How Not to Hire

This doesn't seem to account for anti-productivity at all, i.e. people who create more work by the end of the day than they complete. It's hard to quantify anti-productivity, let along get anyone reviewing work to admit that anti-productivity has occurred. Our work culture tends to value activity over all else, so the common sentiment is that a warm butt in the chair is better than nothing, even if that warm butt is making more work for everyone else.

I'm hoping that my method will actually ameliorate much of this. By starting the person part-time, perhaps their familiarity with the project builds "faster" over a unit-work-time than it would otherwise (I've personally found my comfort level with a project to be in some part a function of calendar time). In this way, I'm also not spending a lot on the candidate search itself.

The idea is to spend less time on much-higher-yield methods of finding people who are better suited to the job crossed with people who are happier with the environment of the job. It is about avoiding turn-over, but not in this perverse way of "ignore the problem because the alternative is worse", but by trying to avoid the hiring of a bad worker in the first place.

In this system, you'll never see a job notice from me. You won't know I have a need for an employee unless I ask you to come work for/with me. You'll only ever get a job offer from me if A) I know you're not an idiot, and B) I know you're available. Yes, that means I have to know the person very well already. If I have an opening that needs to be filled and I don't currently know of someone that fills it, then it is likely to be a long time before it gets filled, if I do nothing.

But then again, it's not like sifting through resumes is providing quality applicants. The resume and job interview are so poor of a selection process that I'm willing to try just about anything else.

There is also an element of respect for the worker involved in what I'm doing. I don't think I have a right to monopolize a person's time. I think people should have the time to be engaged in many pursuits. I want it to be up to them to choose how much they work. I want them to have the ability to find other work as well. The idea being, people who are happier in their work-life balance will be more productive.

Of course, we'll see.

I've worked as an employee of a consultancy a few different times, and I've never been informed about the rates at which I was billed to clients.

You don't need to "show" that you can learn new things, you just need to learn new things. And keep doing it. At first you have to do it on your own, but eventually you'll get paid to do it.

The biggest trick to getting there is inspiration. You need to be excited about the possibilities. You'll get ten times farther in an interview if you can enthusiastically tell your interviewer how much fun you're having with Angular.js. Or that project that kept you up til 3am because you just couldn't put it down.

You need to stop looking at your career as some set of criteria you have to fill and start looking at it as the most fun you're going to have, like ever. Seriously, building shit is fun.

Sadly, it's more true than you can probably imagine.

Realize though, that the pool of people actively applying to jobs is, on average, FAR worse than the total population. Even companies who are pretty bad at hiring can make some kind of selection for quality, and great engineers get fired way less than terrible engineers, so in theory, the very worst engineers in the world would continually apply for jobs and never be hired, or would be quickly fired.

My experience suggests that it's very rare to get a superstar from any passive method (that finds active job seekers). That pool is just to dilute with talent. To get the strong candidates, you have to be active (to have a shot at the passive candidates) or extremely lucky.

It's no surprise to find only 1 in 100 of unemployed engineers are truly good. If you just post openings, you're unlikely to interview even a representative sample of the population, let alone an above-average sample.

Well, it's an anecdote from several years ago of which I have only rough numbers. The "2 people who were good" and the "67% fired" numbers are correct, for one particular project we had hired 6 people and eventually fired 4 of them over the course of two years. I'm guessing at 50% acceptance rate for the offer (it probably wasn't that low, but it wasn't better than 75% either), and the two 10% numbers to get to 1% applicant acceptance rate. It's a rough guess to give an idea of the magnitude of things, and as such it's not an order of magnitude off.

It's likely close to true. The reason: all the good people already have jobs.

We have a pre-employment screening test for all employees at my company that I do the scoring on.

About 1 in 30 even gets passed on to HR to look at their resume. We get about 400-500 applicants a day (I don't personally look at all of them; a handful of us have this responsibility). Most people cheat, don't read the instructions or just give plain crap answers. A pretty significant number don't even try to get good answers - I wonder if they just have to show an attempt for unemployment money. We struggle to get even 2 strong answers out of all 5 questions. 2 strong answers will basically guarantee an interview. 1 - 1 1/2 answers will get passed on to HR with a "maybe".

Of those that interview, I think about 1 in 15 gets hired into our training group. Usually about 1/5-1/3 of these realize that they can't do the job in training and stop showing up or they get recommended no-hire. Usually by this time HR tells us it's too late to fire them but occasionally it will happen (we had a hairdresser who was coached by a very senior employee through the hiring process. she had absolutely no technical ability whatsoever and was fired).

Our turnover rate for people in their first two weeks is high. I'm not going to lie, we're a very difficult company to work for and we don't have the best conditions for our employees (I can't change that).

Ultimately though, we have a staff of about 600 all of whom I interact with on a regular basis. I get about 1500-2200 tickets escalated to me personally each month, so I do deal with almost everyone. I could say that at present maybe 10 people can completely do their job effectively and maybe another 50 who can do most of it and have areas where they're significantly weak. The people who are very effective eventually get promoted to my team though.

For our newest hires, we've given up on recruiting technical skill completely and hire based on phone skills and business sense. The hope is that they can be trained to be effective. Our training department sucks and I have absolutely no hope for this plan to work, but we need butts in seats to meet SLA on our new contracts.

OP's numbers are very believable.

thanks!