you also want them to have "career plans or vision"?
I have a super BS detector
Obviously not, since so many of your questions can only be answered with BS.
The End
That's just about the only thing you've said that I agree with.
You sound like you have a serious attitude problem. I can't imagine working for someone like you. But thanks for writing this. You've solved many problems in advance. I won't be applying. And I don't imagine many people like me will be either.
Interviews are a two way street. If I am applying for a job, my role during the interview is to convince you why I am a worthwhile hire, your role during the interview is to convince me that you are a worthwhile employer. If he was one of my clients I would disassociate myself from him very quickly.
As for his 5 points, I wonder if he realises that all 5 inversely apply to him just as much as they do to the candidate being interviewed.
1.Show me you can get things done. This means you can set realistic deadlines for projects and meet them consistently. You must be a good motivator.
2.Show me you are intelligent. I will ask you questions to discern how in touch you are with todays market. I don't care if you've interviewed a dozen people for this job, I want to know if you've actually read my resume.
3.Show me how I fit into your vision. Truthfully, we’ll work best together if you sincerely think I am the best person for this job in the long run. I want to know how you can help me succeed in my career, Tell me.
4.Be highly skilled. If your job advert says that you need a highly skilled Developer then don't have me sitting in a corner refactoring shitty code for the first 6 months.
5.Be Passionate. If I feel like the interview process is boring you, I will end the interview prematurely but politely.
/rant
Here's a clue: technologies change. By definition, anyone with the "right skill mix" won't have the "right skill mix" for long. Amesome people adapt. But how would you even know that if you don't hire them?
gets to the heart why they cant. 10Xers are not a technology they are personality and a attitude. Hell some of them are not ever that great at some of the technologies they use, but they know how to use the parts they need to get them to the finish line. They know the principles of elegance in clean code, and simple systems that are only as complex as they need to be.
These people are not showing up to the door of people that interview like the author, and if they do they are not taking the position and probably recommending to other 10Xers to go ahead and avoid the interview.
I get the feeling from reading the article, that the author has not learned how to spot technical talent and is growing frustrated with it.
Also this: "Let me know your passionate or don’t waste my time." (you're!)
This is why I love being a contractor / consultant. Clients don't ask for a little lap dance and a smile before we can do business, like this guy seems to expect.
They have a job to do that they think I can do, I give a quote, they say yes or no (usually yes, if we went this far). I do it, they pay me.
No resume-this, resume-that, what's your vision, are you passionate, what do you love or hate. I hate being in an office with a stranger in the middle of the afternoon, talking about my passions.
This sums it up for me. The author sounds like a grumpy person who would be terrible to work for. I also suspect many of these rejections are self-fulfilling prophecies. When you're actively looking for a reason to reject candidates, you're probably going to find one.
> Do you have hiring war stories (interviewer or interviewee)? Share them in the comments!
looking for an employee is a WAR for this guy?!!
A programmer!
Yes, I've reached the end of my career. I'm where I want to be, and I don't want to change. I don't want to be a manager, team leader, or otherwise do anything other than programming. If there were any change I wanted, it would be 'do fewer non-programming things'.
Then we get to his example of a "good" answer for career plans: yet another instance of "In this many years, I see myself that many steps up the corporate ladder. … communication … leadership … responsibility …"
90% of all written correspondence (from customers, users, collaborators, vendors, etc.) is too long. Do you think they're all stupid, too? "
I agree with most of your post, but after doing a lot of interviews as the hiring manager, I have to agree that resumes should be short. I won't exclude a candidate just for sending a resume that is long, but as a general rule, don't expect me to go past page 2, especially for an entry-to-mid level position.
I think the article would have been more constructive it was titled "Why I Will Hire You."
Because you are a dick.
Now who are you? What are you going to give me in return? Why should I tell you that I love my job and my career. Why should I tell you about my vision and plans? What are you really looking for in that.
The hiring should be a lot simpler:
- You have a problem. You need someone with the right skills, and hire him.
- I have a problem (need money). I pick a job that I have the skills for.
Thinking the way you do, accepting your daily bull-shit and philosophy (worse, making myself sound like I enjoy and I belong to it) is only a sign for me that you are the wrong person to work for.
These 'where do you see yourself in 5 years' questions sound like straight from a 'HR for dummies' book. I would really appreciate if an interviewer reading this post explained me what such cliches are trying to test, other than BS skills. Cliche question => cliche response.
