"Basketball would be bad enough. But hoops?"
January 27, 2015 11:54 AM   Subscribe

Article: Hiring is Broken [via mefi projects]
"Google is one of the few companies to go public about the flaws in the traditional hiring process. Except for recent college graduates, the company no longer asks candidates for transcripts or grade-point averages. It found that neither grades nor interviews predicted success. 'Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring,' Laszlo Bock, Google's senior vice president for people operations, told a New York Times reporter in 2013. 'We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess.'"
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome (52 comments total) 27 users marked this as a favorite
 
So they often narrow down the candidate pool by using keywords from resumes as well as degrees from highly ranked colleges.
I had a manager once who, after pointing to a stack of resumes on his desk, said "I refuse to hire the unlucky" and threw half of them away unseen.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 12:15 PM on January 27, 2015 [45 favorites]


“Usually when people talk about hiring for fit or culture fit, it’s a shortcut for saying I want to like you,”

Yes, yes it is. And if you want a shortcut to having a new employee fail at your company go ahead and hire one who has nothing in common with the existing team.

I've been on both sides of the equation and it's not pretty either way.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 12:16 PM on January 27, 2015 [6 favorites]


I had a manager once who, after pointing to a stack of resumes on his desk, said "I refuse to hire the unlucky" and threw half of them away unseen.

I knew someone who worked in HR and that's probably more common than you might think.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:19 PM on January 27, 2015


It's funny that Laszlo Bock said that, because my experience even after that was that google placed a huge premium on schools and grades and highly encouraged its staff to account for that.
posted by Carillon at 12:22 PM on January 27, 2015 [3 favorites]


I was explaining to my friend a few days ago that out of the 6 jobs I've gotten in the past 10 years, 5 of them have been almost solely through a personal connection, ranging from "You went to the same program as the person who's leaving" to "Your mom told us to hire you so we are."

I like to tell the story i learned from The History of Rome podcast about patronage in ancient Rome. Every morning you would wake up and wait outside your patrons house for him to give you enough money for that day. Then you would go home and find your own clients waiting for money, which you would give them. That was your job. (unless you were a shit farmer or a slave)

I find the whole resume process to be idealistic. I'm happy when it works, but there are so many other systems of social connection throughout history. I think it's important to focus on "what else can I do to land a job" rather than "I did what I was supposed to do, where's my job?" The system needs a LOT of work, but in the meantime, it's dangerous to act like following the broken system will get you what you need to survive.

So in that sense, I think the "smartup weekend", while distasteful, ineffective, and potentially exploitative, is a good thing, because at least it is a creative new attempt to get a job. And, a potential opportunity to meet someone who will tell their mom "Hey you should hire this person i met."
posted by rebent at 12:24 PM on January 27, 2015 [3 favorites]


I had a manager once who, after pointing to a stack of resumes on his desk, said "I refuse to hire the unlucky" and threw half of them away unseen.

I knew someone who worked in HR and that's probably more common than you might think.


And that's the real problem, isn't it? Candidates are so plentiful that HR can afford to just toss away half of the resumes they receive and still be confident they'll find someone. I'm not sure switching to a talent show format will benefit anyone, with the possible exception of employers. It will just shift the ever-narrowing hole of the winnowing barn from one subset of people to another, and there will still be a larger number of qualified people who won't get selected for whatever new arbitrary set of reasons. It's an increasingly desperate tapdance we will be forced to do so that we can pretend people deserve whatever they get.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 12:25 PM on January 27, 2015 [28 favorites]


that's probably more common than you might think

It's also fairer than you might think. If you have a huge pool of hirable candidates and no real way of choosing between them, hiring by lottery at least truly manages not to be discriminatory, on which grounds looking for the best "fit" (and interviewing/networking in general) is demonstrably a terrible way to proceed. Many more jobs probably should be hired by lottery among minimally pre-qualified candidates; the reason they aren't is primarily that this means forsaking the illusion of control.
posted by RogerB at 12:26 PM on January 27, 2015 [18 favorites]


When I was out of work last year, I was temping and, as part of my temp job, was managing all applications coming in for a job I was also in the running for. The resumes that were received were from people with wide-ranging, seeming random sets of skills/experience. Some people with no experience, some people with decades of experience but none of it related to the job at hand. All of this variety was rivaled only by the sheer number of applications received.

