Three points of contention, and then a pointer to more valuable advice from a fellow HNer:
1) Union Square Ventures is a leading name in this space - everyone knows Fred Wilson's blog. On top of that, they only have three "staff" listed on their site. USV can ask would-be employees to fly up to NYC to deliver resumes in person and they'll still get plenty of applicants.
2) The job openings in the article that focus on surveys and personality tests - supposedly instead of resumes - are clearly unskilled labor (e.g. social media intern). This is exactly as it was when I applied to work as a waiter at Olive Garden in 2000.
3) IGN's coding challenges are similarly suspect as a representatitve example because game dev is a glamor industry with a surfeit of naifs lining up for these underpaid jobs. Prized developers aren't going to participate in many coding-contest-as-hiring-lottery situations unless they're just really interested in the problem. Ask a YC company who's ever posted a hiring puzzle: what percentage of your correct submissions were from people who didn't even want the job?
The tactics cited above wrongheadedly invert the recruiting plan tptacek uses at Matasano: Start from the assumption that you want the best people possible and that those people will have plenty of great alternatives to working for you. Do your best to get your company's name in front of those people and to convince them that they'd have a rewarding time if they joined your team.
I trust Thomas's experience in identifying and recruiting talent far more than I do a career WSJ reporter's [1] trend spotting.
Prized developers aren't going to participate in many coding-contest-as-hiring-lottery situations unless they're just really interested in the problem.
For a competent developer, a "cover letter brainteaser" that takes an hour to do is essentially equivalent to a $100+ application fee (in terms of opportunity cost).
> what percentage of your correct submissions were from people who didn't even want the job?
Probably pretty low. But it's not designed to have a high conversion rate. It's really just to scare off pretenders and the under-qualified. I like to solve "Cover Letter Problems" for fun, but I've never bothered to apply to a company that had them. I don't think that means they're a failure.
The applicants themselves probably benefit the most as it gives them a window into the company's dev culture. Cutesy "gotcha!" problems that are abstract and removed too far from coding are generally a warning sign that it's a shop full of people who may be smart but are perhaps mediocre developers and/or the shop has non-technical management. On the flip side, problems that explore an applicants coding style and thought process tends to be an indicator the shop wants actual coders who can get shit done in an efficient manner, and that they care about things like Code quality, their tool chain, and care just enough about process to achieve repeatable results, but not so much as to become dogmatic.
I've solved some coding challenges I come across, but mostly because I wanted a little diversion. Generally those problems give me an excuse to practice lesser used languages or languages I want to learn. I've been contacted by companies after solving these, but I always decline.
In regard to the change in hiring practices, "social presence resumes" are just a passing trend. It may result in better candidates in the short term, but people will learn to pad these new resumes and it won't be much more effective than paper resumes.
The best hiring practice will still be tapping your employees' social network and hunting down talented people who aren't happy in their current positions. Anything else is usually a shot in the dark.
It's funny how the answer to not getting enough interest from qualified candidates is to make it more troublesome and time consuming to apply so that only unemployed people will bother.
It's often heard that 3 page CVs are an abomination since no one has time to trawl through all that. But now, doing a video interview just to apply is OK to require, at least according to this article.
Where I work, CVs with cover letters are fine, links to web presences are fine, if someone wants to send a DVD or link to a private youtube exhortation that's also fine. Whatever works for the candidate we'll look at it.
It can be tedious to sort through all these CVs, assuming your company is able to get any relevant applications at all. But that's the price of acquiring talented people. Hiring someone for a creative job like development is as tricky as selecting a spouse to get married. It's a long term commitment that will affect both of you profoundly. It's not the same as buying a pound of hamburger.
Not to mention that I don't hae a twitter account, linked in profile of note, or really any meaningful web presence. I'm kind of busy actually making things.