Having never read an HR for Dummies book, and as a pure technical interviewer, I still frequently ask this question. The point is to not think of it as an adversarial question, like I'm going to mark you off for a bad answer.
It's simply to know how you want your career to proceed. Do you want to be an expert at some specific part of the programming world, an experienced generalist (consultant?), an architect, a manager or product lead, start your own startup, ... ?
This is a very important question for you and your manager to be on the same page about. It helps your manager know how to motivate you and what kinds of work will excite you to move your career forward. And it helps you evaluate via small experiences whether your vision matches up with your skills and what you actually enjoy.
So honestly, the question is: would you want to work for a company that wants you to lie to them? or a company that wants you to grow and roots for you when you do?
I doubt most of interviewers who ask the cliche setup* do it because they hope the best for you and are glad they found the perfect match, probably they just brought it from their previous experience with job seeking, or have read them in an average HR manual.
*
- what was your biggest success in your field?
- what are your weaknesses?
- where do you see yourself in 5 years?
A long time ago a kind of douchebag asked me them while clicking checkboxes on the screen after every answer. Needless to say I had no motivation to even care to go further in the process. A few years later I've heard from girlfriends just after graduation (non-technical field), they got them on every single one of their interviews, mostly asked by HR managers with no particular work experience. The first one is exceptionally funny when the interviewee is a post-grad.
I answered this way in a recent interview (and got the job). The company owners response was "I think working with us will help you learn a lot about starting your own company." At that point I really wanted to work with them.
And to be honest: how many companies out there want someone who tells them right away that experience and money obtained during their job is only to quit on the first moment they feel it's enough to run something on their own?
Lots of people say it, few do it. It also depends on the job. A job at a small company/startup needs self starters, jack of all trades kind of people. These same people are often the ones who want to do their own thing one day.
Many of these open ended questions came about from large companies hiring physiologist to help build and identify a profile of an individual that the company would like the hire. Organizations such as the FBI use similar strategies as well. The problem is that many smaller organizations that did not want to spend the money or simply did not know to spend the money on professionals started to emulate the larger companies, but they did not posses the answer keys once they had the answers they just left it up to the interviewer to divine whether it was the right answer or not. Read that last sentence again and then read the definition of a Cargo Cult. you will laugh at the mental image I promise. You see, these interviewing practices are simply the same mentality that created Cargo Cults, somewhere along the way they lost the intelligence and are just emulating the process in ritual and then divining the results.
And I still got the job.
On the flip side, I just hired a new finance person. I wanted someone who can eventually become a controller then CFO. I have no idea if they are really capable of it, but I want them to at least want it and to have demonstrated some activities to have tried working towards it.
What do I say? If I reach to high I endanger my own prospects at being hired. A buddy of mine answered the "see yourself in 5 years" question with "Probably working at Google". Needless to say he wasn't hired.
If I reach too low I sound like a deadbeat. If I answer with something like "Working at the position you are hiring me for" I sound like I have no vision and no drive.
There isn't a right answer to this question. Because the only right answer is "cliche".
The question is a test for you, but the answer you give, is also a test for the employer.
If you were hiring someone to dig a hole for you, this may be true.
But software is a team sport and you do need an element of interviewing for personality, goals, and attitude as well as skills and aptitude.
Seriously, you figure that from a 2 hour interview? I fall in love with a girl which I thought/seemed/was told was a very good one. Turns out she's a complete slut. Knew that only after 2 weeks getting out with her.
Get the person to work with you for few weeks or may be a couple of months. Scan his history (blog, projects, education, work history, github...) and figure out if he'll match your team ethics and he really know what he does.
Because you are a dick.
You do realise that you're being just as confrontational as the post's author?
I'm skilled, you can see that from the projects I did, worked on, my blog, Github and source code.
Then hire me for a couple of months and see how I fit in the team. Certainly, you should apply your hiring skills to figure out if I'll be a right fit, otherwise you'll waste lots of time hiring/firing/figuring.
What I've found out by experience is that usually recruiters with such restricting requirements aren't ready to back up said requests with the appropriate money. He wants top notch, highly motivated talent. How much is he willing to pay? That's definitely a part of the equation but he's not even mentioning it. If he offers 200-300% the market price then he's right to ask that much skill and dedication, otherwise his pretenses are absolutely unjustified.
- I don't get that he's asking for the moon. He just wants competent people who have a reason to work beyond money and aren't going to be a PITA to him and his team. That seems pretty fundamental to me. Why should it command double or triple an average salary? I don't get it.