It was during that experience that I realized how hopeless the standard job application process was. I later got a great job through connections made while temping.
posted by coreywilliam at 12:31 PM on January 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


consulting firm Leadership IQ announced it had tracked 20,000 new hires over time and discovered that 46% of them had failed within 18 months. In other words, most recruiting practices are about as effective as a coin toss.

Without knowing about the composition of the candidate pool, it's impossible to evaluate whether this 56% "success" rate is good. If only 1% of applicants were actually capable of succeeding, then it'd be a heck of a lot better than tossing a coin.

This is further muddied by the fact that the number is different for each job, and for each organization. It's not uncommon that the domain-specific skills aren't as important as the employee's ability to navigate that company's particular flavor of organizational dysfunction.
posted by aubilenon at 12:38 PM on January 27, 2015 [9 favorites]


Yup, connections, that's how you get jobs. That process certainly doesn't favor those that aren't very social (and anti-social workers can be very good).

"I find the whole resume process to be idealistic."

For me the resume is something to screen people out of the hiring process, not something to decide if I'm going to hire someone. If someone fails at communicating clearly, can't put together a sentence or thought, they won't be considered. If they don't have the basic skillset that's required, there's no point in going further in the process. The telephone screen is to get an actual idea of what kind of skills they have or if they are a general fit for the position. The interview decides the hiring.

I've never looked at grades, they don't interest me. I do find it interesting when someone studied things that don't apply at all to the job. I consider this a plus, actually - they viewed university as a place to get an education, not a trade school.

I think a reason a lot of people in the hiring process place a premium on grades is because they worked hard in university and they can't bear to live with the idea that the good grades they got might not actually matter in 'the real world'.

But yeah, if you want to find a job, it's best to find connections to the industry you want to work in. Go to conferences, go to industry associations local to you, get out into the community. Make friends.
posted by el io at 12:43 PM on January 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


building on what aubilenon said, because I had the same gripe with the article, it's silly to blame people leaving for higher pay or better environments elsewhere on "bad hiring." Maybe you should try to be a company people want to work for.
posted by rebent at 12:45 PM on January 27, 2015 [6 favorites]


A long-unemployed acquaintance, with some past experience as a librarian and community worker, said yesterday that she had applied for an 8-hour a week part-time job at a regional library. And that there were 25 compulsory selection criteria she had to address on the application form. Might as well be a lottery, at least then she won't be discriminated against for her skin colour.
posted by Jimbob at 12:50 PM on January 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


rebent, I had the same thought, but I googled for the report and it appears their criteria for failure are "were terminated, left under pressure, received disciplinary action or significantly negative performance reviews.") Now, maybe the stats are juked in such a way that "left under pressure" is really "person wanted a better job elsewhere", but they do, on the surface at least, seem to be leaving out people who just found a better gig.
posted by tonycpsu at 12:50 PM on January 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


Pogo_Fuzzybutt: I had a manager once who, after pointing to a stack of resumes on his desk, said "I refuse to hire the unlucky" and threw half of them away unseen.

A rousing game of Russian Roulette would actually be an improvement over the farce that passes for a hiring process at most places.
posted by dr_dank at 12:54 PM on January 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


Good catch, Tonycpsu, but it's still the same problem wearing a different jacket. We still have to figure out if "poor performance" was a result of hiring a bad employee, or poorly-trained management. In theory we could do a REALLY expensive study to get to the bottom of this, but honestly I understand that this study is a closer analogue than i initially figured.
posted by rebent at 12:54 PM on January 27, 2015


But yeah, if you want to find a job, it's best to find connections to the industry you want to work in. Go to conferences, go to industry associations local to you, get out into the community. Make friends.
... or be born into the right family.
posted by Brian Puccio at 12:54 PM on January 27, 2015 [6 favorites]


But yeah, if you want to find a job, it's best to find connections to the industry you want to work in. Go to conferences, go to industry associations local to you, get out into the community. Make friends.

But how do you do that when you already have a full-time career and parenting obligations and are literally living paycheck to paycheck or worse as a family's sole source of income? I'd love to have time to make friends, but during the week, I'm on the clock (literally and figuratively) until about 10:00 PM (after the kids are in bed). On weekends, I'm usually catching up on all the chores and other needful things there wasn't time to handle during the week, or working on personal/family projects and otherwise pretending to still have a life of my own.
posted by saulgoodman at 12:57 PM on January 27, 2015 [14 favorites]


But yeah, if you want to find a job, it's best to find connections to the industry you want to work in. Go to conferences, go to industry associations local to you, get out into the community. Make friends.

