One thing that really bugs me is the prevailing hiring culture that one must navigate in search of a better (or first) job. The following is an examination of how the hiring process works (generally) and the problems we face if we’re to attempt to change it. We will focus on the hiring of software/technical people to make our scope a little bit more digestible and eliminate the need to discuss countless permutations of concepts.
Let’s break down the hiring process into it’s most fundamental levels.
What is the point of hiring a new employee? What are you trying to accomplish?
The point of hiring hiring a new employee, is to find an individual who can do whatever it is you need done (as an employer) for the money you can afford to pay them.
Great! Now is that it? What else do we want?
In a perfect world (especially on a small team) we want to like the person. It’s crucial to hire an individual that you can get along with, and preferably someone that you can connect with on a personal level as well. For small software teams (or distributed teams of any kind really) this is weighted quite heavily and should be.
Now that we have our broad (yet somehow lofty) goals set it’s time to hire. The current process is as follows (no recruiters)
Posting goes up
Tons of unqualified people apply without cover letters (or worse with really long ones you never read entirely)
You spend precious man hours sifting through the applicants in a rash attempt to narrow down to ‘qualified’ candidates.
But wait! There is conveniently an entire large (and growing) industry of people who are extremely qualified to deal with this process and make your life easier! For just a small fee, hiring an external recruiter will completely change the hiring process. Let’s rewrite it with the help of a recruiter.
Recruiter posts job description that you write for him/her
Tons of unqualified people apply
Recruiter sends tons of unqualified people to your inbox in hopes that you’ll interview them
You spend precious man hours sifting through candidates
You pay the recruiter a fee for candidates you interview, and then again when you hire one.
On top of all that, you as a hiring manager must deal with the candidates that *cough* over exaggerate their skills and experience and completely bomb any scrutinizing questions during your interview process.
Your new employee search is not sounding great so far? Let’s move on to something more constructive with less satirical whining.
With our problems clearly outlined, I see two main ways we can improve.
Get a higher quality (and smaller) candidate pool to choose from off the bat
Vastly improve the ‘sifting’ and only interview candidates that actually possess the skills you seek.
Alternative - what if you could seek out the candidates you were interested in, on your own time.
Know that they are interested in a job like what you’re offering
Evaluate the person and their experience
We want to eliminate what we call ‘Recruiters’ not the people per say, but their methods we want to render obsolete.
Recruiters should be focusing on find the best people! It sadly has become a numbers game. Lots of volume in, shotgun approach to finding someone that sticks so that they can get paid.
What if we could empower small teams (like mine) to find and screen someone that’s worth of their job online? How much time would be saved, how much money to ineffective recruiters.
Now this is a few things
There needs to be a tool online for people showcase their talents
People need to actually have talents, and be able to express them in some form that is easily consumable by a hiring team/manager
We need a paradigm shift on several levels. Away from the linkedin recruiter spam era, and away from the resume era. Towards skills and people
What is the purpose of a resume when it really comes down to it? It is supposed to be the smallest subset of YOU. A quick way for a hiring manager to get a feel for your skills and determine if you’re worthy of making it out of the first stack and onto a phone screening.
Since they have to use bullet points, people focus on names and lie about skills. Thus nullifying the effectiveness in the first place.
Names have a small probability of yielding a quality employee, but is that really the best we can do?
It also completely ignores the individual. You really can grasp nothing about the human being you’re considering spending time to interview. Is there really no way to get a feel for a person, their passions and goals and demeanor; other than meeting them face to face?
What’s the problem with recruiters? They have no skin the game. External recruiters get paid when you go to in-person interviews, and they get paid if you get hired. They don’t lose money if you perform horribly and release a software bug that bankrupts the company. It’s kind of like asking a realtor if a home is really the best investment for you. Their incentives DO NOT align with yours, ever.
Because of this incentive structure, we’ve created a world where ‘recruiters’ play a numbers game by trying to amass as many candidates as possible for positions.
Now let it be said, there are truly talented recruiters that hire great people and get paid well to do it! Sadly this is more the exception than the norm in today’s hiring environment.
We’ve established a two part issue that inhibits effective hiring now. The concern of resumes themselves (by design), and their unfortunate application in the process now (recruiter spam and flooding of applicants).
The ‘drill down’ approach.
Maybe the typical resume is good enough to skim and find potential talent. The problem is that it’s hollow. Meaning the only things you really can’t lie on are the dates and companies you’ve worked at. Everything else can be fudged to get you into that interview.
It would be awesome if a hiring manager (if they were interested) could dive deeper into the bullet points you listed for verification. For example if you listed ‘worked on Java desktop applications) on your developer resume. If the recruiter was interested in your java skills they should be able to link to a list of projects you’ve completed, see the open source java contributions you’ve made, maybe your stack overflow questions answered tagged with ‘Java’ etc. The idea here is that the recruiter can skim over all the bullet points they aren’t interested in, but have the OPTION to go deep into areas of interest. This also allows you the applicant, to be extremely brief (submit a one page resume) while simultaneously being able to back up your bullet pointed claims with proof, projects etc.
This is a tricky one and causes of a lot of wasted time during the hiring process. The hiring manager wants to pay you as little as possible (naturally) and the candidate wants to negotiate for as large of an offer as possible. The real time wasted is when the gap between these two party’s desires is too large to even bother moving forward. Then there is also the ultimate game of “who says their number first”. What if there was a third party in the middle keeping both sides anonymous and just returning whether or not they’re “close enough” to continue the process.
In this case both parties would ideally submit an “ideal” value and an absolute minimum/maximum in order to check for an intersection.
Perhaps even the hiring manager can elect to ignore this calculation and continue on with the process (if the applicant pool is small for example).
To resolve this, an objective third party is needed. The applicant whispers their ideal, and absolute minimum salary requirements in the virtual ear, the hiring manager does likewise. Then our third party can determine if the two manager and applicant are close enough to continue the process. We can achieve this level of trust and anonymity through an online platform that is guaranteed to be neutral.
Where do we go from here?
Clearly, this is not an instruction manual to fixing all employment problems. However I hope my analysis has been thought provoking enough to stir up some ideas on how to best go about attacking this problem that no one seems to be solving very effectively. If you’ve made it this far, and have any thoughts email me. ethandrower@gmail.com
