How I got hired at a Y Combinator start-up without the necessary credentials
hireart.com
hireart.com
Over the 7 years I've been working as a software developer, I've had many similar experiences. Not once have I been even close to get a project when talking to HR or middle managers. Every project I've landed was because I talked to the technical people in charge or to the owner of the company, even without the necessary credentials.
Middle managers and HR will always apply the "no one got fired for buying IBM" technique to people. CEOs and owners are far more likely to take a chance on you.
We could function with a third of the head count in competent people. And by function I mean be more productive, make better products and have more fun doing it.
Taking a chance, sure, but in my experience CEOs and founders are not particularly great at hiring. Even technical founders are often too young and inexperienced to get it right.
Also, if they hire middle managers and HR people that only play it safe, that is pretty much part of the same pattern.
This guy mentions his background, but does not mention what the requirements were for the job. Customer service experience? I'd say retail and waiting tables give you the customer service side of things in most cases, and you just need to learn about the company's product and how users use the product.
This seems like an ad for a method of hiring without focusing on resumes, which I also do support 100% as a practice.
Quality = Process Control = Effective Management. Large companies fail at quality because they degrade on the other 2. This includes hiring. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming needs a comeback in the western world!
Large companies can get these startup benefits as long as they have good truth-based management practices, which enable good business process control, and enable high quality results. But Western management is about individual reward/punishment and independence, which creates human-limited processes, which creates poor quality throughout the business. Hence the poor hiring decisions, and everything spirals in a vicious cycle until we get the top-down idiocy that is the traditional American corporation.
If you run a company—even a startup—don't go down that road. Learn about Deming, learn psychology and the science behind management, build consistency of purpose and continuous improvement, and put your business on a road to self-reinforced success instead of fighting the spiral of death.
There are a lot of barriers to this, most of them cultural and influential. Otherwise it is not difficult, just difficult to change our essential belifs about people and how they operate in a system, instead of as flawed individuals whom we can game and blame for our own advantage.
For companies who do this, the place to look would be Japanese companies influenced by Deming. In tech, many companies take on some of these ideas, but I haven't seen many that do all of them well. Also look at the Deming prize, which was given to companies who used his methods successfully: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deming_Prize
This article sums up my thoughts on the matter: http://www.examiner.com/article/what-happened-to-the-deming-...
Conventional application/review processes can easily turn into "beauty contests": hiring decisions made primarily (or even solely) on the basis of who looks good on paper, who gives a good interview, or who comes across as the most likable and personable on the day of their interview.
Beauty contests have spotty track records for predicting on-the-job performance, but they're often the norm.
I predict I'd be freaked out to walk into a new job and not know anyone. I haven't done that in twenty years. I think I'd be lonely for awhile? I have some respect for people who do that, its gotta be very stressful.
Even noobs can kind of apply this via school classmates and to a much more limited extent physical meatspace users group meetings. Locally a makerspace is slowly bootstrapping itself and once its further along, I'll join and meet some interesting people soon (the pioneers of the group only meet while I'm busy at work, so occasional mailing list interaction is possible, although not in person).
One hardware job interview a long time ago involved pulling circuit boards of stuff I designed and built at home out of my suit pockets during the interview. The HR lady was stunned, and I was also stunned to hear that she was stunned. Admittedly I was bringing analog to a digital gunfight but still... they're looking for a hardware dude, and I got interviewed because I know a guy, but none of the guys you selected by yourselves personally own a soldering iron, and you're hiring for a HARDWARE guy? If HR screws up that badly, which happens often enough, if you can find any way at all to get in, you'll basically be the only candidate. There are probably ways for HR to do this with software, maybe HR ends up only providing java candidates but they actually need a Ruby guy and you're a Ruby guy and via an old friend you get interviewed, well, I guess you win.
In a way, this makes it easier to get a job at a big company after you're been around awhile. At a tiny startup, its statistically likely no one would know me... at a local 500 person office, I am certain to know at least five current employees, even if by nothing more than reputation.
HR people usually know their dept policies are dumb as a group, but are individually smart enough to get excited for a "real" reference from a current employee.
For what it's worth in my experience on both sides of the interview panel you've basically made an 80-90% decision on a candidate in less than 5 minutes (probably less than 1 in most cases). Everything that follows is gathering information to support that decision and maybe, just maybe push on that 10-20%.
Another option is the obvious getting set up blind date style.
The coworker thing seems to work very well if everyone involved can keep drama out of the workplace, which is pretty easy if its actually ex- coworkers not current coworkers. The "set up by friends" thing seems to work only slightly better than "met at a bar".