- The market will decide. If what he's looking for is rare, he'll have to pay more to get it. If it's not, he'll pay the going rate. Uninformed speculation about what he may or may not be spending on talent seems pointless.
- You send me a stupidly long resume
- forget it. You have annoyed me
- More likely, I will ignore the whole thing
- If you can’t nail it in one sentence, do I really want to look forward to your rambling emails every day?
WOW. Okay Sir. Something else? Now there is nothing wrong with what he is asking for. Can you tell that politely
- Please send me a short and concise resume. Include x, y, and z. That's what matter for me.
- Long emails won't be read fully, because I'm short on time. I might not answer your email because I get lot of them, and I just can't answer them all.
- This doesn't mean your email is not important. It is. Please send it. We'll be in touch.
This title could have been written in inverted form: "Why I Will Hire You". Whether someone uses exclusionary or inclusionary principles says a lot about their character to me. It's always good to look out for yourself, and I don't advocate hiring incompetent people, but I'm really thrilled with the people that work around me, and I would never talk to them like this guy does. Never.
Well then, Don't expect me to even bother writing a cover letter or tailor my resume. In fact, if your only going to be scanning over my resume in 30 seconds why, on earth, should I even spend any time filling out your form to send you my resume? When I send people my resume, I at the very least expect them to read through it. If my skill set matches what you are looking for and you are thinking of an interview, I expect you to at the very least Google my name, or check out my website/github which I conveniently include as a QR code.
>The worst answers? “Well I like the challenge” or some other BS.
Well, Enjoy working with the worst developers possible. Most of the best guys I know will take a job with worse pay, less benefits, and further commute if the work sounds interesting (read: challenging). "I enjoy the challenge" is probably one of the best answers to why you want to work somewhere. Unless, of course the work you do involves mundane repetitive tasks every single day then you probably don't want developers that enjoy challenge, because they will leave very quickly.
You take this stance of "I have the elixir of life and you will bend over backwards to get it because you are desperate". So the only people that do end up bending over are the ones who are really desperate.
Wait till you're on the employing side, like, even, your boss asks you to look over /100+ resumes/ that are 95% irrelevant.
Signed,
A person that has viewed 1000s of resumes a week from time to time.
I get the impression that author is looking for reasons to make the candidate a 'no hire' rather than using those silly questions such as 'tell me a time when....' as a starting to point to open a two way conversation.
My tip is to approach interviews with a positive mind WANTING the candidate to succeed and display their strengths rather than wanting them to fail. You should hire based on positives, not on lack of negatives!
This post really demonstrates how broken interviewing is. These are TERRIBLE and yet still WIDELY USED filters with a high chance of introducing false negatives in the hiring process.
Two examples:
1. The multi year career plans he hints at in a number of places. I personally would be more interested in a candidate with a passion and genuine interest in the job on offer, rather than someone using it as a stepping stone on their ten year plan to get to something tangentially related. I personally don't know what I'll be doing in ten weeks let alone ten years, but a developer it'll probably an interesting and challenging variation of what I'm doing now rather than being somewhere in management.
2. The long CV example is one example of a commonly used signal that tells you precisely nothing about the quality of the candidate. It is a completely arbitrary rule that is no way correlated with their skills or personality. After an initial filter, would it really be so bad spending 5 or so minutes considering and comparing the candidates on offer if that improved your outcomes by even a small percent?
Sigh....
If I am interviewing someone fresh out of school, I can forgive a rambling resume. However, for an experienced person, I am looking for some ability to present information concisely. It's like a design skill: can you present a focused view of the most relevant information? If you think that more than two pages of information is required to advertise yourself for a job, then you are quite likely lacking that skill.
I still think that a one-page limit is where it's at. Don't put down obvious bullet points. If you were a Windows system admin, don't waste a line on writing that you administered an active directory server. Of course you did that as a Windows sysadmin. No, tell me what you did that made you different than a run-of-the-mill person doing the same job.
1) Those that are roughly 1-2 pages per 10 years of experience with care taken to emphasize relevant and recent experience. Skills and knowledge that I actually care about are placed such that I cannot help but notice them on a first glance. Thought is clearly present in this resume.
2) Those that are roughly 13-21 pages (I have one on my desk that is 17 pages for work experience dating to an internship in 1996). Each job is discussed in mind numbing detail without ever giving me any of the details that I may actually care about. Each job includes an "environment" section that lists every tool that was in the building while that project was going on. Spelling and grammar issues are present. Any skills section will be overloaded with undefined in-house tools and frighteningly basic items (such as a senior developer/architect who lists 11 years of experience with FTP and EMAIL).
