{"id":7,"date":"2010-01-25T22:36:49","date_gmt":"2010-01-26T03:36:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cyberbisson.com\/blog\/?p=7"},"modified":"2021-08-13T14:50:48","modified_gmt":"2021-08-13T18:50:48","slug":"great-recruiters-unite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cyberbisson.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/25\/great-recruiters-unite\/","title":{"rendered":"Great Recruiters, Unite!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The following transmission is directed toward the (job) recruiting community everywhere.\u2002It\u2019s time to get together and improve the way employees and employers connect with each other.\u2002The current method of matching software engineering candidates with software engineering jobs is completely broken.\u2002With so many good people out there looking for work, and so many good companies out there looking for good people, you\u2019d think this would be no problem\u2009\u2014\u2009especially in an age of so much technology centered around communication.\u2002If you have landed here, that\u2019s a good start.\u2002Well, here is what I think are some of the roadblocks in this fundamentally \ufb02awed process.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

A r\u00e9sum\u00e9 is a horrible method of weeding out unquali\ufb01ed candidates.<\/h2>\n

There are simply too many things to know about a person that cannot be conveyed by a r\u00e9sum\u00e9.\u2002That people read in to a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 as much as they do is, simply put, crazy.\u2002Don\u2019t get me wrong\u2009\u2014\u2009r\u00e9sum\u00e9s can be very useful for determining what someone knows, how experienced they are, what kind of companies they have worked for in the past, or how adaptable they are to a changing technological landscape.<\/p>\n

Recruiters do not typically use r\u00e9sum\u00e9s like this, however.<\/em>\u2002The classic mistake here for employers is to give your recruiter a list of technological skills that you require to \ufb01ll the given position.\u2002This will lead some recruiters to simply scan for words in candidates\u2019 r\u00e9sum\u00e9s, and match them against the skills that they have been given for the position.\u2002Don\u2019t do this.\u2002To me, it seems ridiculous to look for a candidate (for example) to \ufb01ll a position called \u201cSenior Network Engineer\u201d and discard them because they have not used Objective-C.\u2002Experience is experience, knowledge of networking is knowledge of networking.\u2002Unless you\u2019re looking for someone to write an Objective-C compiler, I personally don\u2019t believe this should even be a factor in considering them from the recruiter\u2019s perspective.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Programming language, OS\u2019es, and software used in the past is meaningless for \ufb01nding a good software developer.<\/h2>\n

As someone who has been on the hiring end of the process, I almost always ignore what technologies the candidate has used in previous positions as a means of ruling out<\/em> that candidate.\u2002Ask yourself, do you want a smart, adaptable employee working with you, or do you want a candidate who already knows the speci\ufb01c technologies involved and can start right away?\u2002Any engineer worth your time should be able to pick up any programming language.\u2002They should be able to start working in a new language in weeks.\u2002Think about this.\u2002Weeks are a very negligible amount of time in the timeline of the hiring process.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t tell you how many times I\u2019ve personally been told that I don\u2019t know technology \u201cx\u201d by an employer, and that<\/em> is the reason that I\u2019ve been passed over\u2009\u2014\u2009many times without even being spoken to in person\u2009\u2014\u2009only to learn technology \u201cx\u201d in my next job, and use it very successfully.\u2002A successful candidate can do anything put before them; an unsuccessful one can only do what they already know.<\/em>\u2002Example: as a recent college graduate, I interviewed at a startup (actually a company with two employees).\u2002I came to learn that they thought that their SQL queries were too dif\ufb01cult for someone to learn as a \ufb01rst foray into SQL.\u2002At the job that I ultimately took, I started off doing mobile development in C++, but after they decided to change the direction of the company, I adapted.\u2002In about a month\u2019s time, I was doing Oracle DBA work, designing data models for the database, and writing large queries and stored procedures in PL\/SQL.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Nobody is doing anybody any favors.<\/h2>\n

There are few things more insulting in the interview process than when one party thinks that they are doing the other party a favor by even speaking to them.\u2002All good candidates recognize this; all good employers recognize this.\u2002Some employers take on an air of superiority when they speak to you.\u2002They\u2019ve perused your r\u00e9sum\u00e9 and have decided that you at least have enough of the skills that they need, but when they speak to you, you get the feeling that you\u2019re somehow being belittled.\u2002This rarely happens with a face-to-face interview, but occasionally happens on the initial phone screen.\u2002In my experience this is because the person conducting the interview isn\u2019t really con\ufb01dent with the topics about which they\u2019re speaking, so they\u2019re attempting to make you feel like they are speaking at such a high level that you must not even understand what they\u2019re talking about if you challenge them (see [1]<\/a>, sec. 3).<\/p>\n

To me, this is a major warning sign about the company.\u2002If a company treats interview candidates like this, then they will probably end up driving away many of the better developers.\u2002Nobody likes to feel belittled.\u2002This is a company that will have trouble hiring quality people, and it is not a company where you will want to work<\/em>\u2009\u2014\u2009unless you\u2019re looking to be a big \ufb01sh in a small pond.\u2002Don\u2019t fall into that trap; work somewhere where you can learn something new and be challenged.<\/p>\n

The same rules apply to candidates of course.\u2002People should be proud of the company that they\u2019ve worked to grow, and it\u2019s offensive to approach them with disrespect.\u2002Maybe you\u2019re better than the job, but not the company or its people.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

My life\u2019s story (or, something you can only tell by actually speaking to me).<\/h2>\n

