No More Résumés, Say Some Firms
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
1) Union Square Ventures is a leading name in this space - everyone knows Fred Wilson's blog. On top of that, they only have three "staff" listed on their site. USV can ask would-be employees to fly up to NYC to deliver resumes in person and they'll still get plenty of applicants.
2) The job openings in the article that focus on surveys and personality tests - supposedly instead of resumes - are clearly unskilled labor (e.g. social media intern). This is exactly as it was when I applied to work as a waiter at Olive Garden in 2000.
3) IGN's coding challenges are similarly suspect as a representatitve example because game dev is a glamor industry with a surfeit of naifs lining up for these underpaid jobs. Prized developers aren't going to participate in many coding-contest-as-hiring-lottery situations unless they're just really interested in the problem. Ask a YC company who's ever posted a hiring puzzle: what percentage of your correct submissions were from people who didn't even want the job?
The tactics cited above wrongheadedly invert the recruiting plan tptacek uses at Matasano: Start from the assumption that you want the best people possible and that those people will have plenty of great alternatives to working for you. Do your best to get your company's name in front of those people and to convince them that they'd have a rewarding time if they joined your team.
I trust Thomas's experience in identifying and recruiting talent far more than I do a career WSJ reporter's [1] trend spotting.
[1] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/rachel-emma-silverman/31/331/507
Probably pretty low. But it's not designed to have a high conversion rate. It's really just to scare off pretenders and the under-qualified. I like to solve "Cover Letter Problems" for fun, but I've never bothered to apply to a company that had them. I don't think that means they're a failure.
The applicants themselves probably benefit the most as it gives them a window into the company's dev culture. Cutesy "gotcha!" problems that are abstract and removed too far from coding are generally a warning sign that it's a shop full of people who may be smart but are perhaps mediocre developers and/or the shop has non-technical management. On the flip side, problems that explore an applicants coding style and thought process tends to be an indicator the shop wants actual coders who can get shit done in an efficient manner, and that they care about things like Code quality, their tool chain, and care just enough about process to achieve repeatable results, but not so much as to become dogmatic.
I really think the problem here is how people do outreach to candidates. I feel like too many companies haven't figured out that recruiting is a marketing problem, just like software sales. Companies get all kinds of creative addressing marketing problems --- but when it comes to hiring, they plug "reqs" into "job boards" and then try to "deflect" the "pretenders".
Calibrate your outreach so that you can safely pay individual attention to all candidates. Don't post reqs to Craigslist or Monster or Dice or whatever your HR person --- in fact don't let your HR person near recruiting --- thinks is the place you're supposed to post ads. You will still be giving "early no" responses to lots and lots of candidates, but it'll be manageable, and it'll be very unlikely for your process to cost you talented candidates.
The solution to this is, again, have an outreach process that gets you Glengarry Leads, at a much lower volume. Where do your best candidates congregate? What are they most interested in? What do they like to talk about? What do they have opinions about? Think about those questions and then, for God's sake, don't just pick a job board based on them.
The end result is often that the best people just walk on by. Honesty in the hiring process cuts both ways.
This is trivially true of any hiring method - you might scare away a few good people. The right question to ask is "what are the proportoins?"
If I can scare away 100% of the chaff and 1% of the wheat, it's probably a win. I can simply hire anyone who survives. If the ratio is less stark, it may or may not be a win, depending on my costs of hiring, how badly I need someone, etc.
I'm not saying everyone who uses this tactic is doing it right, merely that it's not a bad idea in all cases.
Any process that does not cause a cold high-quality lead to come into contact with an engaged human being almost automatically is broken.
And incidentally, cutesy programming quizzes are often a very good filter. In my last job, I tried recruiting with one after speaking to too many people who couldn't handle fizzbuzz. The exact quote was "Instructions on where to send your resume are contained in our application (you'll need to decrypt them first)." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1659735
It dramatically increased the number of people who wrote to me - I actually got quite a few responses of "neat puzzle, not looking for a job, did I get it right?" And by virtue of not giving out an unencrypted email address, I didn't talk to anyone who couldn't code.