When you see an interviewer complaining about resumes that are too long and waste time, understand that they're complaining about the latter. I can easily accept minor issues. It is a huge warning sign when their resume makes me wonder if it is their judgement or motivation that is seriously lacking.
No. I'd love to agree with you, but I've seen articles from people just like you (or so they claim) that complain about resumes longer than 1 page. Resumes that include/don't include a cover letter. Resumes that are too short. Resumes that don't cover experiences outside employments. Resumes that do include those experienced.
You see, you mention #2. This guys clearly has a lot of experience. He probably didn't just create that resume just for your job. He's probably been updating a single resume whenever he needs. This means, that resume has gotten him employed at every company on that list.
Think about that.
It's not a problem with people applying, it's with who does the hiring.
Extreme length is commonly a sign that the person is too lazy to ever prune or clean up things. And my complaint about excessive length is "if they cannot bother to revisit it, why should I?"
I'm aware that every resume is not created from scratch just for me. Still, I should be able to create a guess as to who the person is, what they're looking for, and (generally) why they might be a good fit. If not, why am I reading their resume at all? What am I possibly getting out of it?
While updating resumes usually means adding, that doesn't have to mean that a 1/2 page discussion on tweaking spreadsheets for a law office in 1992 will stand there until retirement. Do I really need to see that someone has experience with Visual Studio 2010, 2008, 2005, 2003, 2000? How about every version of every Office product that they have ever used?
How about a skills section that lists 4 versions of MS DOS? Sure, there's a possibility we have a legacy system to update, but really, if you want to include that stuff, separate the (likely to be) relevant information so that I can find it easily without wading through crap like your Code Warrior Certification in 1995.
I'm not your mother and I'm not going to do the equivalent of cleaning your room just to find out if you might be worth a phone call.
And you shouldn't. But, what you say conflicts, in some way, with your stated goal:
> I should be able to create a guess as to who the person is, what they're looking for, and (generally) why they might be a good fit.
And guess what? That 15-page resume is looking for a place where a 15-page resume will fit in.
My point was that every person who has ever talked about the hiring process and how to put together a resume with the "I read resumes every day" credential is giving you advice on how to get the interview with them: nothing more.
With that in mind, why should I customize my resume for you? Rather, I should write a resume that represents me. If you don't like the resume, you won't interview with me. And that, hopefully, means I wouldn't fit in.
Listen, I've had interviews canceled on me because I play board games (at a company that promotes the fact that they have XBox 360s).
So, I'm not saying you are wrong. I'm just saying that your advice is, at least in my opinion, advice on what you look for. You have no need to defend what your criteria is, I wasn't attacking it. I apologize if you think I was.
In some ways, you should thank the 15-page resumes coming in. They make your decision much easier (I'd assume). If that person adjusted their resume merely to get the interview, are they really the type of person you want to hire?
You don't need to list ever job you've had since your first part-time job flipping burgers during high school. Just try to figure out what they care about and list that prominently. If they want to know more, they'll ask about it. That said, make sure you summarize things in a way that doesn't make it appear that there are large gaps in your resume, though you may still have problems if your most relevant experience was ten jobs ago.
For a tech job, you want to focus on things like what tools you've used, what problems you've solved and any awards or achievements that you can brag about. If you really feel that you can't leave anything out, put a note on there with a link to an online copy of your CV which, unlike a resume, is supposed to list everything. Then watch how many hits it gets to see how little people care.
You can’t tell me why you like your current job - Maybe I hate my current job, and took it to pay the bills. Maybe I actually did take it because I like the challenge. Sure, I could and should give more details about it, but that's a valid response, which shouldn't be thrown out so quickly. While the interviewee should do his/her best to give good answers, it's the interviewer's job to ask intelligent follow-up questions; there's a give and take in an interview.
No career plans or vision - My career plans for most of my life were "keep my options open". That served me very well. It sounds like this interviewer is only interested in people who have been completely focused on a single goal since kindergarten, ignoring everyone else. His loss, I guess.
Claiming they were creative didn't really disqualify, but it didn't make anyone stand out unless they had a couple examples.
-He expects he won't hire me in the first five minutes? If in the first five minutes I get that vibe I no longer wish to have the job.