Am I the only one who sees tons of red flags the moment a job opening requires a video? It feels to me like the ivy league tradition of the in-person interview. Ivy league administrators tell themselves it's easier to judge an applicant's character and suitability in person, but in practice it turns into another way to ensure that the table tilts in favor correct ethnicity and income level.
Am I wrong to see the same thing in a video application? The more cash and connections you have, the better video you're able to create. Don't tell me the hiring manager won't notice the applicant in the $1500 suit with the professional (but not too professional) video.
Pre-recorded videos seem like a supremely silly job interview requirement. Recording a video is nothing like talking to a human being, and ability to execute videos is a learnable skill, not a marker of innate ability, so it's weird to optimize a process around it.
But USV can create any requirement they'd like, and they'll still get candidates, because a role at USV is a prestige job. They might just as well require candidates to compose a freestyle rap about their accomplishments; it wouldn't cost them candidates.
Personally, I love this trend - I last updated my resume 3 years ago and haven't sent it anywhere since. I just direct people to my portfolio (link in profile) which has all the stuff I built. Much easier that way.
But in my previous life, I was an enterprise Java developer in the financial industry. None of the projects I built are online - they're all proprietary B2B applications. It's some of the best work I've ever did, yet no one will ever find out about it online. The only way for me to tell this story is through the resume.
How do people like that supposed to present themselves, in this new hot social media environment?
One option: Word of your skill travels at approximately the speed of beer. (i.e. Try traditional networking.)
You can also have a web presence about the work which does not actually include the work. Talk about an interesting sub-problem which is non-proprietary. Talk about architecture choices. Talk about the tech you used and the problems you overcame while using it. Write about how firms in the financial industry are missing opportunities to throw Java at problems and make heaps of money.
> "they're all proprietary B2B applications. It's some of the best work I've ever did, yet no one will ever find out about it online"
I used to work at Amazon on some meaty back-end-y things.
Then I had the same thought.
Now I write mobile apps, which I find to be more creatively challenging, and the amount of recruiter emails (and cold calls, really guys?) has jumped through the roof.
Another side benefit is that my parents now understand what it is I do for a living, and women apparently find my job intriguing for some reason.
It's even nicer that, if someone asks me "what have you done?" I just need to shove the phone across the table.
Hmm. I'm inclined to believe this is unfair to people who might be just as competent and productive as those whose work is "out in the open", but can't share or reveal anything for some valid reason.
This is common inside the Valley and outside it. Around here, a certain fruit-based computer company advises its employees not to reveal specifically to outsiders exactly what it is they work on. People who write code for big, technical but non-software firms (defense contractors etc) similarly have nothing to show (publicly) for their efforts.
It's nice to imagine that everyone works for some fun little startup that lets you blog and contribute to open source and has everything up on github, but the reality is that if you limit the search to those candidates, you will find the talent pool pretty insular. Some highly competent and very desirable people are locked away in big companies where they're not allowed to make a big fuss about what they're doing. For them, the traditional resumé is still very valuable.
Too-secret-to-blog-about work has a hefty opportunity cost and must be priced accordingly by a would-be employee.
When faced with the choice between unverifiable secret work or highly visible work (open source, name brand employer, etc.), be sure your compensation expectations are weighted to match the future marketability of the experience you stand to gain on the job.
It would be nice if prospective employers could just know that you are out there and that you are competent. Realistically they are going to prefer the safe bet presented by a known-good contributor with an impressive public portfolio.
Edit: rephrased to clarify my work sorting heuristic.
Even at hot startups, a huge amount of work falls under dev ops, scaling, systems engineering, systems admin, data analysis, etc. Most of which has no public repo.
I really dislike this model. While it makes it extremely easy for companies to covertly use a prejudice filter on applicants, it makes it really hard for a person to have a social life on the web that's entirely different from their work ethos.
True, if you have a twitter account filled with links to pictures of yourself drunk at titty bars your potential employer might be able to find it but I don't see how it serves anybodies interests to explicitly point them to it.
