Skipping Traditional Recruitment, Going Straight To the Source 207
theodp writes "Out of necessity, reports Slate, tech startups are changing the way workers are screened and hired. Take database technology startup RethinkDB, whose old-school recruiting effort — job boards, external recruiters — yielded hundreds of resumes, dozens of phone screens, and numerous four-hour meetings with viable candidates, but no one who fit their criteria. 'They [recruiters] can't tell the difference between the competent ones and the stars,' complained Y Combinator's Paul Graham. Instead, the RethinkDB founders turned to sites like Github.com and stackoverflow.com to pick up six people (they're still looking), a mix of full-timers and interns, both senior and junior. 'You can see the code being written and how technically accurate they are,' explained RethinkDB's Michael Glukhovsky."
Personally I think recruiters are worthless (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never used one/been contacted by one, I've gotten my jobs the old fashion way of knowing someone who works there :D. However a good friend of mine was recently out of work for a long time and talked with numerous recruiters (he used every avenue he could to get a job). He'd call me regularly to vent about the process. They were just universally stupid in the questions they asked. They did not at all understand the kinds of positions they were hiring for and had a very much "One size fits all," attitude. For example some of them just flat couldn't deal with his years of consulting. It was a legit business, actual company (consisting of just him) making money and so on. However they couldn't deal with the fact that he didn't have a boss, and that the company phone number was his cell. There was no conception that someone might have worked for themselves. That wasn't the only stupid thing, just one example of many.
To me it really does seem like they provide little value to companies other than maybe to gather resumes, but there has to be a better process for that. Also, their process seemed like what it was most likely to get you was good liars. They didn't ask the right questions so someone who answered honestly wouldn't pass screening in almost all cases. So the candidates you would get would likely be the ones who were willing to just answer in the manner they thought was most likely to get them past that phase.
Maybe he just had a really bad experience, but it has given me a really poor opinion of recruiting companies. Seems to me like this company is on the right track: Do your own searches for people you want, solicit resumes, interview potential candidates first round, etc. Don't think some recruiter will filter all but the best, unless by "best" you mean "People who will say what it takes to get past that step."
Newsflash - job agencies are jokers (Score:4, Insightful)
It should be no surprise to anyone who has dealt with job agencies that they are only after their commission. They don't understand IT in any meaningful way and can't tell a monkey from a genius. They are corporate BS artists.
Having said that sorting one good guy from a few thousand applicants is very, very time consuming.
Re:Personally I think recruiters are worthless (Score:3, Insightful)
...there has to be a better process for that...
Linkedin should be that better process. Sadly people give out recommendations like confetti. I've worked with a sociopath and a lazy slimeball ( two people ) who both got good recommendations on there.
If you can't even trust personal recommendations recruiting anyone will be a very hard process.
Re:More companies should follow RethinkDB approach (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Newsflash - job agencies are jokers (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
The flaw with this approach (Score:5, Insightful)
It pretty clear that Slava at RethinkDB is clueless about his problem. Sure, he has trouble finding top people. It apparently has never occurred to him that top people probably don't want to work there. I'm sorry, but from what I can see, it looks positively inane. My version of hell, because I like far tougher problems than can happen in that area.
Honestly, this strikes me as the narcissists' approach to interviewing. Wake up guy. You're not Bell Labs, and you're not going to get Denis Ritchie to come work for you.
Re:Personally I think recruiters are worthless (Score:3, Insightful)
One good thing about recruiters is that they do the dirty rotten lying that I don't want to do myself.
Re:Personally I think recruiters are worthless (Score:3, Insightful)
I've worked with a sociopath and a lazy slimeball ( two people ) who both got good recommendations on there.
From each other, by any chance? ;-)
Re:Personally I think recruiters are worthless (Score:1, Insightful)
I think recruiters have their place, as filling in the number of applicants when you're hiring internally. In the public sector in Britain, if there's a job going they [local council] _have_ to advertise it to the general public, even if they're going to pick Bob from the adjoining department. Then they have to interview so many men and so many women and so many of an ethnic origin and .... you get the idea. It's pretty much just to cover their backs. Calling a recruiter for that sort of thing, it doesn't matter if "One size fits all", because they know they're not going to hire any of them.
Personally I use recruitment agencies as a fall back position. At the beginning of looking for work, you sign up with any you can get your hands on, and then make sure to prod them every week or so, so they they remember you. In the meantime, you go for the normal methods of job boards, individual companies and actually asking the companies you're specifically interested in whether they have a position coming up.