"Have disposable income."
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 1:01 PM on January 27, 2015 [28 favorites]


el io: But yeah, if you want to find a job, it's best to find connections to the industry you want to work in. Go to conferences, go to industry associations local to you, get out into the community. Make friends.

This is good advice while you're employed, but once you're no longer affiliated with an employer, people can be put off. When you have a job, you're a peer. When you don't have a job, you're a grubby dime-a-dozen job seeker who'll eventually steer the conversation to dunning for a job. It's a cruel catch-22.
posted by dr_dank at 1:04 PM on January 27, 2015 [12 favorites]


dr_dank: "Pogo_Fuzzybutt: I had a manager once who, after pointing to a stack of resumes on his desk, said "I refuse to hire the unlucky" and threw half of them away unseen.

A rousing game of Russian Roulette would actually be an improvement over the farce that passes for a hiring process at most places.
"

Oh man, now I'm picturing a comedy skit where various positions in a business and a group of potential employees are in a room. Turn by turn, the business people pull the trigger on themselves. If one dies, then the potential new-hires are given a gun to play their own russian roulette. If the person survives, they get to take the job of the dead person. This continues until all newly vacated positions have been filled. The last survivor gets to be the janitor and mop up the mess left behind.
posted by symbioid at 1:09 PM on January 27, 2015 [3 favorites]


I can't tell this guy's skill set from the article. He's not a developer, project manager, UX, and I don't think he's a designer. What kind of job was he hoping to get at this hackathon?

Anyway, hackathons already have a bad reputation of exploiting people's (at least developer's) time in order to get some free work out of them. That's bad enough, but getting good people to do the same thing to perhaps maybe get considered for a job is something that ain't gonna happen.

Especially in the Bay Area, where the article takes place. Anyone with any job experience is getting hounded by recruiters as it is, they don't need to waste a weekend getting looked at, along with a giant group of people, by one company.
posted by sideshow at 1:14 PM on January 27, 2015 [2 favorites]


I agree with every response to me. I didn't mean to imply that this was fair, nor easy.

Personally, I pretty much attribute most of the jobs I've gotten to 'luck' (but that luck came through connections, as it were).

It's personally terrifying to me that I might not be able to find a job due to the fact that I've been out of the game for so long ('self employed'/'consultant'). Lots of folks don't want to hire someone who's been their own boss for a long time.

As far as finding work when you already have a job - I can imagine how this can be logistically difficult/near impossible. I've never done this myself (misguided loyalty is a large part of this).
posted by el io at 1:14 PM on January 27, 2015 [6 favorites]


symbioid, check out Exam. More thriller than comedy, but still.
posted by persona at 1:23 PM on January 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm reminded of this NY Times article by Daniel Kahneman regarding his experience evaluating officer candidates in the Israeli army. They ran the candidates through a series of tests, made careful observations about their performance, and wrote up forecasts of how well each candidate would do in officer-training school. In short order, they found that these forecasts were completely useless and uncorrelated with how the candidates would actually do. And yet, even after discovering this, they continued to perform the same evaluations with exactly the same confidence as before.
posted by mhum at 1:23 PM on January 27, 2015 [10 favorites]


And that's the real problem, isn't it? Candidates are so plentiful...
As I say goodbye, I’m proud of my team’s work and of the attendees as a whole. That feel-good moment doesn’t last long. On my way to the bathroom, I hear a woman weeping in the hall. She tells me how she’d opened up to Allen about her personal struggles and many efforts to land a job, and was upset that he responded by saying, “Don’t tell me about your problems, tell me about your solutions.”

