Comment by dpritchett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dpritchett | Hacker News Reader

Three points of contention, and then a pointer to more valuable advice from a fellow HNer:

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

Prized developers aren't going to participate in many coding-contest-as-hiring-lottery situations unless they're just really interested in the problem.

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).

Right and many disagree with the idea of paying for application (see also the similar concepts of "no spec work" and "don't pay to pitch")

I actually haven't applied to Google specifically because they require at least 6 interviews. Maybe they wouldn't want me anyway, but we're certainly not going to find out.

> what percentage of your correct submissions were from people who didn't even want the job?

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 can't get my head around why anyone would design a hiring process to "scare off" anyone. Sure, you'll chase away superficial candidates... but some fraction of all the real talent will also blow you off.

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.

You're absolutely correct. "scare off" may have been projecting my own biases onto the company based on passed experience. However, overwhelmingly I've found managers are terrified of hiring under-qualified candidates, and often do not make a concerted effort to rope in exceptional people who will obviously shine bright enough to be recognized.

Which is totally understandable if the biggest component of your recruiting pipeline is leads from job boards. The average quality of a job board candidate is so _low_ that there's a reasonable concern about defining expectations downwards, so that anyone who can talk coherently about programming and solve FizzBuzz might look artificially qualified.

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.

There is a mindset amongst some of the worst sort of managers that "we only want the best people" and so they design hiring schemes or post jobs ads which over specify their needs and/or are designed to stop lesser candidates wasting management time.

The end result is often that the best people just walk on by. Honesty in the hiring process cuts both ways.

This really depends on the cost structure of the work you're doing. If you're an IT body shop then you really do want middle-of-the-road talent who can work well in a team and won't rock the boat. If you're a smaller specialty shop with a long client list and a reputation for top-notch work then you can't afford a single NNPP.

Or worse: they overspecify a development job and then expect the candidate to do helpdesk work, fix printers, diagnose NTFS-3G problems in Mac OSX Lion, where it is no longer supported, setup Skype for a secretary who won't learn her job, and become an unlicensed email therapist for a technically unsavvy supervisor who demands a 100% email delivery guarantee from a programmer with no control over email servers.

I have to agree at least partially. I had better really want (or need) that job to go through the trouble. And at the same time, I find this quite refreshing. The process of submitting resumes is quite passive and limiting. While the effort to create a video might be a more laborious task, I appreciate the opportunity to represent myself outside of bullet points and buzzwords like "spearheaded". There must be some balance here between answering the same questions with the same answers and proving you are sharp, creative, interesting, etc.

I can't get my head around why anyone would design a hiring process to "scare off" anyone. Sure, you'll chase away superficial candidates... but some fraction of all the real talent will also blow you off.

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.

If it was 100/1, I'd agree with you, but these are never 100/1 processes; they're cutesy programming quizzes, or video requirements, or lengthy statements of required prior technical experience.

Any process that does not cause a cold high-quality lead to come into contact with an engaged human being almost automatically is broken.

If it's part of a hiring process, it doesn't need to be 100/1. You can chain bad filters together to get a good one - that's the basis of statistical prediction.

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 negative in a job filter results in a phone screen with someone who can't do fizzbuzz.

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.

Perhaps the reverse way to look at the situation is that job adverts are so uninformative about the place where one might work, that it is the employers who should present a video about why one might want to work for them. It shouldn't be one of those glitzy HR ones, but rather one made with a cameraphone introducing the people the prospect will be working with, and some idea of what type of problem is being solved.

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.

I've solved some coding challenges I come across, but mostly because I wanted a little diversion. Generally those problems give me an excuse to practice lesser used languages or languages I want to learn. I've been contacted by companies after solving these, but I always decline.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com