To drive the point home, I\u2019m going to tell you about how absolutely fantastic I am\u2009\u2014\u2009something you could never \ufb01nd out by perusing (or ignoring<\/em>, as the case may be) the \u201cTechnical Skills\u201d section of my r\u00e9sum\u00e9.\u2002First and foremost, there are two things that have never happened in my professional career.\u2002First, I\u2019ve never<\/em> gotten anything but a glowing, superlative review of the way in which I perform my job.\u2002Second, I\u2019ve never<\/em> happened to get any of those positions by submitting a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 to a recruiter within my current company, to a \u201cjob cart,\u201d or through a career site like monster.com<\/a>.\u2002(Regarding the last two, it just seems wrong to me to waste all the time formatting my r\u00e9sum\u00e9, only have it converted to text and submitted in an HTML form.)<\/p>\n

My \ufb01rst job out of college was the toughest to get by far.\u2002I graduated when the internet \u201cbubble\u201d had just burst.\u2002With few connections, and every job posting looking for someone with a minimum of 10 years of experience in some small niche skill-set, I ended up being unemployed for almost a full year.\u2002I probably sent out about 1,000 unsolicited resumes (even going through the Yellow Pages to \ufb01nd software companies), I got exactly 2 job interviews\u2026 I guess the point I\u2019m trying to make here is that the job market was bad\u2009\u2014\u2009really<\/em> bad.<\/p>\n

My mother happened to \ufb01nd out that someone she worked with about 20 years earlier was the VP of engineering at a small start-up, and contacted him on my behalf.\u2002I went in to talk to some people, and decided that I liked the company.\u2002Unfortunately, they didn\u2019t actually have any positions open at the company.\u2002After a few weeks of checking back and bothering people at the company to see if there were any openings, I came up with (what I thought was) a brilliant idea.\u2002I would offer my services free of charge<\/em> for a month.\u2002Worst case, I learn some new technologies, get let go, and it doesn\u2019t cost them anything.\u2002How could they say no?\u2002They didn\u2019t.\u2002After only a week, they said, \u201cwe don\u2019t want you to \ufb01nd a job somewhere else,\u201d and offered me a position.\u2002I had a great experience working there on anything from simple content transformation to hand-held device application and synchronization to Oracle DBA work.<\/p>\n

After a little more than two years, the company was starting to go under, and I knew I needed to start looking for a new job again.\u2002Someone I worked with at the company for only a short time contacted me out of nowhere from Palm.\u2002I went through the whole process\u2009\u2014\u2009a phone screen, two 4-hour interviews, and a \ufb01nal talk with the director at that time.\u2002I later came to \ufb01nd out that they were on the fence about me until they talked to that person I worked with (and they respected very much) and apparently I made such an impression that he basically put himself on the line for me.\u2002\u201cHe\u2019s good\u2026 hire him.\u201d<\/p>\n

When they \ufb01rst hired me, they had some pretty modest expectations for me, but in my \ufb01rst week on the job, the architect (my manager) went on his sabbatical\u2009\u2014\u2009for four weeks.\u2002They were going to hire a much more experience developer to take on a project to port and expand an existing framework that was in place under the Treo\u2019s email application.\u2002This would basically bring the email application into the Linux world for their next big project<\/a> at the time.\u2002I just plain did<\/em> that job and took over the framework (with guidance from that architect when he came back of course).<\/p>\n

Two years later, the of\ufb01ce closed its doors so Palm could consolidate all their developers to the main of\ufb01ce in California.\u2002I had no interest in moving across the country, so I took my severance and took the summer off.\u2002Using a recruiter that got some of my former co-workers jobs, and armed with glowing recommendations (including one from the director of the Palm of\ufb01ce, and one from my manager), I got a job working at a start-up with some of the smartest people I\u2019ve ever worked with.\u2002After only a year, though, they were bought out and the of\ufb01ce was moved out of the city.<\/p>\n

At that exact time, though, Research In Motion met with the director of my former of\ufb01ce at Palm and a few of the managers with the intention of basically having him create<\/em> a new of\ufb01ce.\u2002This director thought so highly of me that I was the \ufb01rst new hire for this of\ufb01ce (after him and one of the managers).\u2002The rest, as they say, is history.\u2002I guess if you\u2019re looking for a moral to this story, that moral is that you have to use your own personal connections<\/em> to \ufb01nd candidates, and that you must actually speak to people<\/em> before deciding that they can\u2019t do a job (after you\u2019ve decided that they have the experience you\u2019re looking for of course).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
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<\/center><\/p>\n

Further Reading<\/h2>\n
    \n<\/a><\/p>\n
  1. Corcodilos, 7 Mistakes Internal Recruiters Make<\/a>.<\/li>\n

    <\/a><\/p>\n

  2. Corcodilos, Respecting The Candidate – Instructions For Employers<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    \n

    Enjoy a printable version here<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The following transmission is directed toward the (job) recruiting community everywhere.\u2002It\u2019s time to get together and improve the way employees and employers connect with each other.\u2002The current method of matching software engineering candidates with software engineering jobs is completely broken.\u2002With so many good people out there looking for work, and so many good companies out … Continue reading “Great Recruiters, Unite!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[10,11,12,13],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","tag-annoyances","tag-recruiting","tag-software","tag-tech-industry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyberbisson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyberbisson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyberbisson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyberbisson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyberbisson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/cyberbisson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":123,"href":"https:\/\/cyberbisson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions\/123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyberbisson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyberbisson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyberbisson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}