Well I don't really consider Linkedin personal (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that people view social networking as just some sort of big ole' party. Most people I know can't believe I won't accept any and every Facebook friend request. For me, it is someone I know that I would consider a friend, even if fairly distantly. For most people, the more the merrier. They just say "yes" to anything.
Well that attitude spills over to Linkedin, even though it is supposed to be more professional. People just associate with whoever the hell they happen to know, regardless of how they think of the person. I know people who have "linked" with people they really don't like.
The kind of recommendation I'd take is an actual, in person, personal recommendation from someone I know who's judgment I trust. Those kind of people would have trouble looking me in the eye and lying to me (that's why I trust them). That doesn't guarantee anything, maybe they don't know something about the person or have misjudged them, but it is a much better sign.
In terms of more cold hiring I think companies just have to put in some more legwork. I work at a university and our hiring process is all our own. Does mean that you have to work more at it, the manager has to write up the position, HR posts it on the site (it can be posted/linked elsewhere is you like), resumes are collected and the manager has to review them, decide who to interview, etc. Not as easy as just telling some recruiter "Go find me a programmer," but you get better candidates. For example in the campus environment, we've found that hiring student employees to staff, if they are interested, works well. Pay is lower than industry but benefits, including work environment, tend to be good. Students who are interested in working there know this and are ok with it, whereas other applicants sometimes view it as a temp job due to the pay.
I think companies need to be more willing to do that. Yes, it sucks to have to spend more time on hiring, it is a crap process. However if you want candidates that fit you better it is what you have to do.
Re:Newsflash - job agencies are jokers (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, and job interviews are often like dating: a scripted, mechanical jump through hoops in which questions are asked and only the canned, standard answers are accepted. They want to see that you're not a weirdo or a kook and that you're properly assimilated, using the right keywords, spinning negative experience into positive, etc.
Assimilated is right. Most multinationals are full of clueless middle managers who look for people like themselves, everything else scares them. I gave up on big companies after working for a well known oil multinational only to find it was impossible to get anything done without justifying every tiny step to a whole bunch of clueless losers who don't understand any of it.
In a previous job I once got change control approval to clad my entire building in two foot thick lead to prevent ram parity errors.The fools were too dumb to know what they were approving. When I told them they just brushed their ignorance under the carpet and carried on with the same ignorant change control process.
I'll bet the dumb recruitment agencies survive because most huge companies only want dumb, untalented, middle manager drones.
Small companies are the only way to go. Once the 'professional manager' types get a foodhold any company is screwed.
Trade one BS method for another? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everybody who works in the field, including many who are very involved with and passionate about their work, also has the time or inclination to be coding in their spare time as well. Sure, you expect people who are dedicated to do some continuing education outside the office, but that's not the same thing. Many people, besides the hectic day at the office, and constant "continuing education" at home, also have families and other interests to deal with.
For the most part, if you limit your search to open-source contributors, you are skewing your results toward single people, mostly men, who may or may not have any social skills outside work, and leaving behind a great many well-adjusted people with well-balanced lives, who are equally great coders.
Not to mention that according to most people in the Agile industry, the idea of the "rockstar developer" has been dead for about 2 years. There are damned few of them, and you are making up bogus criteria for trying to identify who they are.
Re:The flaw with this approach (Score:3, Insightful)
It pretty clear that Slava at RethinkDB is clueless about his problem. Sure, he has trouble finding top people. It apparently has never occurred to him that top people probably don't want to work there. I'm sorry, but from what I can see, it looks positively inane. My version of hell, because I like far tougher problems than can happen in that area.
It seems like its possible. I do like that they are upfront with their salary/stock options. (Stock options that *may* be worth something if this company of geniuses manages to come up with something that could be marketable to a buyout). Pure statistics alone, they will not.
And I can buy that the management is very technically able (as has been cited here), but not so realistic about hiring.
Probably read too much Joel on Software. Remember that tripe? He's implicitly and explicitly telling you to go about insisting on hiring future Nobel prize laureates and programmers that have their consciousness tuned for a power-conserving compact bytecode, so their skills can be applied to a recently web-enabled bugtracker in a job that will probably pay slightly better than the mean (this is essentially what the part about giving them better benefits/pay means) for similar work (ie not that much for that labor pool).