-Tailor-made resume for his job? As if people are supposed to create new resumes for every job that they apply for? Get serious. Plus different companies expect different style of resumes since there is no standard and what amounts to close to standard changes every couple of years. What he wants is people to magically read his mind to craft a resume just for him to meet his expectations.
- He won't hire if I can't say why I love my current job? If I love my current job then there's not much reason to leave it, now is there? Plus, he claims to have a BS detector but he seems to be asking for BS from the applicant.
- No career plans or vision? For most people laying out five year plans is BS, which means he won't hire you. What good does such a question do for anyone anyway? Looking back over my career I've only had one job that I actually planned for. The rest are from changes in things I can't control with changes in what interests me.
- I agree with the no skills part. As someone who's been on the hiring side of the table there's nothing more annoying when someone can't back up what's on their resume.
- "Don’t sit there and tell me what you would do in the future. I didn’t ask what you would do, I asked what you did." Um, yes you did, it was two bullet points ago.
- He apparently requires the perfect candidate. I wonder how many people he actually manages to hire and how many of them stay for their "career"?
- He talks of bad advice out there discussing the topic of his post and he seems to assume his will not get lumped into that list. I would say it's the same as any other post on the topic, some good and some bad.
He sounds a lot like the kind of guy that has a high turnover rate of first-year hires who leave for more money and he can't figure out why.
To create something cool and reach financial independence in X amount of years. But first I need to pay for food for the next couple of months until somebody better than Your Company starts begging for programmers and sending me emails. And to be honest, your project likely won't be able to hold my interest for more than a few months, it will become boring and routine, nothing like anything fun I'll be working on in my own time.
Most interviewers hate that answer. (which is why I freelance, it's perfect)
PS: I have yet to give the answer that directly, but I should try every time I go in to talk about a freelancing project and it turns into an interview.
No career plans or vision Why would this matter to the interviewer? I just can't get over how ridiculous of an answer he provides. Why would he care what my career plans and vision (whatever that is) are? Who can honestly plot out the next 10 years of their life? Very few, and I'd be wary of anyone who claims they could.
I'm not surprised this person is not finding the right candidates for his company, but I think he has no clue why.
Where does he say that he is having trouble finding people?
While I agree that the example he provides is a rare case, it's not entirely a stupid question. (However, as I said elsewhere about other interview questions, it definitely could use a more original approach.) I think many interviewers are worried about hiring someone who is just going to use the company as a year-long hopping stone, and therefore won't be committed.
I know some people will probably downvote whatever you post without thinking, no matter what you say - because judging from the comments, you seem to have angered the mob. Indeed, I disagree with this article strongly myself - and would be happy to chat with you about why it doesn't resonate with my personal experience. However, if you have thoughtful answers to what people here have to say, the community only wants to help you, and see its own succeed.
If you want to stand behind your article, please do. If you want to recant or clarify parts of things you've said, you can do that too. You're a one person company - are you hiring right now, and what sorts of positions are you having trouble hiring for? We'd love to hear specifics - and to hear you engage in the community about something it obviously feels passionately about in a deliberate, measured way. Many may disagree with what you have to say, but no one here should fault you simply for your attempts to say it, for contributing to the discussion around your own ideas. Hope to hear from you.
Attacking each point:
You send me a stupidly long resume
Some recruiters/HR desks look for resumes with specific keywords, and we need to tailor our resumes to get past those (admittedly retarded) filters. As an interviewee, I understand that and have made my resume longer to get past them to the people that actually look at it. As an interviewer, I've rarely looked at the resume until the interview, and only scanned over it to look for things that I can ask about, in addition to our normal quetions.
You can’t tell me why you like your current job
You don't have to like your current job. Especially in this economy, some people are glad to have jobs. Of course, it'd be nice if you like your job, but then again, that's why he's interviewing. Whether or not a person likes a previous job has nothing to say about whether or not he'll like his next job, unless, of course, you're looking for a spineless twit who will go with the flow regardless of how they treat him.
It's more important to recognize a cultural fit and find someone that will get along with the employees, but again, this can vary wildly. I worked at a startup and we interviewed a manager from a large corporate company to be our BA. We went into the interview thinking there's no way we'll like this guy, but it turned out he was awesome, and a great cultural fit too.