This highly educated, unemployed woman tells me she is running out of places to couch surf. Soon she may be sleeping outdoors. This woman’s problem is not Allen’s problem, nor Nicholson’s problem. It is, however, a national problem.
JOBS FOR ALL: "All parties pay lip service to the idea of jobs for all. All parties are ready to promise to achieve that end by keeping up the national purchasing power and controlling changes in the national expenditure through Government action. Where agreement ceases is in the degree of control of private industry that is necessary to achieve the desired end. In hard fact, the success of a full employment programme will certainly turn upon the firmness and success with which the Government fits into that programme the investment and development policies of private as well as public industry." [1,2]

And if you want a shortcut to having a new employee fail at your company go ahead and hire one who has nothing in common with the existing team. I've been on both sides of the equation and it's not pretty either way.

karakumy: "If you are a white guy who grew up on Long Island and played varsity sports in college, you have a HUGE leg up in the finance world by virtue of having something in common with 80-90% of the industry and probably having a personal connection through sports or a fraternity. Again, that isn't to say people don't work hard - they do. But the truth is people like to hire people that they like. Most of this stuff can be taught. And when these people get jobs, they either hire their friends or give business to their friends."

anti-social workers can be very good

"Where is the door?"

also btw, re: 'culture'

-Company Culture and the Power of Thoughtful Disagreement
-Greece's new finance minister learned about tearing down capitalism from working at a video game company: "The current system of corporate governance is bunk. Capitalist corporations are on the way to certain extinction. Replete with hierarchies that are exceedingly wasteful of human talent and energies, intertwined with toxic finance, co-dependent with political structures that are losing democratic legitimacy fast, a form of post-capitalist, decentralised corporation will, sooner or later, emerge."
posted by kliuless at 1:27 PM on January 27, 2015 [7 favorites]


I kind of like that hackathon-ish idea if it's done the right way. Resumes are about as useful as your transcript for proving what you actually can do.
posted by bleep at 1:32 PM on January 27, 2015


I can't tell this guy's skill set from the article.

It wasn't written by a guy.
posted by zippy at 1:36 PM on January 27, 2015 [2 favorites]


So far I have been reliant on connections except when applying to things like graduate school or the peace corps where you are just one of a huge anonymous pile of applications.
posted by Dip Flash at 1:38 PM on January 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


I once had a co-worker who tossed all the cover letters for all the hundreds of resumes away, before I had a chance to triage them, because cover letters were meaningless to him.
posted by zippy at 1:40 PM on January 27, 2015


It seems like the premise is always "There is a way to quantify everything about human beings, we just haven't found it!"
posted by sylvanshine at 1:44 PM on January 27, 2015 [8 favorites]


symbioid, check out Exam. More thriller than comedy, but still.

Is...is that link part of the test? Oh god I failed.
posted by CaseyB at 1:46 PM on January 27, 2015 [3 favorites]


The resumes that were received were from people with wide-ranging, seeming random sets of skills/experience. Some people with no experience, some people with decades of experience but none of it related to the job at hand. All of this variety was rivaled only by the sheer number of applications received.

A lot of this is probably due to the computerization of the job application process, especially the opportunities it provides for job seekers to do applications blitzkrieg style, sending out hundreds of applications at once with only minor variations, or perhaps no variations at all.
posted by jonp72 at 1:55 PM on January 27, 2015


A lot of this is probably due to the computerization of the job application process, especially the opportunities it provides for job seekers to do applications blitzkrieg style, sending out hundreds of applications at once with only minor variations, or perhaps no variations at all.

Such is the way of the arms race. Employers throw out applications at even greater rates, requiring that applicants cast a broader net in order to have a chance at getting noticed, which provides even more and more-generic applications for employers to have to sort through, which leads to them throwing out even more applications, which leads to...
posted by CrystalDave at 2:00 PM on January 27, 2015 [3 favorites]


I'm transitioning out of the Military, and as part of that there is a mandated week-long class on getting a job in the civilian world. One of the key takeaways from that class is that nobody really knows what they're doing, especially the people doing the hiring. So the way to get jobs is to make connections and get people to like you.

Now here I am navigating the hiring process for Google, and I really don't care if the hiring process is broken as long as it's broken in my favor (So far, it seems to be).
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 2:10 PM on January 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


I am clinging valiantly, stubbornly, to my buzzword-free resume because a number of specific technologies I have touched professionally are things I never, ever, want to have a keyword match on. Classic ASP with VBscript? ColdFusion? Drupal? Microsoft Exchange? No, no, hell no, and don't make me murder you right here using only tools available on your desk. I will put keywords into cover letters as appropriate, but never in the resume itself. My thought on this is that any company that would rely on a machine instead of having a person read my resume is not a company that's going to be happy with me anyway. But it means I don't get many phone calls.