Will be interesting (and scary) to see what happens as social media permeates more of our lives and makes things public.
Will we end up with a situation where employers will enforce strict rules about out of hours conduct of employees so as not to reflect badly on them, Orwellian Society?
Or will everyone have so much dirt on everyone else that it just stops to matter anymore, this could in fact lead to a more honest and liberal society.
really hard for a person to have a social life on the web that's entirely different from their work ethos.
I don't know... maybe the problem is the belief that there must be a difference between your "social life" and your "work ethos." There seems to be an assumption in this thread that having, say, "pictures of the applicant drunk at titty bars" is somehow a bad thing, something an employer (or potential employer) will take a dim view of.
Maybe the solution is to look for (or found) more open-minded organizations that don't care about shit like this. I mean, if I were hiring right now, I couldn't give a fuck less about somebody's Facebook profile pictures of them drunk and puking at a frat party, or hanging out at a strip club, or snorting coke off of a hooker's tits. As long as they can convince me that they can and will do the work that needs to be done, meeting the relevant parameters for quality, timeliness or what-have-you, I don't care about any of that jazz. Surely there have to be some other folks out there who feel the same way.
I really used to value the internet as a "third space" like a bar, or a club. I don't really want it to become an extension of my work persona. I will adapt I suppose, I have started to make a conscious effort to build a presence under my real name. But honestly, how much management of my online presence must should I really be expected to do?
It's a very interesting topic. I've worked at a company where we would get a stack of applications (about 1500) over night (right before the deadline of course) and the crappy tracker system we used would crash. Even worse I searched for a reasonable alternative, but simply couldn't find one that was SIMPLE. Sure there're plenty of bloated CRMs out there, and even some honest efforts like jobvite and interview street. But I couldn't find the right balance of simple tracking and review/screening features. So, as PG once suggested, I went and built my own.
It's still in dev mode but we've gotten pretty good responses from potential customers so far. Some of the issues we've tried to tackle has been the resume "problem" as discussed here. The thing is, resumes are much more than the content they hold. The design of the page, the choosing of words and descriptions, how to weight the important stuff etc. You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their 'paper' resume. It's almost like judging a person by their handwriting, though this metric is sort of skewed since everyone I know, myself included, has developed crummy handwriting ever since spending 10+ hours/day communicating via a keyboard.
An interesting point-of-view I've seen a lot of places is the obvious, yet under-prioritized factoring of values and soft skills. Personally, I think it's naïve to think you can attract "the best, the top 1%" of coders, managers, product devs and so on. What would be far more valuable in terms of hiring would be to find those people that would actually fit the company culture and team the best. Skills can be learned, but personal values and interests can't. So a silly manager might ask for someone under 30 with 15 years of experience in C#, Java, Ruby, and some html/css for good measure. Yet, this is the skewed metric to evaluate on. Instead, they should find the person who finds the problem they're meant to solve interesting and someone who would fit well into the company and the team. If the candidate 'only' knows C++ and Python, it's far easier for them to get up-to-date on the company program running on Ruby than trying to force the 'ideal hard skill candidate' into a culture he/she's not comfortable in. Prioritizing candidates in terms of soft skills and values are actually one of the pillars of the program I'm working on. It's a tough nut to crack..
Another issue we've talked about is how to evaluate someone with a minimum of screening bias? There's so much bias going into an evaluation of a person, and it's a well-known issue that we tend to look for people similar to ourselves - even though it might not be what the company is actually looking for. So, if the application tracker could enable "blind" mode and switch off certain information like pictures, names, tests scores etc. it could potentially negate some of the bias involved in screening. Even letting multiple people rate a candidate could negate some of it, yet the work flow used in most HR departments simply don't allow for this kind of flexibility.
Probably the best reason to forsake the traditional resume is to keep incompetent "headhunter" agencies away. I annihilated my linkedin profile a couple years ago, and keep just a tar.gz of a HAML formatted resume on my site.
