John D. Mitchell's Blog

Passionately Curious

What do you really look at when you're hiring people?

Does your team fall into the various mental traps that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in his latest book, Blink? I.e., do you look for people who fit your conscious and/or unconscious biases? Wouldn't it help if, like the symphony committees, we only hired people based on their ability to code where we could not see them?

Does your team fall into the hiring hubris fallacy that Joel talked about recently? Is this just another example of the Lake Wobegon Effect where organizations are trying to make themselves feel better? Wouldn't it help if we only hired people we thought were better than us?

Does your team fall into the Certification Fallacy -- believing that a certificate means that a person is good/qualified/etc.? Do you only look for resumes that have the ridiculous laundry lists of keywords that the HR people can put into their filtering software? Wouldn't it help if we actually looked at what the actual work that a person has produced?

Or, is your team tragically hip and hires open-source commit sluts? Wouldn't it help if we actually spent some time working with people and the software that they've worked on?

When it all comes down to it, aren't we really looking for how we connect our true passionate curiosity with each other?

Comments

• It's a difficult measure. I think part of the problem is a lack of follow through after the hiring. A hiree often goes through a battery of scientific or people oriented interviews. I've rarely seen that same dedication in the person's reviews later on.

  In cases of smaller companies I worked for the full blown reviews by the company was seen as slow or a waste of time. I'd have to say the ones we hired right away tended to be the biggest disappointment.

  As we concentrate on more framework or pattern oriented development what is wrong with the 99%s? What's funny is each new package or component is supposed to make development easy and simple, yet we despise people who think programming is easy and simple.

  Per the people on my team, I don't always want the brilliant reckless dude. The ones I saw who were the smartest tended to sit on their ass and surf the web.

  I want the diligent cowboy who traces down the problem according to the deadline and comes up with better processes along the way. Yes, we're taking that cowboy name back. Cowboys were more corporate then you think. Read the history!

  Posted by: smartinumcp on February 11, 2005 at 06:38 AM

• I look for a gestalt of competence which can be hard to measure. During the interview I often work in some casual mention of a programming quandary our group is facing. The best candidates perk up when hearing about a specific problem but generally the candidate not deserving of a second interview misses the cue and sticks to generalizations. This isn't the only metric I use to hire, but in my experience the best hires demonstrate an interest in concrete issues, not generalizations or canned answers to the typical interview questions.

  Posted by: duanegran on February 11, 2005 at 08:40 AM

• The symphony committee approach to hiring programmers might be okay for hiring a black box to which you submit written requirements and receive source code in return.

  But, when you are sharing a cubicle with someone, those conscious and unconscious biases -- right or wrong -- matter much, much more than skill.
  

  Posted by: erickson on February 11, 2005 at 09:45 AM

• erickson, you're statement feels like you're saying this is an either/or kind of thing. Are you perhaps relying too much on those biases? I.e., might it help to start off not with a gut reaction but with a more impersonal hearing and then augment that with working with them in person?
  

  Posted by: johnm on February 11, 2005 at 10:12 AM

• duanegran, yes, I love bringing up real problems and solutions -- for some strainge reason, that seems like the point of our business. :-)
  

  Posted by: johnm on February 11, 2005 at 10:16 AM

• smartinumcp, you raise some interesting issues. I totally agree that the follow through in most organizations sucks. One particularly fascinating example (to me anyways) is illustrated in Anatomy of Insanity? (the comments are important) but that's a different story.

  I think that we find it difficult because we're looking at the wrong things. For example, your comment about the 1% vs. the 99% seems to imply some particular measure of what defines that 1%. I.e., who says that the top 1% are brilliant but reckless? In my experience, people aren't looking for the best 1% in terms of results -- they are looking for the people who best match their preconceived biases (and it's quite rare where those biases coincide with the results).
  

  Posted by: johnm on February 11, 2005 at 10:28 AM

• John,

  Thank you for that link on true passionate curiousity. It made my day.

  I've been a bit despondent for the past week; We've been trying to fill some short-term contractor positions, and it just looks like every resume that makes it as far as me is a carbon copy of all the others. I'm just a step in the hiring process, and I am deciding whether or not someone will get a further hearing simply by the blandishments on their resume.

  I have a friend who is despondent becuase nobody responds to his resume. You guessed it, his is the same as everybody else's: Blah blah J2EE. Blah blah Struts. Blah blah WebLogic.

  I surely wish that there was a better way to judge a candidate then a resume.

  Posted by: johnreynolds on February 11, 2005 at 10:40 AM

• @John: funny, because from the employees side, it appears as if the recruiters criterions are often rather bland. In fact, at the german recruitment portal Gulp, you can get an an overview of the skills most sought after - there is an even better one that shows you how many times a certain keyword has been searched for, but I can't link to it because it requires login. You can also look at the searches, which makes it obvious that many recruiters don't even know what they are doing (ie what are the meanings of the keywords they are searching for). It actually made me 'dumb down' my profile at gulp to include dumb keywords. For example, almost naturally, recruiters won't find you if you write Java 2 Enterprise Edition instead of J2EE (stuff like this is also always amusing in interviews, when they ask you if you possess a certain qualification...).

  As for the passionate curiosity, I thought employers don't like curious people, because they might tend towards dissatisfaction with their job.

  Posted by: iion_tichy on February 12, 2005 at 04:26 AM

• JohnR, it's my pleasure. The next issues of Darrell's newsletter is coming out soon.

  In terms of the swamp of basically useless resumes that you're wading through, my question is... So, why are you using resumes at all? Have you tried asking people to "Show me your passion!"? Have you tried asking people who read your blog for recommendations? Have you tried asking people whose blogs you read (and respect :-) if they are interested or have any recommendations? Have you shared your passionate curiousity for your job/team/organziation/etc. with people?

  I must confess that I've always loved Einstein's definition of insanity:

  "Insanity:
   doing the same thing over and over again
   and expecting different results." --Albert Einstein

  
  

  Posted by: johnm on February 12, 2005 at 11:44 AM

• iion_tichy: Yeah, it's sad how utterly incompetent most hiring people are. In my experience, it's mostly because they are some combination of overworked and scared.

  
  Being overworked (whether it's because they really do have a lot to do or because they are truly incompetent) has a pretty straightforward solution: if they *really* cared about hiring, they'd make it a higher priority. I've seen more genuine concern put into buying a single computer than into hiring somebody who is going to be responsible for the success or failure of a multi-million dollar project. I don't know about you but that's frightening. It's also indicative of all sorts of serious organizational dysfunctions but that's a different rant.

  
  Fear. Ah, there's so much fear involved on all sides of the hiring process. But with respect to this thread, let me start by asking the question: why are all of the job ads so bad?
  

  Posted by: johnm on February 14, 2005 at 06:59 PM

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