On the hiring front, I tried to put some obvious keys to success in the job postings when we hired junior programmers, along the lines of "include a resume in plain text or PDF format, and a cover letter including two examples of X." I did weed out the people who didn't follow those instructions in their cover letters (a surprisingly high number), but then I could use the requested details in the cover letter along with the resume to get a feel for whether they actually had the soft skills we needed or not. And one of those soft skills was just to be able to read the requirements and follow them.

Regarding the specific article: yes, hiring is broken, but I fail to see how the weird weekend hackfest was supposed to help fill positions. "We invited prospective candidates to learn and perform an interpretive dance and then invited several for interviews."
posted by fedward at 2:15 PM on January 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


"I'm transitioning out of the Military, and as part of that there is a mandated week-long class on getting a job in the civilian world. "

Good luck! When I was in hiring folks I tended to give extra consideration to ex-military folks. The work ethic was solid, they could take instructions, they'd often be willing to do boring/'grunt work' if need be, they generally worked well in a team.

I have a very high opinion of the work values the military can instill.

And this opinion is from a pacifist who is against most military actions the US has taken in the past 60 or so years, and is concerned/upset with the growing power of the military-industrial complex. Awful machine, great cogs.
posted by el io at 2:21 PM on January 27, 2015 [5 favorites]


I don't want to abuse the edit window, so I'll add these thoughts: When interviewing you may want to mention some of those things - 'the military taught me...'.
posted by el io at 2:23 PM on January 27, 2015


also btw, re: 'culture'

'Culture' covers a lot of ground in hiring. Worst employment mistake I've ever made was accepting a position at a startup that was "technology driven". I thought that was a meaningless phrase until I realized that they weren't all that interested in creating a feasible company, just in making sure that the solution worked over the "cloud".

Apparently I'm "customer focused". Who knew?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 2:23 PM on January 27, 2015 [2 favorites]


Regarding the specific article: yes, hiring is broken, but I fail to see how the weird weekend hackfest was supposed to help fill positions

i think the problem it solves in theory is that as a hiring person, if I'm not hiring for a job any high school graduate could be reasonably taught, I have no clue who can actually do the job and who can't. And for someone who's not already mega-established, there's no way to prove it. Especially for stuff where having a portfolio is either impractical or impossible. Done the right way, something like this could provide a mechanism for that.
posted by bleep at 2:27 PM on January 27, 2015


Done the right way, something like this could provide a mechanism for that.

I kind of get it, in the vein of NFL pre-draft camps and basketball combines, where you put a bunch of candidates in the room with a bunch of recruiters, so the recruiters can see the candidates in action. Except this didn't sound like there were a bunch of recruiters in the room. It sounded like one guy was running a lab experiment.

But mostly the discussion of hiring leads me back to a link from another post on the Blue recently, about the Thermocline of Truth. The coders and the immediate hiring managers might know what skills they need at that level, but HR has a model for how to hire employees at a given pay scale, and those ideas don't intersect much. Until that communication between HR and the hiring manager is straightened out, the HR people won't actually be sending the right candidates to interview with the hiring managers.
posted by fedward at 3:08 PM on January 27, 2015 [2 favorites]


Plus the NFL pre-draft has a pretty horrible success rate of predicting actual success in the NFL. Ryan Leaf vs. Tom Brady for instance.
posted by Carillon at 3:36 PM on January 27, 2015


Well ya that's why I said "in theory". I've been to ux meet ups where the model was similar to this (break up into teams, take an hour to make a rudimentary prototype to solve a given problem, and present it). Officially the purpose was to learn about prototyping but I was definitely there to show off for anyone there who might be hiring.
posted by bleep at 3:38 PM on January 27, 2015


The real problem is that there doesn't seem to be a "best practices" for hiring. Nobody seems to do it well. The 'best' companies at least are starting to realize that they don't do it well—the Google study, and some similar stuff out of big companies where they have the data available—but even they are struggling to actually do better.

For job-seekers, one issue is that "hire your friends" actually does seemingly work out pretty well as a recruiting strategy, in terms of outcomes vs. time spent on recruiting. It may not be perfect, but if it gets you the same or similar outcomes without having to spend hours reading resumes, that's what companies, particularly small ones without recruiters who have to justify their existence, are going to do.