A false positive results in a candidate who can e.g. write a kernel memory allocator walking from your process because you're too much of a pain to deal with.
Too many interviews, or losing the best possible candidates. I know which one I prefer --- especially because I know when I'm getting too many interviews, and can tune other things (most notably: where I post about jobs) to adjust that. I can't know who I'm losing as a result of my recruiting process being cumbersome.
The other thing that jumps out at me is that instead of a cute challenge, it's probably more useful to provide a bug in 50 lines of code that you expect to "jump out" effortlessly for the qualified candidates, while less qualified might struggle a little.
For a competent developer, a "cover letter brainteaser" that takes an hour to do is essentially equivalent to a $100+ application fee (in terms of opportunity cost).
In regard to the change in hiring practices, "social presence resumes" are just a passing trend. It may result in better candidates in the short term, but people will learn to pad these new resumes and it won't be much more effective than paper resumes.
The best hiring practice will still be tapping your employees' social network and hunting down talented people who aren't happy in their current positions. Anything else is usually a shot in the dark.
It's often heard that 3 page CVs are an abomination since no one has time to trawl through all that. But now, doing a video interview just to apply is OK to require, at least according to this article.
Where I work, CVs with cover letters are fine, links to web presences are fine, if someone wants to send a DVD or link to a private youtube exhortation that's also fine. Whatever works for the candidate we'll look at it.
It can be tedious to sort through all these CVs, assuming your company is able to get any relevant applications at all. But that's the price of acquiring talented people. Hiring someone for a creative job like development is as tricky as selecting a spouse to get married. It's a long term commitment that will affect both of you profoundly. It's not the same as buying a pound of hamburger.
The ideal employer who doesn't want resumes should be able to tell the difference between these two things.
Jeremy Ashkenas, Yehuda Katz, and Zed Shaw each build great things and give them away to the community. They also blog about these great things and they show up here on Hacker News to encourage discussion of their work.
I'm not sure that is true. My new years resolution of sorts was to build a web presence for things I build, because historically I have not put them out in the public eye at all, even though there probably are some interesting things in there.
Publishing isn't nearly is fun as building, so I can imagine a lot of developers are in a similar boat.
I'd love to have a blog! Doesn't mean I want to write one, though.
This way I (1) get experience making, (2) get experience writing, and (3) market my competence.
I'm using Tumblr, but that's soley because I found their look and feel pleasing to the eye.
Union Square Ventures is not looking for someone who likes to make things. They're looking for someone who likes networking and getting noticed. Or to put it another way, they're looking for someone who can find someone else who's making things.
Am I wrong to see the same thing in a video application? The more cash and connections you have, the better video you're able to create. Don't tell me the hiring manager won't notice the applicant in the $1500 suit with the professional (but not too professional) video.
But USV can create any requirement they'd like, and they'll still get candidates, because a role at USV is a prestige job. They might just as well require candidates to compose a freestyle rap about their accomplishments; it wouldn't cost them candidates.
Being asked questions about your favorite superhero power or simpsons character or which of their list of offensive unlikable celebrities I would rather date.
I think part of the process sometimes is figuring out how far you will go to humiliate yourself for them.
But in my previous life, I was an enterprise Java developer in the financial industry. None of the projects I built are online - they're all proprietary B2B applications. It's some of the best work I've ever did, yet no one will ever find out about it online. The only way for me to tell this story is through the resume.
How do people like that supposed to present themselves, in this new hot social media environment?
You can also have a web presence about the work which does not actually include the work. Talk about an interesting sub-problem which is non-proprietary. Talk about architecture choices. Talk about the tech you used and the problems you overcame while using it. Write about how firms in the financial industry are missing opportunities to throw Java at problems and make heaps of money.
Plus if your employer finds what you wrote you better need a justification for putting it up there that isn't "so I can apply for this job".
You don't really want to end up in legal trouble or fired.
