But I really enjoyed this post. The hiring problem seems to me to have multiple dimensions:
it can be hard to test for what people will be doing at a job, because that may change once they are in a company
what is important at a job isn’t often conveyed in the job description or interview, it’s something candidates have to dig for and may be ill defined in the mind of the interviewer (“fit”)
most companies say they hire the best but aren’t willing to pay top salary (or can’t!). But theyy don’t make that trade-off explicit
interviewing by its nature is trying to get a lot of signal in a short period of time
it is relatively easy to quickly assess what a candidate knows and much harder to assess what they can learn
there’s a paralysis of choice and a desire to wait for the perfect hire because software engineer performance is hard to measure and because as a manager you aren’t seeing progress day by day
companies have more optionality (they have many employees but most employees have only one job) so of course more effort and risk gets pushed to the employee
candidates want to broaden their option pool, which implies learning things outside of their current skillset. This effort is required because something someone knew about a certain technology 3-4 years ago could be wrong now, but there’s only so much one can have used in the recent past
because of health insurance being tied to a job and disruption to their life, employees have much more risk she they switch jobs than companies do in hiring
I think you could make the hiring process better by making it less risky for both sides. You can do that by fostering a culture of contract to hire, and making benefits more transferable so that candidates aren’t as impacted when they switch jobs (especially with health care). But it is a tough problem.
This is the best article I’ve read about technical interviews in a long, long time.
I wrote a similar, yet much less rich post on the topic here:
http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2812
But I really enjoyed this post. The hiring problem seems to me to have multiple dimensions:
I think you could make the hiring process better by making it less risky for both sides. You can do that by fostering a culture of contract to hire, and making benefits more transferable so that candidates aren’t as impacted when they switch jobs (especially with health care). But it is a tough problem.