As a data point, I consider myself slightly above average, but not quite Turing or Dijkstra, and I was making their Engineer II level pay in a region of the East Coast with far lower cost of living (but not in the deep sticks either) a few years after high school. I can't imagine those smarter than me are so cavalier about the risk/benefit ratio of jumping to a startup with no product ready to go.
I point out my case, because I think if they really believe they are going to impress people with simply the salary quote, they are only going to attract people below my capabilities, which would be well below what they seem to "want". Sorry, but if those SV salaries look good to you (mind you this is a startup and not Google with fringes galore and other things), you are either underpaid and unaware or you just are not as good as you think (Dunning-Krueger, ahem).
A startup is far better off being upfront about exactly where they stand, what they do, and be prefectly frank with the risks involved and not blow smoke up your ass. The idiots will go batshit with your pie-in-the-sky, the *brightest* not so much. Don't try to PR style market to the brightest, they'll see though it and not like it.
And it might just be that those smart enough to know what they don't know, are not so quick to rush to a place where the website sounds like they have all the answers to DB problems. I, for one, took pause at their job postings. They see "visionary," I read into and between the lines and see "dogmatic adherence to our superior view"
That's another thing, you don't generally hire the best and brightest (the real best and brightest--in more than just code monkey) into "staff" positions, they usually don't fit well.
You have to have a little irrationality to go on the startup ride and it helps if the founders realize they are not *all* geniuses and smartness is multifaceted. If they can't find people in a market as liquid as Silicon Valley, they apparently can't pay the price and have to make their expectations more realistic, or simply wait longer and let probability do its thing.
There are bright people willing to work for low-pay (high short-term risk) if they feel the other benefits (thrill of doing something worthwhile) are worth it, or they like/believe in the reward. It's not all about base, of course, but that is something too.
Ditch recruiters, screen on programming skills (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Personally I think recruiters are worthless (Score:3, Insightful)
Linkedin should be that better process. Sadly people give out recommendations like confetti. I've worked with a sociopath and a lazy slimeball ( two people ) who both got good recommendations on there.
People are corrupt. They value their friends above the common man and will give them a free pass no matter what. When Joe recommends his good friend Mike, who he knows is a shitty developer, it is the same form of corruption as when politicians accept bribes. It is very unfair to those who are not "linked in."
Recruitment agencies blow ass (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Newsflash - job agencies are jokers (Score:5, Insightful)
"In a previous job I once got change control approval to clad my entire building in two foot thick lead to prevent ram parity errors."
And you didn't go through with it? A schoolboy error!
Re:Personally I think recruiters are worthless (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Personally I think recruiters are worthless (Score:3, Insightful)
Linkedin is no better.
The process is broken, simple as that.
Your resume says NOTHING about who you are, and what you can do. It makes no difference between 20 years experience, and 1 year 20 times. And everyone lies on there resumes.
Keyword matching is the worst - and it's going to cost you candidates.
My resume had zero experience writing multithreaded servers in c, but the place I eventually worked at, their lead was leaving, and they had tried a half-dozen others before they decided to "scrape the bottom of the barrel" by going to an "older" worker - which by their definition was anyone over 30. The code was terrible, the database design sucked, there was no documentation, and it was obvious why the lead had left for greener pastures - it was "fish or cut bait" time. He had milked this job as far as he could.
So, get familiar with the code, study the posix threads docs online, and start fixing the problems. End result was 3 inter-related specialized linux/bsd-hosted servers (depending on -DBSD for make) that can handle a thousand requests a second (including db lookups on the same low-end hardware), never kills off a thread to "reclaim memory" (zero memory leaks, even after running for months at a time), and it does the job.
Only one problem - the code was now stable enough, and clean enough, that I was no longer needed, and the extra delays meant a round of cost-cutting.
The job hunting process since then has convinced me, more than anything else, that most people doing "recruiting" don't have a clue, and that employers aren't willing to take the logical step - hire a programmer on a contract basis to help them weed out candidates.
It's also why I absolutely refuse to hand out a resume. I am *not* my resume, and my resume is not me. If you have a problem, either I can fix it, or I'll tell you that I can't. The main concern really isn't that anyway (studies show that the leading cause of project failure is bad communications, not lack of technical skills).
Re:They need a clue (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, they do seem to be able to recognize when people are not the right fit during that four hour interview. Their whole story is that they are finding that everyone they do interview that way are people they don't want to hire. The problem is, this is inefficient considering the glut of programmers below the level they want. The article is about finding alternatives to this process where this glut can be avoided. Maybe better phone screen skills might have done so? But they seem to think there is success in going to the source, where the good programmers are known to hang out. Of course, the big problem there is most of them don't want a new job.