No career plans or vision
Not everyone has a long-term. Not everyone knows what they'll be doing in five years, especially when they're younger. My first two jobs, I told them I'd be gone within a year and a half. I don't remember saying it, but when I quit a year a half later, they aid I told them that during the interview and they just didn't believe me. The better question is what will it take to keep me here for five years, and what is your firm going to do for it as well? Of course, people most likely can't answer this question until they've had a few jobs under their belt, so they realize what they like and don't like.
No skills
There's really the primary thing that matters.
Answer my skills with conjecture
I didn't read this far, but it sounds like 'Don't BS me'. I'll agree there as well.
I agree with csomar. I probably wouldn't work for you.
The interview failures described in the article occur when neither party understands this.
I find many interviewers have no idea that it's a two way street as well. I guess it shortens the interview for me though. I don't want to work for someone who only wants answers, not a conversation.
I severely disagree with the attitude conveyed. People would do well to remember that a work arrangement is mutually beneficial, always. You take a job because it is in your interest to do so. You are offered a job because it is in their interest to do so. No one employs someone while taking a loss on them, yet companies treat interviewees as if they would be lucky to land such a wonderful job.
If this attitude came out in my interview, I'd immediately walk out. If you're treating me in this way before I even work for you, odds are it's not ever going to get better, only worse.
Not to worry. I will only work for someone who can manage to conquer problems of scale such as skimming a resume and finding pertinent points. If you are unable or unwilling to do so, we'll eventually have a problem and I'll be better off elsewhere.
That you thought it appropriate to write a blog post with simply the title of "Why I won't hire you," is the reason "Why I will never interview with you." (And, for many others as well, I'm sure.) It has little to do with the content (although in fact, the content only gets worse with conceit and self-inflating statements) and everything to do with your attitude.
Who wants to work for someone who already thinks they're better than the majority of humanity? I'd want to work for a manager who knows how to communicate effectively without being abrasive, and who has excellent skills in resolving conflict and helping their team grow to their maximum potential. Everything about your blog post suggest the opposite combined with such a level of hubris, that I could only imagine working for you would be the worst job I've ever had.
Good luck with that hiring thing.
The best developers I've ever worked with tend to lack career plans. If you're sufficiently happy with your life that you don't need a change strategy, that's pretty cool.
That's the thing these interviews fail to take into account. They assume that everyone wants more, when that's not always the case. Happiness means knowing when you have what you want, and enjoying it.
I don't know about that, but my experience suggests that most CVs you get for a job interview will be unsuitable.
The situation is very different however. In my experience, top talent either a) have their own company or b) are well-looked after by their current employer (at least one would hope so) so they need to actively lured away; how about you tell me why I SHOULD work for you rather than give all the reasons why I can't?
Oh yes - and the author is an arrogant dick.
I have a good BS detector too. Lots of people do.
Here's the problem: Lots of people are full of BS. That includes interviewers.
Since people are very sensitive to BS either way, a BS impedance mismatch can completely ruin an interview. That means that the BS-appraisal process must complete efficiently and accurately within the first 30 seconds of the interview, which is quite a difficult demand.
Let's discretize the BS axis into two categories: full of BS / hates BS.
So we have 4 situations:
* Interviewer is full of BS, wants to hear BS. Interviewee is full of BS, provides BS. WIN
* Interviewer hates BS. Interviewee is full of BS, provides BS. FAIL.
* Interviewer is full of BS. Interviewee hates BS. FAIL.
* Interviewer and interviewee both hate BS. SUPER WIN.
The problem is that neither the interviewer nor the interviewee are aware of the BS-status of the other individual.
The interviewer, however, is generally in a power position, since we can assume the interviewee wants the job. Therefore it is really up to the interviewee to estimate the BS-status of the interviewer.
So, only two situations are really going to be fundamentally compatible, one of which has much of a chance of landing a good candidate. There is easily a 50% chance of something going wrong at this point just out of luck, or as a result of a misestimated BS status.
If there is a detected mismatch, the interviewee can make a choice: Fake personal BS status (BSer tries to be "real", anti-BSer gives up on personal integrity and provides some BS because that's what is expected by the BS interviewer); or, be true to himself, and either walk out of the interview (politely!), or get down to business and present himself as a serious individual (for the non-BS interviewer).
So, the BS estimate is critical. Moreover, since it's easy to get the impression that most people are full of BS, there may be bias present in the estimator that helps to get things off on the wrong foot.
Notice that _none_ of this has anything to do with whether the interviewee is actually the right candidate for the job. Right off the bat, the BS-status and accuracy and speed of the interviewee's BS estimator is a huge factor in job-getting ability, regardless of other skillsets.
