Ask HN: Tips for hiring? It has been difficult

    What have people been doing?

When we interview we don't try to assess how much technical knowledge the candidate has, but rather, of the things which they have gained experience in (and they are allowed to dictate this), how much can they confidently relay to us. From this we can estimate how much talent the candidate has. We get some interviewees with seemingly strong CVs e.g. particle physics PhD who does Kaggle in their free time, but then they are not able to explain in detail anything they have done. We also get some interviewees who have seemingly mediocre CVs e.g. bad grades, didn't publish their thesis and bare github, but they turn out amazing.

I guess my point is, experience is not talent, and some good talent does not sell themselves well and for the rest you get inundated with mediocre talent who know how to sell themselves.

My team has finally found a successful routine. Here is how we do it:

* Our corporate recruiters are picky and yet hyper aggressive about finding/reaching people that seem qualified. It’s how they found me. I am not sure what their process is for finding people.

* Next they send me the resumes that pass their filter to see if I am willing to interview them. I am generally willing to interview anyone.

* The interview with me is a filter. I see if the candidate is qualified based upon experience alone. I do not bother with technical questions unless I am trying to see if they lied in their resume. So many people lie on their resume. Instead I mostly dive into their problem solving ability, their interpretation of technology, and general communication capabilities. You only need three things to be good at software: writing skills, an understanding of the platform/syntax, and people skills.

* The next interview is more technical and determines if the candidate is hired.

As a background I work for a defense contractor. People tend to skew much older, more experienced, and more mature. The work tends to be more predictable and polished compared to my prior software career writing JavaScript. People are expected to exercise initiative and figure things out instead hoping something like React, jquery, or AI will save their job. These sorts of pretenders are the people I try to filter out. I know I wouldn’t go back to that world where most people are under qualified and hyper insecure. I suspect that’s why people in this line of work tend to be older and why people tend to seek this work out when they could make more elsewhere.

Job Seekers, eager to get a job somehow, add the keywords in their resume to get shortlisted, without realizing that they might not go past the first interview. They don't realize that it's a waste of their time and the employer's time.

In my experience of placing software engineers in tech startups, the only way to find the best talent is to talk to them. If we give them coding test, they get done with it somehow but when we talk to them in the interview, that's when we get the real sense of their skillset. I know it's time consuming, but it saves you a lot of time and money in the long run.

I can’t share any recommendations, but know that it’s roughly an equally difficult experience from the opposing side.

Also, if you provide feedback to candidates whom aren’t faking expertise, major kudos and respect to you. Feedback loops were relatively common when I started my career and they’ve become mostly nonexistent today.

https://posthog.com/newsletter/43-lessons-about-hiring-for-s...

Tech companies usually require from you to:

- go through at least 4 stages (screening, tech challenge, systems design, chat with managers). You need at least 3 weeks to go through this in a sane manner

- You need to know about tons of topics (distributed systems, concurrency, microservices, k8s, ci/cd, databases, OS, networking). It’s common for engineers to know a little bit about everything, but when asked about something in particular in an interview, you cannot expect deep knowledge

- good luck trying to convince them that it doesn’t matter if you don’t have professional experience in $language, that you are rather an agnostic software engineer with experience in different progr languages and frameworks

- if you don’t craft your cv with proper buzzwords, you won’t get a chance to get interviewed. The ones who read your cv first are: machines (that are inflexible) and hr recruiters that know nothing about tech besides buzzwords

- good luck making a single mistake in the tech interview. Since the company has 100s of other candidates, they are only looking for the best of the best

Honestly, I don’t know whats wrong with using ai to “prepare” for interviews. I wish things were simpler, though (just come as you are, we talk for a couple of hours and if then you get a yes/no answer)

Would putting more time into refining the job listing help?

What specifically do you want? Why? Why will this particular hire help the organization accomplish its goals? What values does a successful employee need to have? Why would someone who fits the ideal candidate checklist want to work with you?

The best ROI is personal referrals. The second-best ROI is interns->FTE or just new-grad from good schools. Industry hiring is hard, obviously top-tier talent is out there but finding it is exhausting. You have to actively look and participate and not just leave it to recruiters and automated filters.

https://www.recurse.com/hire

I haven't used them, but read the testimonials:

> ...sent us two profiles of solid candidates, one of which we hired!

> ...other recruiters sent like 50 CVs and we couldn't find anyone, and then RC sends a single candidate and we hired him.

How they do it: the Recurse Center puts more thought into collecting a small set of excellent candidates, then puts even more thought into matching them with employers.

we have to filter 100s of CVs for a role somehow

Using an AI, arbitrarily select 10 CV’s and move those candidates forward.

Discard the rest.

You don’t want to hire unlucky people anyway.

Good luck.

First to me, hiring from a job posting's crop of CVs is going at it the hard way: of course you get 100s of responses. If you have alternatives available: network, recruiter, user groups, trade show, anything really, then use that at least in addition to random CVs (which then are backup).

Second, I would suggest rounding up a few colleagues who can spend 20 seconds per CV. If 100s of these CVs all look basically the same - roughly impossible to judge a fit - then all these have failed already. Hopefully you are left with more interesting looking CVs which appear to actually say something (beyond keyword slop). A resume has one job. It shouldn't take deep reading to set aside 90% of them.

Which leads us to resume intake software. I understand why HR depts use resume intake software - they don't have the competence to read them. But normally the technical team does have the competence - and should be able to tell quickly keyword slop from not keyword slop. (AI will mess that up - but I don't think we are there yet.)

Some of the common resume formats out there fail us all 100%. They are not useful anymore. I appreciate candidates who notice what the resume is there for.

What are you hiring for exactly?

> the amount of very well crafted CVs we received it's crazy, they are really good

please explain

Networking.

Recruiters. Any recruiter who sends you someone like that, lose them. Find a recruiter that can actually judge talent - not perfectly, but enough to not fall for someone reading from an AI.

A hiring manager once confessed to me that it was all luck.

- Put best 30% into a pile

- Arrange 10min screening call with 20% (randomly selected from this pile)

- Use the screening call to verify the individual can convincing speak to the experience on their CV, and that they are a real person from the location they claim to be from (fake remote employees are a huge problem these days)

- Take a random sample from those who pass the screening call to do a tech interview

- Use the interview to get a better sense of their experience, culture fit, and end by setting a tech challenge

- Follow up on those who complete the tech challenge and make them talk through a few decisions they made (pick a few things in the code to discuss before the interview).

- Those who produce good code, can explain why they made the decisions they did, have good experience on paper and have past all previous steps are generally going to be pretty decent employees

Cut corners at your own expense. A bad hire will cost more in time and money long-term. Don't penalise those who use AI. Penalise those who use AI then can't explain their code.