As an owner of a software company, handing me or anyone else at the company a resume is actually a (slight) negative. It means you're handing it out to anyone who will take it, and you haven't done the research on our company.
One can certainly overcome such a tiny black mark, though, since we definitely forgive ignorance in the strange ways we sometimes do things.
I just went through another useless gig interview,was in fact upfront about that I ask for 50% advance on project dev costs and get miss-directed when I ask directly if they understand that its not a suggestion.
Depends on the scale of the project. Something small, sure. But if it's a 6-month project, it's unreasonable (should do deposit/retainer along with regular payments).
But would you want to work for news corp some of us have standards and working for known hackers and serious criminals like NI is probably going to be a black mark.
Hacking a retired SIS officers pc is far more serious than VMB'ing some poor murdered girls phone for example.
We are trying to solve this exact problem at GitHire. See http://www.githire.com/about for more about our process.
There are a lot of problems with resumes that have been brought up again and again. Many companies we are working with welcome the change.
For those of you who still want to play the resume game, and don't want to spend your off-work hours contributing to open source, or building a web presence, don't worry. There will be plenty of job openings for you at companies who like to do things the old way.
[+] [-] dpritchett|14 years ago|reply
1) Union Square Ventures is a leading name in this space - everyone knows Fred Wilson's blog. On top of that, they only have three "staff" listed on their site. USV can ask would-be employees to fly up to NYC to deliver resumes in person and they'll still get plenty of applicants.
2) The job openings in the article that focus on surveys and personality tests - supposedly instead of resumes - are clearly unskilled labor (e.g. social media intern). This is exactly as it was when I applied to work as a waiter at Olive Garden in 2000.
3) IGN's coding challenges are similarly suspect as a representatitve example because game dev is a glamor industry with a surfeit of naifs lining up for these underpaid jobs. Prized developers aren't going to participate in many coding-contest-as-hiring-lottery situations unless they're just really interested in the problem. Ask a YC company who's ever posted a hiring puzzle: what percentage of your correct submissions were from people who didn't even want the job?
The tactics cited above wrongheadedly invert the recruiting plan tptacek uses at Matasano: Start from the assumption that you want the best people possible and that those people will have plenty of great alternatives to working for you. Do your best to get your company's name in front of those people and to convince them that they'd have a rewarding time if they joined your team.
I trust Thomas's experience in identifying and recruiting talent far more than I do a career WSJ reporter's [1] trend spotting.
[1] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/rachel-emma-silverman/31/331/507
[+] [-] ben1040|14 years ago|reply
For a competent developer, a "cover letter brainteaser" that takes an hour to do is essentially equivalent to a $100+ application fee (in terms of opportunity cost).
[+] [-] spamizbad|14 years ago|reply
Probably pretty low. But it's not designed to have a high conversion rate. It's really just to scare off pretenders and the under-qualified. I like to solve "Cover Letter Problems" for fun, but I've never bothered to apply to a company that had them. I don't think that means they're a failure.
The applicants themselves probably benefit the most as it gives them a window into the company's dev culture. Cutesy "gotcha!" problems that are abstract and removed too far from coding are generally a warning sign that it's a shop full of people who may be smart but are perhaps mediocre developers and/or the shop has non-technical management. On the flip side, problems that explore an applicants coding style and thought process tends to be an indicator the shop wants actual coders who can get shit done in an efficient manner, and that they care about things like Code quality, their tool chain, and care just enough about process to achieve repeatable results, but not so much as to become dogmatic.
[+] [-] kd1220|14 years ago|reply
In regard to the change in hiring practices, "social presence resumes" are just a passing trend. It may result in better candidates in the short term, but people will learn to pad these new resumes and it won't be much more effective than paper resumes.
The best hiring practice will still be tapping your employees' social network and hunting down talented people who aren't happy in their current positions. Anything else is usually a shot in the dark.