It's to the point where I don't really know that many people who found jobs except through personal networking. The exception is when you're fresh out of school; that seems to be about the only time when a large number of employers will really consider you, even if you come in as a cold resume without any personal recommendations. Once you get beyond a few years' worth of experience though, then the weight placed on personal recommendations seems to get much heavier, to the point that with some exceptions (some specialized technical fields, or people who have an industry-wide reputation) you are sunk without them.

I'm not sure how to 'fix' that, because you'd have to come up with a hiring / screening process that actually works better, and despite the fact that hiring is something that all employers—by definition!—have to deal with, very few of them seem interested in investing significant resources in trying to make the process more effective. It's nice that Google, at least, seems to be looking at the problem, but so far all they've come up with is to look at alma maters, which if you do it for a few 'generations' of hirees basically amounts to just asking last year's new hires who the smartest kids in the class behind them were. (And some companies do explicitly that, and it actually works really well for them. It just sucks if you happened to go to the 'wrong' school for that particular company.)
posted by Kadin2048 at 3:55 PM on January 27, 2015 [8 favorites]


I am clinging valiantly, stubbornly, to my buzzword-free resume because a number of specific technologies I have touched professionally are things I never, ever, want to have a keyword match on.

Two months ago a bunch of us endorsement bombed a friend for a protocol he completely detests. I assume there is some lag in LinkedIn's databases because he's still getting calls from recruiters. ;-)

The gift that keeps on giving, really.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:14 PM on January 27, 2015 [3 favorites]


So, I'm now the new hiring process dude of the moment (see the end of my comment here) so we did a non-scientific quick look at our organization. The most high-performing, good attitude, and yet loyal (haven't left for other internal opportunities "just for a change") people we have skew heavily toward people we hired at a very low level, and who then worked their way up with us. The deckplate-level job doesn't actually require higher education to do, just someone who's fairly bright and can learn things quickly and adapt to new situations. There's some math, but only to understand how the thumbrules we use daily were developed and the limitations of them.

For some reason, we've been hiring only people with college degrees in a hard science for years now. Just because we can, I guess. It's dumb. Those people also qualify for engineering jobs, and a soon as one opens up, engineering department poaches the good ones. Plus, we have to hire them at a higher pay grade initially, but they're not really any more practically useful (for this specific thing) than someone without a degree.

The new plan is to also specifically look for people with no college or 'some college' but NOT a degree. I'm thinking that will have a big washout rate initially as some of the young people learn how to be adults in their first jobs, but the people that make it will turn out better for us.

Wish me luck. (BTW, it's GS-2 or GS-4 which sucks, but non-competitive promotion through GS-10. If you know someone interested, memail me. I need a lot over the next couple of years. Like, a lot a lot.)
posted by ctmf at 6:39 PM on January 27, 2015 [9 favorites]


Hey ctmf, I am so excited to hear that. I'm the gal who wrote the article that was posted. My editor cut out tons of stuff for space reasons, including the info that the US is pretty much the only industrial nation with a huge number of employers who expect to hire employees they do not need to train. I bet the people that make it under your new approach will be better for your company, more loyal, yadda yadda. Good luck!
posted by Bella Donna at 6:46 PM on January 27, 2015 [12 favorites]


Hello Bella Donna. I like your article.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:13 PM on January 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


hiring process dude of the moment (see the end of my comment here) so we did a non-scientific quick look at our organization. The most high-performing, good attitude, and yet loyal (haven't left for other internal opportunities "just for a change") people we have skew heavily toward people we hired at a very low level, and who then worked their way up with us.

Every single thing I've read and trusted about hiring and educating your staff shows that this is the case. You don't hire for skill, you hire truly entry-level people who can learn (and if they can't, you have a process by which you can move them out of the company within a particular time period), teach them the skills you need and make them a part of the company from the outset. You not only get employees who know exactly what you want them to, but they're also (and this is an oddity in today's workforce) loyal to you.

I don't know where the resistance to this comes from, other than corporations believing that the bottom line can't be adjusted by the minimum amount of money, time and effort it takes to have a decent education program as part of the company, but I suspect that we'll hear a lot more about these impromptu hackathon/performance auditions, believing they'll somehow ferret out those things that you could easily determine if you'd spend time developing your staff's talent, rather than expecting to hire a cog that fits perfectly into a running machine.
posted by xingcat at 6:44 AM on January 28, 2015 [5 favorites]


I lucked out in many of the hiring decisions I've had over my adult life. Each of them has something that I think could be used in a better overall hiring procedure.

