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Hiring employees is no good. And yours too

I can’t even remember all the articles about hiring workers that I have read over the past few years. All of them are arranged in one format. At the beginning, it is argued that hiring employees is no good . Then describes the practice of hiring at XYZ Then follows an extremely detailed analysis of in which situations this practice is useful and in which it will lead to poor results. Finally, they end up with hiring based on ABC criteria, and this is only for someone else to write an article that ABC is an unsuitable way to hire employees.

To date, I have already seen almost all combinations of ABC and XYZ. As a small exercise, I decided to make a small selection of them all. I am sure that many people will ardently defend their views on how to correctly and incorrectly hire employees. Honestly, I have already lost all interest in listening to these opinions and examples from life. Until someone conducts a thorough study evaluating different interview strategies, preferably using double-blind random sampling, it makes no sense to spur this dead mare further. The selection of staff is no good at all. And you have it no better.



See which university graduate candidate


Behind:


  • University admissions teams spend a lot of effort on selecting the most capable students. Why not use their efforts for the good of your company?
  • The best universities in general employ the best professors, the best students study and more demanding study programs, all this will inevitably affect the candidate.
  • To enter the university from the top lines of the ranking, you need to spend a lot of both physical and mental efforts. These can be good signs of a successful employee.


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  • Either you know the solution or not. It depends on how lucky the candidate is at the moment to get a flash of insight, or whether he has met this task before.
  • There is no direct connection with programming.
  • Even Google says they are useless .


Live Coding Exercises



Behind:

  • Direct testing and demonstration of code writing skills, to which the majority does not apply and “against” in the paragraphs above.
  • The fact that FizzBuzz is effective shows the need for even more live coding.
  • Completely honest and impartial. If you solved a problem, you have a lot of points. If not, not enough. Here is such a meritocracy .


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Good question. When I worked in Google, we completely relied on live programming, and the HR department additionally took into account the data from the resume. Not so long ago, Google began to ask behavioral questions, but this process is still at the very beginning.

I think that there is no solution that would be suitable for all applicants. Different people demonstrate their experience in different ways. Someone is good at live programming, some at test work, others can provide excellent recommendations from famous people who are trustworthy. Companies should be more flexible and enable candidates to choose how to demonstrate their skills.

This, of course, is just my personal opinion and it is clear to me that the implementation of such an approach can be difficult. In the coming decades, serious changes will surely occur in this area.

About the author.
Rajeev Prabakar ( site ), received a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University, after which he worked at Intel, Oracle, Google and Amazon.

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