And that is why interviewing sucks, for both parties.
Be Passionate. If you are bored working in a similar job somewhere else, you’ll be bored with me.
Does the job involve rockets or something like that? No?
Well good luck finding exactly someone who is both highly skilled AND not bored by your job.
Employees: 1
He's been doing this for almost a year and hasn't hired anyone. Sounds about right.
Also, the website is taking 20s to serve any page. Maybe he should spend less time blogging about how awesome he is and how everyone sucks, and instead build a website that can handle a surge of traffic.
a) Currently work in a job that they don't really like and, hence, are looking to switch (because they cannot come up with a satisfactory answer for: "You can’t tell me why you like your current job")
Also, since they don't know much about your company besides second-hand information, they cant answer: "why you think this job will give you the same passion". Interview is a conversation, you'll have to tell them what your company culture is and how it can benefit potential employees.
b) Candidates who are fresh out of college / don't have much experience.
c) Candidates who are probably good enough for your job but aren't good enough to pass the, very high bar, you've set up for them.
So it depends on the profile for which you're hiring and the prerequisites you are looking for. I personally won't mind if an interviewee can't answer most of these questions but can do the job I'm giving and has done something simiiar to it in the past with reasonable success and is a good cultural fit in my organisation based on what I can deduce during the interview.
Yes, hiring is hard. Yes, as an early-stage startup it will take you a very long time to hire. But you have to remember those you're hiring today will make or break the company tomorrow. Their "5 yr plan" should have no bearing on whether or not they get a job at a very early startup, but by the end of the interview you should know not only that they're technically capable, but can roll with any changes you foresee the company making, and that they have the right personality to mesh with you and the rest of your team (you'll be spending a lot of time together - could you grab beers with them?). You should also know that they're so sold on the idea and vision of your company that their 5 year plan and your 5 year plan become one (or are at least related). Realistically, your startup probably won't even be alive in five years.
Of course I know a lot of people look at things differently, and I have complete respect for different opinions and methods (and love reading about them). We're still trying to figure out hiring ourselves, but I think the best engineers come with all sorts of non-corporate eccentricities. If we had followed the author's suggestions, we wouldn't have hired either of our two founders (including myself) or our first engineer. I'll leave it up to the reader to decide whether that would have been a mistake or not. :)
But - I am sure a lot of people interviewing use indicators like these so it it worth knowing about them.
Finally, on the CV thing. This is a hard issue because agents look for buzz words. If you've done a lot of stuff you need to write a lot to get all the buzz words in. That is the only way the agent will forward our CV. Then - you cannot tailor the CV to the job because you did not submit one for that job, you submitted one for buzz words.
In short, if you're looking for a job, try to put yourself in the position of the interviewer and adjust your approach accordingly. Don't go in cold, and don't assume the interviewer will make allowances for you.
'I am going to drop 99% of all candidates because they fail the following'
and
'You sent me a looooong resume'
In my world you're sending the resume before the interview. If that's such a big issue (is it?), then - don't invite those guys. Your 99% rate just dropped significantly and you're not wasting time on both sides.
This guy -- who apparently rejects 99% of interviewees -- apparently runs a single-person company of dubious purpose. This absurdly trollish post is over the top because that's what ensured it a front-page showing.
Kudos on the pagerank earned by trolling the gullible folks on HN.
1) You are a self-important douche who writes lengthy blog posts on all the reasons you deem people unworthy of working with you.
Try to see things from this guy's perspective -- this comes across as a guy who's grown really tired of being bombarded by terrible resumes. Then, the few candidates whose resumes appeal to him result in terrible interviews because the candidate either doesn't give a shit about what he/she does, or misled (if not flat-out lied) about his/her skill set.
That would leave anyone a little ornery after a while.
Personally, I found the post rather unenlightening, only because I think it's common sense to be passionate about what you do -- otherwise, why do it? -- and to have the right skills, etc.
But a little tough love never hurt anybody. (And if you think this guy is a dick, I want to work for your bosses, because I've worked with some real doozies.)
There's some good stuff in here, but that's outweighed by the large serving of nonsense.
I think the biggest issue with interviewing is that it can only be done well in a team. We usually have at least 5 or 6 people interviewing and some of them have to be from unrelated projects. We have the luxury of drawing from a large pool of engineers from different projects but for smaller companies it might be a good idea to pull in people from other companies as neutral observers, if that's possible.
I always find it interesting to discover my own biases during the debrief meeting.
