Our interview and hiring system is currently failing a ton of unit tests. Let’s fix it.
I am starting to get tired of people reiterating ways of how hiring is broken, yet no one suggesting alternatives of how they are fixing it.
Here is someone who seems to be a hiring manager, posting about all the problems of a process that I assume their organisation also follow, to some extent. But not a word about how this organisation is changing any part of their process to solve for any of this.
I get it when developers / job seekers share their poor experiences. But I’d expect hiring managers who have the ability to change their processes to echo these only if they are doing something about it.
OP, my question to you: how are you planning to change the hiring process at your company and what aspects of the broken hiring process you described do you hope to address with it?
This piece does a great job describing the problem! But it’s really hard to find something that does a better job of predicting success as a software developer without requiring much more effort than the current approach.
This is the core problem in my opinion. Nobody has a clue what to test for. Companies who have investigated all found that whatever they were testing has little significance. All that remains is: Do an interview to ensure employer and candidate have correctly understood the job description and the application. Do some low-skill checks (FizzBuzz) to weed out liars.
Still, what (bigger) companies could do is to establish a systematic process: Define a standardized test. Regularly correlate the test results with employee performance to tweak the test.
Regardless of the length of the interview process, the company and the candidate should be honest and up-front about the timeline and their ability to meet expectations along the way. I personally believe that most of the responsibility lies with the hiring party. Unless you’re a small start-up, it’s much more damaging to the candidate to be lead along while you negotiate contracts than it is for a candidate to lead you along while negotiating other offers.
Good summary, and linked to some things which discuss potential solutions. Would’ve been nice to summarize solutions that might begin to address the problem.
Also
and communication about why someone failed a stage are often poorly communicated
I am starting to get tired of people reiterating ways of how hiring is broken, yet no one suggesting alternatives of how they are fixing it.
Here is someone who seems to be a hiring manager, posting about all the problems of a process that I assume their organisation also follow, to some extent. But not a word about how this organisation is changing any part of their process to solve for any of this.
I get it when developers / job seekers share their poor experiences. But I’d expect hiring managers who have the ability to change their processes to echo these only if they are doing something about it.
OP, my question to you: how are you planning to change the hiring process at your company and what aspects of the broken hiring process you described do you hope to address with it?
This piece does a great job describing the problem! But it’s really hard to find something that does a better job of predicting success as a software developer without requiring much more effort than the current approach.
This is the core problem in my opinion. Nobody has a clue what to test for. Companies who have investigated all found that whatever they were testing has little significance. All that remains is: Do an interview to ensure employer and candidate have correctly understood the job description and the application. Do some low-skill checks (FizzBuzz) to weed out liars.
Still, what (bigger) companies could do is to establish a systematic process: Define a standardized test. Regularly correlate the test results with employee performance to tweak the test.
The first suggestion sorta works, except that the false negative rate would still be too high. Firing people is expensive.
The second sounds like a good idea but in practice finding such a test proves elusive.
Regardless of the length of the interview process, the company and the candidate should be honest and up-front about the timeline and their ability to meet expectations along the way. I personally believe that most of the responsibility lies with the hiring party. Unless you’re a small start-up, it’s much more damaging to the candidate to be lead along while you negotiate contracts than it is for a candidate to lead you along while negotiating other offers.
Good summary, and linked to some things which discuss potential solutions. Would’ve been nice to summarize solutions that might begin to address the problem.
Also
Must be some kind of an instance of Muphry’s Law