[+] [-] droithomme|14 years ago|reply
It's often heard that 3 page CVs are an abomination since no one has time to trawl through all that. But now, doing a video interview just to apply is OK to require, at least according to this article.
Where I work, CVs with cover letters are fine, links to web presences are fine, if someone wants to send a DVD or link to a private youtube exhortation that's also fine. Whatever works for the candidate we'll look at it.
It can be tedious to sort through all these CVs, assuming your company is able to get any relevant applications at all. But that's the price of acquiring talented people. Hiring someone for a creative job like development is as tricky as selecting a spouse to get married. It's a long term commitment that will affect both of you profoundly. It's not the same as buying a pound of hamburger.
[+] [-] enjo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtbigwoo|14 years ago|reply
Am I wrong to see the same thing in a video application? The more cash and connections you have, the better video you're able to create. Don't tell me the hiring manager won't notice the applicant in the $1500 suit with the professional (but not too professional) video.
[+] [-] tptacek|14 years ago|reply
But USV can create any requirement they'd like, and they'll still get candidates, because a role at USV is a prestige job. They might just as well require candidates to compose a freestyle rap about their accomplishments; it wouldn't cost them candidates.
[+] [-] dcpdx|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] zavulon|14 years ago|reply
But in my previous life, I was an enterprise Java developer in the financial industry. None of the projects I built are online - they're all proprietary B2B applications. It's some of the best work I've ever did, yet no one will ever find out about it online. The only way for me to tell this story is through the resume.
How do people like that supposed to present themselves, in this new hot social media environment?
[+] [-] patio11|14 years ago|reply
You can also have a web presence about the work which does not actually include the work. Talk about an interesting sub-problem which is non-proprietary. Talk about architecture choices. Talk about the tech you used and the problems you overcame while using it. Write about how firms in the financial industry are missing opportunities to throw Java at problems and make heaps of money.
[+] [-] potatolicious|14 years ago|reply
I used to work at Amazon on some meaty back-end-y things.
Then I had the same thought.
Now I write mobile apps, which I find to be more creatively challenging, and the amount of recruiter emails (and cold calls, really guys?) has jumped through the roof.
Another side benefit is that my parents now understand what it is I do for a living, and women apparently find my job intriguing for some reason.
It's even nicer that, if someone asks me "what have you done?" I just need to shove the phone across the table.
[+] [-] bengl3rt|14 years ago|reply
This is common inside the Valley and outside it. Around here, a certain fruit-based computer company advises its employees not to reveal specifically to outsiders exactly what it is they work on. People who write code for big, technical but non-software firms (defense contractors etc) similarly have nothing to show (publicly) for their efforts.
It's nice to imagine that everyone works for some fun little startup that lets you blog and contribute to open source and has everything up on github, but the reality is that if you limit the search to those candidates, you will find the talent pool pretty insular. Some highly competent and very desirable people are locked away in big companies where they're not allowed to make a big fuss about what they're doing. For them, the traditional resumé is still very valuable.
[+] [-] dpritchett|14 years ago|reply
When faced with the choice between unverifiable secret work or highly visible work (open source, name brand employer, etc.), be sure your compensation expectations are weighted to match the future marketability of the experience you stand to gain on the job.
It would be nice if prospective employers could just know that you are out there and that you are competent. Realistically they are going to prefer the safe bet presented by a known-good contributor with an impressive public portfolio.
Edit: rephrased to clarify my work sorting heuristic.
[+] [-] rdouble|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ttt_|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiggy2011|14 years ago|reply
Will be interesting (and scary) to see what happens as social media permeates more of our lives and makes things public.
Will we end up with a situation where employers will enforce strict rules about out of hours conduct of employees so as not to reflect badly on them, Orwellian Society?
Or will everyone have so much dirt on everyone else that it just stops to matter anymore, this could in fact lead to a more honest and liberal society.