1) I joined the military back in 2000. The procedures, applications, and exams used to place me and promote me were public and well-understood. In addition, the military does most of the training in house, so there wasn't a major focus on previous credentials. The ability to learn was more useful for them than what you've already learned. Also, as such a large organization, I was able to take advantage of internal hiring, so my position shifted from enlisted to midshipman to officer all without having to not have a job first.
2) I started teaching for a public school. This one was far more credential-heavy, but by virtue of the HR person who interviewed me having to pour through teachers' resumes regularly, HR knew exactly what main things to look for that had direct correlation with being a first year teacher. After that, I was sent to the school to interview with two Assistant Principals—who I would later be working for. One of them was a former English teacher like me, so they were able to ask me about not only educational approaches by ones specific to my discipline.
3) I was hired by the government to work at West Point. I later found out 41 applications for the position were received and two people in the English Department went through and evaluated the CVs of all of them, assigning them a score, which was sent to the civilian HR system. Later, two people were asked for interviews with the department chair, the dean, and two senior instructors.

Although the first hiring system was largely impersonal, it also benefited from looking at temperament more than credentials, something that I wish more large companies would do when hiring initial, no-experience employees.

The other two systems had much of their hiring process done by the people who do the job and were able to better look for how experiences and schooling can better translate to long-term employment. I was checked to see how I could adapt to both the organization and my unique duties at that school. The reading of every single application by people trained in that discipline and not just HR? I know it takes so much time, but I think you get what you pay for. If you put at least part of the hiring decision with the future colleagues and direct supervisors of the applicant, you can have a much clearer connection between long-term employment.

I stayed at my teaching job for three years in public school. Although in the end, I didn't want to continue in that way, I felt well-matched to the school. For my current government job teaching English, it's great. Employees stay foreeeeever because it's a good gig. In this situation, finding someone who is a good work mate in a department of 8 is crucial.

By the way, any hopeful post-secondary English instructors/professors with some of the following: MA, teaching experience in urban or high-needs schools, being a veteran, willing to work in NY. A GS-11 job will be opening up for next academic year in the nearer future, which is pretty good for some non-working English instructor types. Memail me for some ins and outs of how I got hired that might work for you.
posted by Lord Chancellor at 7:22 AM on January 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


I have a very high opinion of the work values the military can instill.

And this opinion is from a pacifist who is against most military actions the US has taken in the past 60 or so years, and is concerned/upset with the growing power of the military-industrial complex. Awful machine, great cogs.


Although I wanted to say thank you, one of the things I like working with (and being) former military is that they're trained to be adaptable to different situations. A lot of them tend to be very good at adjusting to whatever job or organization will be, and don't mind cross-training. On the other hand, while they don't mind going beyond some limits, the former military that I've worked with have a very strong sense of "I'm not doing that," if they think they're being exploited. They tend to raise a bit of hell if there's a reduction in benefits or standard of living. It makes sense: the military pays good benefits, and most former military expect civilian careers have a greater standard of living than those they left. They know their own worth and know when to push back at management when there are unreasonable requests. I like that in coworkers.

The military isn't the only place people learn this dual level of being both adaptable and stubborn when the situation calls for it. I suppose it used to be more common before the lousy job market enforced constant insecurity on future hires.
posted by Lord Chancellor at 7:29 AM on January 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


*sigh* All of this is a bunch of shit. In an ideal world, if you wanted to hire effectively, you'd just goddamned hire *everyone* that expressed an interest in your job opening. All of them. Pay them for their time, see if they're good at it, and get rid of the ones that don't fit.

That's the key: PAY THEM FOR THEIR TIME. This "hackathon" bullshit is just as bad as "hiring for cultural fit", if not worse! It's the same problem as the "GitHub == Resume" problem; where you're self-selecting for people that can and will do work for free.
posted by Xyanthilous P. Harrierstick at 8:27 AM on January 28, 2015


You not only get employees who know exactly what you want them to, but they're also (and this is an oddity in today's workforce) loyal to you.


Which of course they had better be, because if they try to change jobs they'll find that they are trained very narrowly to work on a particular job track at only your company.

The sort of position specific training being mooted here only makes sense for an employee if they expect that the company will continue to exist and also share their sense of loyalty. Unfortunately that is not how things work any more.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:02 AM on January 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


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