+1 on the long resumes, though. Also, listing every programming language or CAD program in the skills list is very off-putting.
You might not like the tone of the author's writing, but having sat on the other side of the interview table, it is thoroughly depressing when a candidate tells you "Yeah, I just want a job - money, isn't it?", when you know that the role available is great, and someone who wants to care about will really enjoy it.
Don't get me wrong; we all have to pay the rent. There there are indisputably times when, guess what, one just needs a damned job that'll pay the bills.
But for a lot of smaller companies with cool little projects? Yeah, I think it's totally reasonable for them to discriminate on that level.
@Llambda - isn't the process of the interview also the process of finding a suitable candidate?
This guy must spending every waking hour interviewing.
An excellent example of the latter is the presence of spelling errors that could have been fixed with spell-check, completely random font changes due to copy-and-paste, etc. These typically are just the superficial signs that no thought was put into the content.
It's like showing up for an interview in a dirty t-shirt and sneakers. I'm not looking for excellent fashion sense; I'm looking for a basic awareness of the world around them.
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For a doubter wanting to succeed, I'm already turned off. Smart people don't have to prove they're smart. Give them a problem and they'll leave your head spinning about why you didn't see it like that before.
I like looking at possibilities. It probably wouldn't work out that you know how to recognize someone great.
"You send me a stupidly long resume"
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I wouldn't send you a resume at all. I would send you a personal letter I wrote just for you outlining the things I've done and offer an actual, live, tour of everything I work on and the names and numbers of those clients.
You might not know how to process this calling of your bluff that you're in fact, ready to hire the perfect person.
"You can’t tell me why you like your current job"
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If I'm talking to you I'm open to possibilities of liking more than one thing. It's up to you to tell me why and how what you're doing is so much different and not a glorified CRUD/Reporting app just like the other 40-50 apps I've built in the last 15 years.
How about I tell you that you're no different than any other company? You just want the answer to one question. Where is x at? That's all everyone wants with their own data.
"No career plans or vision"
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You must have been the first person ever to predict what exactly would happen in the technology world, exactly in the last 20 years so you could chart a perfect plan, or vision through it.
Why has no one given you a Nobel Peace Prize? I can nominate you.
My vision is to be a very curious person about everything I come across. I like knowing how everything works, and doesn't work. You know what that does? I'm not afraid of anything that comes across my plate whether others say it can be solved or not.
My career plan is to do interesting work helping people get more done with less effort so they can do what they do best -- interact with other people. Do you fit that? I do.
I don't need a plan or a vision when I can engage my passion from the second I wake up to the second I go to sleep, 7 days a week. I've seen more plans and visions not work out (much like girlfriends who have "plans" and "timelines" that never work out) to know better than to expect life to work on my watch. All I can pick is a direction and give every situation my all.
Sadly, you probably don't get this.
"NO SKILLS"
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Right. And you're qualified to measure them. If you did, you'd know there's no real thing as a skill. Just an aptitude with a technology that comes and goes to the latest tool.
Your brain might blue screen if I told you that .NET isn't a language, but 30+. Imagine how silly you must have sounded beating that .NET developer drum.
Most importantly, real developers can quickly learn anything they need to get anything done. That's all they do all the time to solve a problem under unreasonable circumstances, and a skill you can't seem to imagine.
"Answer my questions with conjecture"
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I will call your bluff and tell you to hire me for 2 weeks unpaid. If I don't make you swoon like a fairytale it's probably not meant to be anyways.
That's the answer to all of those questions because I've done hiring for myself, and my customers with those same questions and they don't reveal as much about the person as you believe. I bet I could know more about you from how you load a dishwasher (telling each dish why you won't use it because it won't load itself into the dishwasher).
"How to Win the interview"
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If you're having trouble finding people getting things done and that's a big deal for you to hire, I think you're still going to be collecting emotionally scarred baggage to put into future blog posts.
How are you the top player you're looking for others to be? We can only find and know deeply in others what we have and know deeply in ourselves. :)
So in his own special way that guy is telling the 1% to f*ck off. Well played.
Why? I hate working for other people. I only want to work for myself. The only reason I even take a regular job is to fund my projects until they become successful. But, I can't ever tell them that.
"About halfway through the first bullet point I decided I wasn't interested in reading every juicy word of this boring essay. I thought about writing a rebuttal along the lines of "why I won't work for you", but it boils down to this -- you sound like a bad listener and a self-important jerk."
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