Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

As a hiring manager know what you want and be careful what you communicate to determine your desired audience.

Secondly, skill verification is a form of leaky abstraction and may not be what hiring managers want. It’s most often not about finding the most skilled candidate but rather the most compatible candidate. This can commonly mean finding the least sucky person from a pool of sucky people.

Hiring managers can game that by setting requirements criteria for a job. If you want extremely skilled people then get down to the metal and find candidates that like to work without tools or abstractions. If you super versatile candidates find people with experience in a bazillion different tools. If you just want a body to fill a seat that is quick to hire/fire select for the latest trendy framework.

The best way to determine the right candidate is to ignore the nonsense on their resume and just talk to people. Dig in and see what they really want and then challenge it with questions only they can answer. Most people are bodies just wanting to be hired without bringing anything special to the table so that’s what most employers target for. The real challenge here is finding people that are highly skilled in a market where exceptional skills outside the bell curve are not commonly rewarded, because these people will not self identify as awesome when looking for work in compatibility driven system. The people that most typically do identify as awesome tend to not be as awesome as they believe.

This is a real insight "finding the most skilled candidate but rather the most compatible candidate", thank you very much, this is the kind of feedback I am looking for from engineers. I never looked at it from this perspective.

I talked to hiring managers and most of them say skills is good but what we want is a personality because skills can be taught and personality cannot be. Personality I have experienced that, very skilled teammate exceptional, but personality was not a fit, so the management was not happy.

"The best way to determine the right candidate is to ignore the nonsense on their resume and just talk to people.", that is true and this I have tried with when I was playing the role of hiring manager trying to find a team member to work with me in the company I worked for. I imagine the peer-to-peer verification framework like this talk to people and ask them personalized questions, this is how exceptional talent will be flushed out I think.

Given that, if you were to imagine a tool that helps surface those 'quietly exceptional' people—the ones who are highly skilled but won't self-identify—what would that tool look like? Does it even need to be a tool to begin with?

> I talked to hiring managers and most of them say skills is good but what we want is a personality because skills can be taught and personality cannot be.

That is correct, but its an extreme over simplification. What they mean by personality is among these:

* excellent soft skills - can listen and emotionally bond with others

* excellent written communication - the ability to put into writing high precision content with minimal revision that is well structured. It should not take advanced effort to turn meeting notes into a formal written recommendation.

* discipline / conscientiousness - this is awareness of the space outside yourself. It is the ability to balance 6 things at once with endurance throughout the day.

Yes, technical skills can be taught. Hiring managers really prefer to retain their people and not have to rehire, so teaching people is a long game of minimal continuous effort from the leader via proper assignments and continuous practice on the part of the individual contributor. If the individual contributor also does this work as a hobby outside the office that is even better, but it would be a massive ethical violation to impose this or it intermingle it with assigned tasks.

I am a hiring manager, by the way.

From a tooling perspective I am not sure. My organization uses a tool called GreenHouse. It contains a candidate's resume and credentials and allows HR to build out forms for interview feedback. The insight part is always a challenge. I am fully remote so I am actively watching everything a candidate does with their eyeballs as much or more than listen to the content of their answers, because I want to know what they are thinking and what they are looking at since AI prompts during interviews is now a thing.

When I do look at a resume what I am only looking at:

* Years of total experience

* Job hopping versus loyalty/duration

* Credentials like education attainment, certifications, and so forth

Yes absolutely, I am looking for framework that will be included in the platform to be able to asses someone and determine those accurately skills to have them in the CV it is not easy and it is a challenge, overall those skills can make a teammate be valued among others.

The AI interviews part is becoming very common as well, this is the issue I wanna solve since it is very easy to fake it while remote.

I have another question, have you ever faced with getting a perfect candidate during interviews this person passes fully it is great, everything matches but then after 1 or 2 months the just completely flip and are not the candidate(now employee) what you tought and everyone else tought they are?

Yes. So, I work for a defense contractor and we can hire somebody into a start date within a week, but it might take a couple of months before they can enter the office, even online. During this period is where most people fall apart. Either they cannot get their administrative requirements together, cannot get their required certifications complete, or end up with a competing job they find better. They have not even gotten to the social interaction part of the job yet, but we are already starting to get a sense of their ability to lean in and participate by the time all their roles and permissions come in.

Then we have a 90 day evaluation period where I write something up and sit down with the employee. I have never had anybody fail out by this point due to performance. With on-boarding so long everybody has time to really settle in. Even after they can come into the office/online there is still a honeymoon period. From a supervisory perspective it gets real at the 6 month or 12 month evaluation based upon the volume of assignments and quality of participation. I am super chill as a supervisor so as long as the employee gets their work in at the client's timeline, keeps the client happy, and is as helpful as possible to the rest of the team everything is kosher. I have released candidates for negative performance almost never, but it has happened.

I have had an Army general officer tell me in the past that to get there they just have to do the job they are assigned and don't put their boss in hot water. I heard the exact same thing once at Bank of America, and it works for me as well. The people that bubble up for promotion tend to be the people that accomplish the most from the least effort, not the harder workers, because those are the people that can be assigned their same job plus an additional job. That does not mean taking shortcuts either. Part of doing more means overwhelmingly helping people in the present for building out relationships to leverage into the future.

That is very interesting, it is like a starting filter for candidates which can catch candidates that might not be a fit for the job after all. Basically the candidate was lacking the discipline and patience to be able to handle paperwork and administrative duties to even start doing the job. Got me thinking how would it be possible to catch something like this before it happens, would be a very big challenge

So it all boils down to, handle the administrative challenge first, then make the boss happy and not make his life harder as well as everyone on the team and lastly for promotion simply be efficient, I like this framework it works so well.

I think these all work for any industry, since defense is a bit stricter then there is a higher chance to avoid a bad hire.

> Hiring managers really prefer to retain their people and not have to rehire

In my experience, the only time a hiring manager has had the authority to overcome HR mandated maximum percentage wages was when my manager was a director/CTO and I was a strategic employee. That’s what causes “salary compression and inversion.”

Line level managers who most junior developers report to are completely useless when it comes to almost anything except for advice about dealing with the politics of the organization and reaching across teams.

You may sincerely want to retain talent but (the royal ) you probably don’t control budget. If you are working in a large tech organization, the promotion process still goes through a committee and is out of your control. Even when you do get promoted, you’re probably going to be making less than a new hire coming in at your same level.

Getting back to the uselessness of line level managers, when I was interviewing to be a “strategic hire” for two companies between 2016-2020 before I got into consulting, one of my conditions was that I would report directly to the person who had signing authority for budgets and/or major decisions so I wouldn’t have to deal with powerless line level management.

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