At this point anyway your "web presence" is pretty much just going to be your resume but put online, I imagine if they explicitly don't want resumes they wouldn't want that either.
More broadly: fear, weakness, and lack of creativity in the face of constraint are not career-enhancing attributes. (That's not personal. Many engineers need to hear it, including me, both in the past and occasionally in the present.)
A 20something who works at a funky startup and writes for their corporate blog and gets paid to spend 20% of his time contributing to the rails codebase or something.
vs somebody older (or maybe not) who works 60+ hours a week in a corporate (possibly non IT) organization which has strict corporate blogging policies (i.e don't blog about work) and has a family to look after.
I can see a lot of crap getting thrown up and github and mediocre blog entries written prior to interviews.
I think this article sums it up fairly well: http://teddziuba.com/2009/10/i-dont-code-in-my-free-time.htm...
On weekends, I'd rather be out fly fishing or playing video games.
Ted's post about not favoring github et al in applicant screening is one thing, but an aspiring employee who chooses to forego some easy and visible self-promotion has only himself to blame when he doesn't get the same opportunities as someone willing to meet hiring companies at their point of need.
To hire someone you have to find them, vet them, and entice them with the right deal. People who make themselves easier to find and to vet are going to get better deals on average.
I used to work at Amazon on some meaty back-end-y things.
Then I had the same thought.
Now I write mobile apps, which I find to be more creatively challenging, and the amount of recruiter emails (and cold calls, really guys?) has jumped through the roof.
Another side benefit is that my parents now understand what it is I do for a living, and women apparently find my job intriguing for some reason.
It's even nicer that, if someone asks me "what have you done?" I just need to shove the phone across the table.
This is common inside the Valley and outside it. Around here, a certain fruit-based computer company advises its employees not to reveal specifically to outsiders exactly what it is they work on. People who write code for big, technical but non-software firms (defense contractors etc) similarly have nothing to show (publicly) for their efforts.
It's nice to imagine that everyone works for some fun little startup that lets you blog and contribute to open source and has everything up on github, but the reality is that if you limit the search to those candidates, you will find the talent pool pretty insular. Some highly competent and very desirable people are locked away in big companies where they're not allowed to make a big fuss about what they're doing. For them, the traditional resumé is still very valuable.
When faced with the choice between unverifiable secret work or highly visible work (open source, name brand employer, etc.), be sure your compensation expectations are weighted to match the future marketability of the experience you stand to gain on the job.
It would be nice if prospective employers could just know that you are out there and that you are competent. Realistically they are going to prefer the safe bet presented by a known-good contributor with an impressive public portfolio.
Edit: rephrased to clarify my work sorting heuristic.
I don't really believe that exposure to open source projects has that much market value, though. I also think it's probably very hard to run a dev hiring pipeline that expects to primarily recruit people from open source projects. There are a whole lot of very talented developers who have spent their careers doing closed-source (i.e.: normal) software development.
For most of the "normal" closed source work, it's easy to say that you worked on X product or feature, and can talk about some of the challenges that you encountered with it.
Contrast that with defense contract work that requires classified clearance. If you're a developer on that, you will most likely never be able to talk about it to most recruiters or interviewers before you retire. There is no way to actually talk about what you've done with the general public. That can hurt a career, especially if it puts a black hole in your experience on a resume.
I don't know of any reqs within my company (GlobalDefenseCorp) that indicate salary is increased when you go dark. Your compensation is that you get to work on cool shit, which will likely lead to another project in the same vein.
Will be interesting (and scary) to see what happens as social media permeates more of our lives and makes things public.
Will we end up with a situation where employers will enforce strict rules about out of hours conduct of employees so as not to reflect badly on them, Orwellian Society?
Or will everyone have so much dirt on everyone else that it just stops to matter anymore, this could in fact lead to a more honest and liberal society.
I think we already have that (well, at least at the medium-to-large-company level), it's called company Christmas parties.