[+] [-] mindcrime|14 years ago|reply
I don't know... maybe the problem is the belief that there must be a difference between your "social life" and your "work ethos." There seems to be an assumption in this thread that having, say, "pictures of the applicant drunk at titty bars" is somehow a bad thing, something an employer (or potential employer) will take a dim view of.
Maybe the solution is to look for (or found) more open-minded organizations that don't care about shit like this. I mean, if I were hiring right now, I couldn't give a fuck less about somebody's Facebook profile pictures of them drunk and puking at a frat party, or hanging out at a strip club, or snorting coke off of a hooker's tits. As long as they can convince me that they can and will do the work that needs to be done, meeting the relevant parameters for quality, timeliness or what-have-you, I don't care about any of that jazz. Surely there have to be some other folks out there who feel the same way.
[+] [-] Hominem|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johanjessen|14 years ago|reply
It's still in dev mode but we've gotten pretty good responses from potential customers so far. Some of the issues we've tried to tackle has been the resume "problem" as discussed here. The thing is, resumes are much more than the content they hold. The design of the page, the choosing of words and descriptions, how to weight the important stuff etc. You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their 'paper' resume. It's almost like judging a person by their handwriting, though this metric is sort of skewed since everyone I know, myself included, has developed crummy handwriting ever since spending 10+ hours/day communicating via a keyboard.
An interesting point-of-view I've seen a lot of places is the obvious, yet under-prioritized factoring of values and soft skills. Personally, I think it's naïve to think you can attract "the best, the top 1%" of coders, managers, product devs and so on. What would be far more valuable in terms of hiring would be to find those people that would actually fit the company culture and team the best. Skills can be learned, but personal values and interests can't. So a silly manager might ask for someone under 30 with 15 years of experience in C#, Java, Ruby, and some html/css for good measure. Yet, this is the skewed metric to evaluate on. Instead, they should find the person who finds the problem they're meant to solve interesting and someone who would fit well into the company and the team. If the candidate 'only' knows C++ and Python, it's far easier for them to get up-to-date on the company program running on Ruby than trying to force the 'ideal hard skill candidate' into a culture he/she's not comfortable in. Prioritizing candidates in terms of soft skills and values are actually one of the pillars of the program I'm working on. It's a tough nut to crack..
Another issue we've talked about is how to evaluate someone with a minimum of screening bias? There's so much bias going into an evaluation of a person, and it's a well-known issue that we tend to look for people similar to ourselves - even though it might not be what the company is actually looking for. So, if the application tracker could enable "blind" mode and switch off certain information like pictures, names, tests scores etc. it could potentially negate some of the bias involved in screening. Even letting multiple people rate a candidate could negate some of it, yet the work flow used in most HR departments simply don't allow for this kind of flexibility.
Long rant, interesting topic.
[+] [-] shawnee_|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radley|14 years ago|reply
code -> git repository
design -> portfolio
investment analysis -> written opinion & prediction
[+] [-] tirrellp|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] listrophy|14 years ago|reply
One can certainly overcome such a tiny black mark, though, since we definitely forgive ignorance in the strange ways we sometimes do things.
[+] [-] shareme|14 years ago|reply
I just went through another useless gig interview,was in fact upfront about that I ask for 50% advance on project dev costs and get miss-directed when I ask directly if they understand that its not a suggestion.
[+] [-] radley|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsolomon|14 years ago|reply
The results can and are easily stacked through bogus accounts.
If a company thinks that professionals use those sites for professional reasons, then I question the professionalism of the company.
[+] [-] mjwalshe|14 years ago|reply
Hacking a retired SIS officers pc is far more serious than VMB'ing some poor murdered girls phone for example.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] heyrhett|14 years ago|reply
There are a lot of problems with resumes that have been brought up again and again. Many companies we are working with welcome the change.
For those of you who still want to play the resume game, and don't want to spend your off-work hours contributing to open source, or building a web presence, don't worry. There will be plenty of job openings for you at companies who like to do things the old way.
[+] [-] dsolomon|14 years ago|reply