First of all, I definitely agree that resumes are woefully overused and overrated. They have structural problems and incentivize people to use "negative selection" criteria where people are eliminated based on not having a specific feature rather than selected for excelling on something¹.
This article neatly demonstrates that resumes are not necessary and that not using them can unlock new sorts of candidates.
However, I don't think there's a conclusion to be made about the actual method used here. I suspect that it worked because it was different, not because it carried a fundamentally strong signal. If everyone did this, project descriptions would be gamed even more than resumes—it would select for people who prepared for the selection process² more than anything else.
This reminds me of various captcha strategies I've seen used by small forums to great effect—solving some math, typing a word into a text box, choosing a popular character's picture… etc. They all work, perfectly. But only because spammers don't care about the small fry: it's not worth their time to modify their bots for your little site. If any given captcha becomes used widely—or your forum grows big enough—they will bypass it trivially.
Now, an essay like this isn't quite as bad as a captcha, but the idea is the same: it works because it's new and different. If everybody used it, it would probably be a step back.
Ultimately, I think the real moral is that more companies should do their own thing, even if that thing is not great in the abstract. Being different carries a value of its own, and it breeds biodiversity that's healthy for the system as a whole. (Of course, many of the things companies try are really bad for various reasons, but that's a different story…)
¹ In particular, most people have a bunch of "red flags" they look for with, at best, cursory rationale—everything from passing on people who didn't go to the right school to those who have breaks in their work history, based on "common sense" or "experience" rather than anything meaningful. Most of these criteria seem counter-productive.
² I also think this is really true for college admissions and especially the admissions essay. A project blurb for hiring is more or less the same idea in a new context.
However, I don't think there's a conclusion to be made about the actual method used here. I suspect that it worked because it was different, not because it carried a fundamentally strong signal. If everyone did this, project descriptions would be gamed even more than resumes—it would select for people who prepared for the selection process² more than anything else.
I find myself almost irresistably drawn towards the conclusion that people will game the hiring process, because it is a game. It has winners and losers. Everybody is trying to make themselves look better than everybody else, even to the point of making themselves look better than they really are: Job candidates, employers, internal and external recruiters, everybody who is selling a hiring product, etc. Everybody is trying to emphasize their positives and hide their negatives, while searching for the negatives of the others.
A drawback to "do your own thing" is that it is enormously inefficient for candidates, and the results may turn out to be based on the luck of a particular candidate guessing a particular employer's game is, or being generally better at games.
I don't know a solution. What strikes me is that as broken as the system seems, we still manage to hire good people most of the time.
The process being broken isn't a deal-breaker for companies, which can still hire from the 90% that can deal with the broken system. It's a deal-breaker for the 10% that are bad at playing the game / jumping hoops / resume writing / interviews, because they can't get a job.
It's not so rosy for companies. The situation is akin to the one in large companies and bureaucracies where all numbers and estimates in all communications become "padded" and largely fictionalized -- precisely because "everyone is doing it." In such broken games, signals lose their meaning, and everyone ultimately loses.
In academia, someone observed this: "The revolutionary idea of one generation becomes just the stuff you say to get tenure in the next generation."
I am biased, but I think that if it was possible in America to graduate with virtually zero student debt and 20-24 months of industry experience in a five-year bachelor's program, despite having little to no savings prior to starting college, leading software companies wouldn't need to import developers and engineers on H1Bs and TNs. Immigration lawyers are expensive, you know.
> I don't know a solution. What strikes me is that as broken as the system seems, we still manage to hire good people most of the time.
Interestingly, the simplest conclusion would be that everyone is good, most of the time. So if we throw hiring out the windows and pick employee randomly, we might still get to the same result.
Which actually isn't too outrageous, since if we have 10% unemployment, wouldn't it mean 90% of people (or more, actually) have to be value added?
True, but the costs (both direct and ancillary) of making a bad hire are so high that anything we can do avoid making the wrong hire would be worthwhile.