I don't know... maybe the problem is the belief that there must be a difference between your "social life" and your "work ethos." There seems to be an assumption in this thread that having, say, "pictures of the applicant drunk at titty bars" is somehow a bad thing, something an employer (or potential employer) will take a dim view of.
Maybe the solution is to look for (or found) more open-minded organizations that don't care about shit like this. I mean, if I were hiring right now, I couldn't give a fuck less about somebody's Facebook profile pictures of them drunk and puking at a frat party, or hanging out at a strip club, or snorting coke off of a hooker's tits. As long as they can convince me that they can and will do the work that needs to be done, meeting the relevant parameters for quality, timeliness or what-have-you, I don't care about any of that jazz. Surely there have to be some other folks out there who feel the same way.
You are looking at this from just one perspective. What about a company that will be paying your health care insurance and knows before-hand that you have a serious medical condition but that it doesn't impede you from doing your work. Not a shy number of companies might simply turn you away for that reason alone. I've heard of recruiters that don't hire people that use motorcycles because the accident rate is so high.
What about your gender identity? A lot of people simply have to live a double life because if they depend on open-minded organizations to accept them, they would simply be unemployed for life.
What about religion? Or personal opinion? Those things usually step on some peoples toes, and it might just be the employer-to-be's toes.
It's still in dev mode but we've gotten pretty good responses from potential customers so far. Some of the issues we've tried to tackle has been the resume "problem" as discussed here. The thing is, resumes are much more than the content they hold. The design of the page, the choosing of words and descriptions, how to weight the important stuff etc. You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their 'paper' resume. It's almost like judging a person by their handwriting, though this metric is sort of skewed since everyone I know, myself included, has developed crummy handwriting ever since spending 10+ hours/day communicating via a keyboard.
An interesting point-of-view I've seen a lot of places is the obvious, yet under-prioritized factoring of values and soft skills. Personally, I think it's naïve to think you can attract "the best, the top 1%" of coders, managers, product devs and so on. What would be far more valuable in terms of hiring would be to find those people that would actually fit the company culture and team the best. Skills can be learned, but personal values and interests can't. So a silly manager might ask for someone under 30 with 15 years of experience in C#, Java, Ruby, and some html/css for good measure. Yet, this is the skewed metric to evaluate on. Instead, they should find the person who finds the problem they're meant to solve interesting and someone who would fit well into the company and the team. If the candidate 'only' knows C++ and Python, it's far easier for them to get up-to-date on the company program running on Ruby than trying to force the 'ideal hard skill candidate' into a culture he/she's not comfortable in. Prioritizing candidates in terms of soft skills and values are actually one of the pillars of the program I'm working on. It's a tough nut to crack..
Another issue we've talked about is how to evaluate someone with a minimum of screening bias? There's so much bias going into an evaluation of a person, and it's a well-known issue that we tend to look for people similar to ourselves - even though it might not be what the company is actually looking for. So, if the application tracker could enable "blind" mode and switch off certain information like pictures, names, tests scores etc. it could potentially negate some of the bias involved in screening. Even letting multiple people rate a candidate could negate some of it, yet the work flow used in most HR departments simply don't allow for this kind of flexibility.
Long rant, interesting topic.
code -> git repository
design -> portfolio
investment analysis -> written opinion & prediction
One can certainly overcome such a tiny black mark, though, since we definitely forgive ignorance in the strange ways we sometimes do things.
I just went through another useless gig interview,was in fact upfront about that I ask for 50% advance on project dev costs and get miss-directed when I ask directly if they understand that its not a suggestion.
The results can and are easily stacked through bogus accounts.
If a company thinks that professionals use those sites for professional reasons, then I question the professionalism of the company.
Hacking a retired SIS officers pc is far more serious than VMB'ing some poor murdered girls phone for example.
There are a lot of problems with resumes that have been brought up again and again. Many companies we are working with welcome the change.
For those of you who still want to play the resume game, and don't want to spend your off-work hours contributing to open source, or building a web presence, don't worry. There will be plenty of job openings for you at companies who like to do things the old way.