But it's hard to find the people, who don't participate in the "Dating-Tournament".
- "we'll be contacting you soon" is vague. The client might wonder if it is minutes, hours, days? When should he be expected to reach back to Support if the problem is not resolved? "I'll be contacting you in the next X minutes/hours" would tell the client exactly when he can expect the next step to take place.
- the support representative could have added "call me at (XXX) XXX-XXXX if you wish to talk to me directly" to make it clear he wants to go above and beyond his job duties to provide fantastic support.
- the mail could be made more personal by using more "I", as in "I attempted to check with the members of my team, etc" instead of "the members of my team [...] aren't available".
I thought a bigger weakness to the email was that it didn't gather generic useful information that might help the people actually equipped to fix the problem. It doesn't even ask the login name the customer is trying to use, never mind other any error messages, browser version etc. Asking those questions should speed up the tech team's work, and might even result in the customer trying something else which fixes their problem. Even in the worst case scenario - the information being useless and irrelevant - it at least gives the customer the impression they're being listened to rather than apologised at.
Since plenty of people that wouldn't be well-suited to helping customers with problems (unreliable, disorganised, lacking initiative, technically illiterate etc.) could also write a nice canned apology for an interview exercise, I'm more intrigued by the process after the initial screening was complete that earned Dylan his permanent role
It is not. I did not promise a time by which the pb will be fixed, but a time by which a status update will be given (even if it is "I have made the technical team aware of the pb, they are still looking into it and will give a ETA for a fix").
Yes, I find that email profoundly unhelpful as well; it sounds like generic level-0 helpdesk drivel. The client was promised 24/7 support (and is probably paying for that level), he hasn't been getting anywhere, and is meanwhile losing money. In that situation people are past looking for empathy, here it's no longer "about onion soup, Obelix, it's about sesterces. About mo-o-oney!"
A competent secretary would have emailed something like "I contacted XY, who was supposed to be on on-call duty, but he is in hospital with food poisoning. I then contacted ZW, who is next on the on-call rota, he is looking at your ticket. His cellphone number is XXX-YYY-ZZZZ; he is waiting for you to call."
In a well-run company a secretary has no place on the totem-pole, he can run up and down and talk to whomever he pleases. Good secretaries are worth their weight in gold, bad ones, on the other hand are only fit to serve as boat anchors.
As a tech person on the team who would have to help the customer, my first question of the support person would be, "why didn't you gather more information, like the customer's username, error messages he/she saw, browser type and version, etc.?" Not only would that be useful information to help track down the problem, but it would also give the customer some actions to take that would a) potentially lead to a solution, b) make him/her feel like he was actively pushing his problem closer to resolution.
I'm not saying the poster was a bad hire; given that he's risen in the organization and has spent a lot of time there, I assume he quickly learned how HireArt's business works and what questions to ask to get solutions faster for customers... I'm just a little baffled that this work sample got him a job. Presumably it was the process that followed that the founders really liked. Maybe this was just a good filter that easily disqualified resume-spammers and people who can't form sentences.
I think the real value in this post is pointing out something that many recruiters, HR departments, and hiring managers should seriously think about: asking a candidate to solve an actual real-world problem is much more useful than most interview processes.
The "get back to you in an hour" ... not sure about that. You don't want to string someone along with a series of these, and in this artificial case he has no idea exactly how long it'll be before he can get back to the customer. Worse, if enough customers are messed up he'd be sending a lot of identical messages like that out, and for each reply he'd need to make a more personal reply.
The points you make about his interacting with the tech team are well taken, but we might assume the info gathering was already done (ideally there's a ticket system and he could confirm that before sending this sort of reply), and I'm not sure they're relevant for a first level screen like this. If the company has its act together, their next step would be to test all that with some of the people he'd be working together with in the future.
Even if he was powerless to help at that moment, the customer does not want to hear that. The customer wants to believe that they are being helped and that the person on the other end of the line is actively taking steps to get them there.
The lesson here is not to be defeated by your own (perceived) failings. What you think is a fault might not matter to a hiring manager. Don't fear rejection. Step up and apply anyway. You never know.
(Plus, if you hire someone like this, your startup gets a really good human-interest news story 18 months later. ;) )
I propose that candidates should purchase a big engagement ring for the company to prove their commitment. This will filter out the losers who don't really want the job. If the rock is big enough, they pass to the next phase, which is to fake an earth-shattering enthusiasm about how awesome the company and job are. If we are convinced that we are the best they ever had, then they can be allowed to solve our problems for us.