You might be right that randomly picking candidates might be just as efficient, but I can't imagine anyone taking that risk.
> True, but the costs (both direct and ancillary) of making a bad hire are so high that anything we can do avoid making the wrong hire would be worthwhile.
That's a load of highly-enriched equine fertilizer. I have had this discussion here before. I asked for information. I didn't get much. Some worst-case hypotheticals that, to my knowledge, have never happened anywhere. A buttload of management failures surrounding bad hires where management was responsible for the vast majority of the costs, not the hire. A couple legitimate bad hires where the costs were significant, but not in the same ballpark as people like you parrot.
Also ignored in this conversation: what is the cost of keeping your req open? How much money are you losing, directly or indirectly, by not having someone in that role? Why do you think someone can't grow into the role?
I actually agree that the biggest cost of a bad employee is a management failure to either create an environment that the employee can thrive or is too "nice" to confront reality and get rid of them quickly.
I can't speak to your experiences and I never said bad hires were costly due to the employee vs. Management screwups. The simple reality is that every day a bad hire is in place, is a day that a much more productive employee is not in place, which costs could be astronomical.
The bottom line is that "slow to hire and fast to fire" as difficult as it is, is very sound advice!
Without knowing you and jumping to a conclusion based on your comment, I assume you don't appreciate that employee boss relationships are adversarial by nature and there is often considerations management makes that might seem bad but are really a product of their understanding of whats possible and realistic within limiting circumstances...
I used to complain with my friends about all the things we would change in our boss and the company we worked for and now after many years I realize that at the time I had no flipping clue about anything.
What are the costs associated with a bad hire? Is there a way to minimize the potential damage and allow for a wider net to cast?
Could the on boarding process be more akin to a mentor-apprentice relationship and utilize open source as the avenue, with the burden of work placed on the apprentice. Your company has both closed and open source projects that many of your engineer's contribute to and manage. An apprentice level candidate works on and applies a patch with the feedback from the mentor level engineers. At some sufficient level of acceptance based on performance the apprentice is brought in for a culture fit type interview and potentially offered a position.
From the view of the apprentice this may seem like MORE work then writing resumes and prepping for technical interviews. But from my point of view as an apprentice I'd be learning skills that seem more useful than gaming resumes, screening and technical interviews, and adding to my portfolio that may never get glanced at. Skills like communication and coordination with a team, Real world coding experience and pushing to production. From the viewpoint of the mentor, I see candidates that have already been introduced to the internal workflow and show the communication necessary to work with my engineering team.
I think the European practice of having a candidate on a 3 month evaluation period(when it is easy to fire) and then having a job security afterwards seems a reasonable balance between employer and employee needs.
It is hard to pull wool over someone's eyes for 3 months especially in a results oriented field like programming.
Bad hires are certainly a concern. I think this is the reason why people buy screening products such as personality tests. Paying $100 for a screening test that promises to prevent the $100k cost of a bad hire seems like a pretty good bargain. It reminds me of Pascal's Wager, where you give a little bit to the church in order to avoid the infinite risk of hell.
The test seemingly has to be 0.1% effective, to pay for itself. The thing that's hard to imagine is that the test is even less than 0.1% effective, because it's a scam. This is also how things are sold like a $5 extended warranty for a flash drive.
And, as always, lets pretend false positives do not exist.
Do you know what's even more expensive than a bad hire? It's letting an extraordinary hire go away because your snake-oil test did not work. But that loss won't make onto a spreadsheet, then, who cares?
The funny part is, in good old game theory fashion, the prime motivator for hiding your negatives and trumping up your positives is everyone else is doing it, so you must as well just to keep up.
Yes, it logically follows from simple economic principles: if you're competing with other companies for good candidates (which you are), your hit rate will go up if you look for signals that your competitors ignore or reject, because that gives you access to a pool that hasn't already been picked clean. So if most companies prefer candidates who have a college degree, look for candidates who haven't. If most companies are looking for experience in some mainstream language, look for candidates who have experience in something quirky and unusual. If most companies discriminate against candidates outside the age range of 20 to 39, look for candidates outside that age range.