Re:The flaw with this approach (Score:5, Insightful)
It apparently has never occurred to him that top people probably don't want to work there
This seems to be the heart of his problem, although I don't think it's for the reasons you list. He wants experienced database internals programmers who hate SQL, know LISP, and can modify the LINUX kernel. He boasts about getting a whopping $1.25M in funding for 2010. No market for his product and no sales. Those should be huge red flags for anyone with experience in the field (if such a person exists).
Re:Well I don't really consider Linkedin personal (Score:3, Insightful)
> In terms of more cold hiring I think companies just have to put in some more
> legwork. I work at a university and our hiring process is all our own. Does
> mean that you have to work more at it, the manager has to write up the
> position, HR posts it on the site (it can be posted/linked elsewhere is
> you like), resumes are collected and the manager has to review them, decide
> who to interview, etc. Not as easy as just telling some recruiter "Go find me
> a programmer," but you get better candidates.
I've been both a participant in and the decision maker for hiring at some fairly large technology companies, and I have to say I have always been baffled by people who report that "HR screens the resumes". What the heck does HR know about the technical capabilities and backgrounds we need for this position or how to pick them up from a resume or cover letter? If the manager making the hire isn't directly involved in the process from the beginning what are the chances he will make a good decision? Similarly with all these filters people talk about their process using (advanced degrees, 23.7 years experience in a technology released in 1998, etc). I generally do specify a high school diploma (or GED), but what I want to know is what has this person _done_, what has he/she accomplished, what new things has he learned and successfully used rapidly when the chips were down.
And don't even get me started on "certificates", "certifications", etc. The one filter I have considered putting in place is "no one with a PMP certificate shall ever be hired", but that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of useless pieces of paper.
sPh
Re:Personally I think recruiters are worthless (Score:4, Insightful)
Soft skills like the ability to make friends, work together without coming to blows, etc, are frequently valued more highly by employers than pure technical skills. Right or wrong (and I happen to think right), that makes being "linked in" an early proxy for those skills, and is in no way 'unfair' to those who can't make friends. If you can't work easily and comfortably and sociably with significant numbers of people, we really can't use you in our large organization.
That's why you need automated candidate testing (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a lot of recruiter hate going on here but it seems to miss the real problem. Having spent the last 6 years on the hiring side, it's very obvious that Jeff Atwood's FizzBuzz problem [codinghorror.com] is too hard for 90% of the people applying for programming positions out there. When you end up with a situation like this, traditional hiring methods just don't work. Job board postings will get you hundreds of resumes in a single day but the quality is really crap and it is prohibitively expensive to do traditional interviews for every single resume received. HR recruiters, hated as they are, actually do provide higher quality candidates than posting on the job boards. However, it's something like an increase from 1% quality candidates to 5% quality. Still very poor.
We've ended up using a multi-prong approach to hiring ourselves. Besides using recruiters and posting to SIG boards, we've also optimized our candidate screening to handle the flood that comes in from job board postings. Since you can't tell much from resumes (some candidates lie, but an amazing number of good developers are also very bad at writing resumes), we try to call in all but the worst of the resumes received. Then we sit them through an automated testing system (we use Codility [codility.com]). Candidates that pass the equivalent of the FizzBuzz problem are then interviewed by technical interviewers that go over the code with them detail and attempt to thoroughly assess their true skill level. That automated testing step filters out the equivalent of 90% of our candidates, resulting in an almost 90% savings in our HR costs. It's very expensive to have good technical people spending hours interviewing after all, and they tend to hate it anyway.
It's not perfect. There are of course great people who get rejected or who even refuse to take an automated test. However, automated candidate testing means the difference between our top technical people spending 10% of their time interviewing or 100% of their time interviewing. With the scarcity of really good technical talent, we obviously chose to optimize our techie time.
Re:Well I don't really consider Linkedin personal (Score:3, Insightful)
+1.
I have never seen a company where HR is the first level screen. Not even at a very large company. They MAY be the second level screen, e.g., they may have a kill option for someone who they think cannot legally work at the company. But beyond that, their involvement is usually pretty limited until the hiring division is ready to proceed to making an offer.
Re:The flaw with this approach (Score:1, Insightful)
Joel doesn't even eat his own dogfood. I was the kind of programmer who had my consciousness tuned for a "power-conserving compact bytecode" and I didn't even get an interview when I gave them my resume. So I went to work for a world-class compiler team instead.