This guy did a work task sample and nailed it. Then he got the job. Kudos for him, and kudos to hireart for using statistically relevant hiring criteria.
[1] Schmit and Hunter 1998, Don't have a link handy.
Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274
http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...
So this is probably not a coincidence - it's the implementation of some decent academic research.
As an engineer who's admittedly not very social, I would have no trouble writing that email. Are standards for non-technical people really this low when someone applying for an engineering position has to go through grueling interviews, code reviews, and resume checks?
(I'm sure that he was a great hire, I'm just amazed that this was sufficient to even get an interview.)
Most "big company" customer service jobs are up or out in a couple months on average, annual turnover ratios in the small integer range. So even if you make a mistake, as long as the hire passed legal, and the general firing policies and procedures passed legal, it doesn't really matter.
"I know I wouldn’t have landed this job if HireArt had been hiring using exclusively resumes. "
For example, I have been unsuccessful in even being contacted/screened by YC companies I have applied for, and in positions I would be highly qualified (not necessarily over-qualified). Example, I am an attorney with 3 years experience practicing business transactions and I applied to Contracts Manager and Legal Coordinator positions.
I often felt if I could only get in front of a recruiter/hiring manager and become a face rather than being just a resume in a pile that would make all the difference, of course companies can not afford to sit down with every candidate. Therefore, I think the author is right on point that performance based application is a good middle ground to be employed by more employers (pun intended).
http://blog.alinelerner.com/silicon-valley-hiring-is-not-a-m...
I would love to see more stories like this, for both engineers and non-engineers alike.
But the corollary to this is that the industry is really not measuring or even very interested in skills other than interviewing-under-pressure skills.
)!@#$%^&*( <- Do you understand what that means?
"how can you be expected to do real work with bosses and clients giving you vague specs and yelling at you?" Asking questions, communicating with your boss and clients.
I would love to learn what an A player would do in that situation.
Edit: Not trying to be snarky, I just wouldn't foresee the average YC company putting red tape in someone's way if the person demonstrates enthusiasm and value and the company is looking to grow.
Since you got hired by one YC company, even if you felt underqualified, I'd guess there are probably multiple YC companies out there who would hire you. So it seems possible that these 'necessary credentials' weren't real requirements in the first place, just imagined ones.
Not only was the customer service email extremely well-written ---the entire blog post is nicely crafted to deliver this payload paragraph.
IOW I am both cynical and impressed. I see what you did there... and reluctantly congratulate you.
Well done, and congratulations for your job. I hope that many companies will be inspired by this post.
it's better than any set of "credentials", which are a poor proxy for demonstrating this.
It's one reason lots of us test programmers on both simple coding (FizzBuzz or hopefully a bit harder, I also put some code with errors on the white board), and then, at least in my case, work through a design problem with them. All proxies for showing they can do the job.
However in the startup world the hiring process you experienced at ODesk is very common. Most startups don’t have a HR team to do all the personnel stuff. The CEOs and 'techies' decide who is joining the company and they are focused on your skillset. Can that applicant deal with our everyday problems? Which of course makes sense; they don’t necessarily need a senior or principle. They need someone who can get the job done.
I’m happy for you and wish you best of luck doing the job you’ve always wanted.
People can learn to program, learn systems and even learn whole languages. But often, they have the most difficulty learning to communicate empathically and effectively. This is a vital skill that, I believe, is more important than just knowing systems or knowing how to program.
The other stuff you can work on the side.
Talking to people on a humane level seems to be largely ignored or even regarded with condescension among technical people and I think that's really a shame.
so i had no credentials or experience when i got my first tech job. although my experience was at a AAA game dev. i became a rendering programmer which is generally considered to be a specialised role as well... this was down to a combination of personal connections, having a rock solid demo and knowing my stuff inside and out.
my experience there was that oxford graduates with 5 years + experience ranged in quality from 'gifted hard worker' to 'dead weight' with a heavy leaning towards the 'dead weight' end. literally you could have replaced some of these people with large rocks and it would have saved the company money.
being able to demo skills is valuable and should be expected during hiring imo, but sadly many employers have not grasped this in their interview and selection process. on the other hand in small high pressure teams avoiding bad hires is super important...
imo this is the genius of the test you were given - unlike almost every single examination and course work in academia, it puts you into a real world situation and demands a solution without warning (knowing when your exam is) support (lecturers) or cheat sheets (textbooks).
"Your clients are important to you", etc.
Thanks for sharing.