I'll add a note that it's not necessary for every company to do something different. It's perfectly okay for your company to copy the way this one did things. It's perfectly okay for five or ten companies to do that. Only if a large fraction of the market starts copying a particular strategy, do you need to switch to something else.
What about resume styles that focus on "You should hire me if you need X..." with a listing of strengths rather than rote "Seeking a position that Y". Then the CV builds towards that with concrete examples.
That'd be a strategy that would better suit both the hunters and the hunted.
> This reminds me of various captcha strategies I've seen used by small forums to great effect—solving some math, typing a word into a text box, choosing a popular character's picture… etc. They all work, perfectly. But only because spammers don't care about the small fry: it's not worth their time to modify their bots for your little site. If any given captcha becomes used widely—or your forum grows big enough—they will bypass it trivially.
Which reminds me of Jeff Atwood's original "captcha"[1] on the Coding Horror blog. It was a static image of the word "orange" every time. It was the most trivially defeatable captcha ever, but he didn't care because it worked. It would have been senseless for him to invest time and effort into implementing a complex captcha engine, when the existing solution was filtering spam bots just fine.
"Ultimately, I think the real moral is that more companies should do their own thing, even if that thing is not great in the abstract. Being different carries a value of its own, and it breeds biodiversity that's healthy for the system as a whole. (Of course, many of the things companies try are really bad for various reasons, but that's a different story…)"
This really resonated with me - especially as a start up, doing what feels right just makes sense, especially when that's consistent with your team's culture and even sense of humor.
Real example - when we're not getting a sense of the 'real' person we're interviewing, we take them out for a friendly game of foosball. It's brilliant at removing nerves, but also gives us great insights into their team skills, competitiveness, and more.
Early in Google's hiring, they heavily selected for Python, which was a relatively new language at the time. It's debatable if there was something technically unique or strong about Python at the time. But many of the people who knew it at the time also happened to be programming enthusiasts, Google's right kind of crowd.
It's similar how ingredient X isn't as important as X's relationship to the status quo. Almost... hipster hiring in a way.
I find this a funny one. At one previous job the head of HR would highlight "breaks in work history" on the CV with a pen, three months here, six months there, as though that meant something.
I have talked to several HR directors (heh, though not as a job candidate, just people around in bars) who would see my last 3 years of very successful freelancing as a "break in work history". I'm probably unhirable at most of the places near where I live (Washington DC) but I'm actually fine with that.
This article neatly demonstrates that resumes are not necessary and that not using them can unlock new sorts of candidates.
However, I don't think there's a conclusion to be made about the actual method used here. I suspect that it worked because it was different, not because it carried a fundamentally strong signal. If everyone did this, project descriptions would be gamed even more than resumes—it would select for people who prepared for the selection process² more than anything else.
This reminds me of various captcha strategies I've seen used by small forums to great effect—solving some math, typing a word into a text box, choosing a popular character's picture… etc. They all work, perfectly. But only because spammers don't care about the small fry: it's not worth their time to modify their bots for your little site. If any given captcha becomes used widely—or your forum grows big enough—they will bypass it trivially.
Now, an essay like this isn't quite as bad as a captcha, but the idea is the same: it works because it's new and different. If everybody used it, it would probably be a step back.
Ultimately, I think the real moral is that more companies should do their own thing, even if that thing is not great in the abstract. Being different carries a value of its own, and it breeds biodiversity that's healthy for the system as a whole. (Of course, many of the things companies try are really bad for various reasons, but that's a different story…)
¹ In particular, most people have a bunch of "red flags" they look for with, at best, cursory rationale—everything from passing on people who didn't go to the right school to those who have breaks in their work history, based on "common sense" or "experience" rather than anything meaningful. Most of these criteria seem counter-productive.
² I also think this is really true for college admissions and especially the admissions essay. A project blurb for hiring is more or less the same idea in a new context.