I think it's safe to say there's such a thing as being too overqualified to work on a bug tracker.
Jobs (Score:1, Insightful)
Hell, I just turned down a six figure job at one place because they have a campus wide tobacco ban. The HR droid was pissed because he said he said it was nearly impossible to find someone else with my specific qualifications. I told him sorry but I choose who I want to work for and companies that have punitive policies are not on that list. I choose to work for winning companies that stay out of my business and provide a pleasant, well compensated and creative place to work.
Re:The flaw with this approach (Score:3, Insightful)
Given the stupid high cost of living in the Silicon Valley area, that pay scale sucks.
My first thoughts, without even looking to see what they pay, is if there so little available talent in Silicon Valley (one of the reasons they state for not being able to find good candidates), why don't they simply move? They appear to have 2 employees, an adviser and a website. They don't appear to manufacture a physical product and no indication of having a business location. Couldn't they shop other markets and move the company when they find one with a good supply of candidates?
It appears that the only thing they have is an add-on for an open source product and a pocket full of investor cash. Why be tied to a market with one of the most expensive costs of living in the nation when they could maximize investor equity in a cheaper market. But then again, I'm not a PHD candidate in Computer Science. My background is CIS, business, and economics...
Re:Well I don't really consider Linkedin personal (Score:3, Insightful)
"what I want to know is what has this person _done_, what has he/she accomplished,"
Should be worth some moderator's points. Any one on slashdot can probably look around, and find someone with certs to hell and back - but they've never DONE anything. Take another look around. Find the company gopher, or maybe the janitor, or possibly the receptionist - one of the crowd that you just take for granted. What HAVE they done? Especially if that nobody is a military veteran, he/she may know some great ways to actually "get things done".
Degrees, diplomas, and certifications are proof that either the guy had lots of time and money to sit in classrooms, or he learned how to game the system. They most certainly are NOT proof of intelligence, or knowledge.
I don't care how Ivy league and elitest anyone is - if he's honest at all, he can look around, and find a classmate who has never amounted to anything, and never will.
Screw it (Score:1, Insightful)
After 15+ years of IT work, I finally said screw it and got a teaching job. My coding skills are good, and yeah, I can program my way out of a paper bag and more. I just don't believe I need to justify my skills to some little 20-something shit just out of college. I get my programming fix by contributing to some open source project and teaching my high school kids what they need to know to survive in the world of IT (including advice, when appropriate, to think about some other line of work). And before you trot out the oh-so-cliche "Those who can't do, teach," I'll just say that I can do both very well. Not to sound too arrogant, but I'd like to think that my self-imposed exile from the IT world is their loss, not mine.
I laugh at the silly interview games people post here. I wonder how many of those asshats who play such games could actually answer their own questions. I suspect very few could.
Re:Trade one BS method for another? (Score:3, Insightful)
And there might be some of those people who can do that for a whole career and not burn themselves out. They're a small minority. In the real world, it's completely fucked up to expect that someone who does something for 8 hours a day at work to go home and continue doing exactly that in their spare time.
I invent IT-type tasks, like creating PPA'd deb packages, in my spare time. I am rewarded on a variety of levels not including monetary. I think you are looking at this all wrong. I [hypothetically] want to hire someone who likes to do IT work to do IT work, someone who likes to write code and make a contribution to a project to write code for my project.
Do we expect that every white collar worker does their profession as a hobby as well?
Not if it's boring. But then, I wouldn't want to do a job I found boring. That's why I'm a good IT employee... I like doing this stuff. When I worked as an intern at Yuba College (it fit my schedule... so did school) I enjoyed the appreciation of the users when I fixed a problem that had the people I worked for stumped, so I would give my all even though I was being monetarily paid chump change. And the fact that I have a heterogeneous network at home has gotten me employed more than once. I really like making computers talk to each other when they're not on good terms. Why that flips my lid, who knows, but I'm the kind of person I want to hire to work in an IT department. Maybe not to lead one, but then, I have a tendency to take over anyway.
Would you expect an architect to go home and design buildings for shits and giggles?
Yes, and the greatest ones are all like that.
Or perhaps we can get over the unrealistic assumption that to be good at certain technological professions you need to work what amounts to a part to full time job with no pay in addition to your actual employment.
Bullshit hyperbole. Log in so I can foe you.