Are Your Hiring Practices Out of Date?

Hiring people is difficult and we know you’d like to avoid it. But how will you get new people to write your code and sob into your pipelines? 

The face of hiring has changed, probably permanently in the last 12 months. Companies that started working remotely last March have decided to stay that way. 

There’s no easy solution and the norms for hiring are changing all the time. Here are a few things that we notice are going the way of last week's banana and saying “YOLO”.

Wearing a suit

I mean, this nearly doesn’t need to be said any more but what your applicant wears to an interview doesn’t particularly matter. I’m writing this under the assumption that we’ll be going back to in-person interviews at some point, btw. What they wear to a remote interview matters even less. (Although they should still be wearing pants and not pajamas, please).

As long as they are wearing clean, tidy, non-offensive, clothing - who cares? Why should someone need to wear a suit to a job interview in an office where everyone else is wearing “Sudo make me a sandwich” tshirts?

Often people go to interviews straight from work. Suddenly appearing in a nice shirt and pants combo screams “I’m seeing other companies”. 

If you or your HR department is worrying about the state of someone’s clothes instead of the state of their knowledge, then please shift priorities. 

Weird logic problems

Remember back in the 2000’s when tech was on the rise and everyone was really excited about Google offering lunch and naps? 

They also used to ask questions like “Why are manhole covers round” and “How long would it take to wash all the windows in Detroit?”

Then everyone started doing it but Google stopped. They gave up on the “How many cats live in Antarctica” questions but they still linger. Hiring Managers say they’re a way of seeing who can “think outside the box” or that they “just want to see how people think”.

Honestly, give it up. Someone will know how to answer the question or they’ll be thrown for a loop. The ability to pull some nonsense out of their butt probably isn’t an indicator for success in a software developer or infrastructure engineer.

For most jobs being able to answer these kinds of questions is a strong indicator of someone who has previous experience of these kinds of questions. 

Complex Algorithm interviews

And I know how hard it is. You want to build an unbelievable product. To do so, you need unbelievable engineering skills. Over our careers, the various recruiters in nineDots have worked with a load of different styles of interview and styles of technical assessment and 99% of people hate whiteboard algorithm questions.

It’s a meme at this stage - the interview asks “please invert this binary tree”, the day to day job involves importing libraries and debugging.

I mean, I know the logic of testing someone’s engineering skills - you want to know if someone understands the underpinnings of software development. Realistically though … do you just need someone who can bang out React.js according to requirements without too much hand-holding and who can get on with the existing team? 

One million interviews

This is sort of a tough one for me to lecture on because as a recruiter, the ideal scenario is one where there are zero interviews and you just give me money. However, as a recruitment consultant, I do want you to hire the best people so you can build out a good team. (So you want to hire even more people … and then give me money)

An elongated interview process won’t help. In my experience, this sort of thing is most symptomatic of new companies or the hyper-cool US companies who want to be Google (but are not Google)

I’ve worked with companies who have a 10 stage interview process. What on earth are going to find out after interview number four that you don’t already know? Team fit is important but you honestly do not need the poor applicant to talk to everyone in the company. 

If the CEO is 2 levels of management above and will never interact with this person - do they really really need to sign off on hiring them? Just trust your managers not to hire total gobshites. 

Caring about educational background

We’re getting into the controversial ones now! However, what is life without something to argue about?

Degrees are not that important in tech. Most of tech is a skill rather than a bank of knowledge gained. Degrees are important if someone needs an accreditation or needs to build up a large stock of knowledge about something.

You can either code or you can’t. You can learn the basics of software engineers fairly quickly and the rest of it is learned by doing. The same goes for most other areas. DevOps = a skill. Data Engineering = a skill. Project Management = definitely a skill. 

I know there are people reading this screaming at me about “What about the principles of OOP!!!” And yes, there are advantages to thoughtfully spending time learning what computers are from the ground up and learning several different aspects of the field. 

College is an important part of life too - it’s four years to learn about yourself and meet new people, expand your horizons. 

However, it’s not an option available to everyone and it’s classist and exclusionary to blindly exclude everyone who doesn’t hold a degree. 

Keeping identifiable information on the CV

So this is a relatively new one. Only a few companies are using blind CV’s at the moment. This is where the name and other identifying information is stripped from the CV before it goes to any decision makers. In some places, this can mean stripping out the name of the university or address. 

Any information that has often lead to discrimination, essentially. The ins and outs of how unconscious bias works in hiring is a whole other blog (which I’ll get to at some stage). It boils down to people who have names that seem “foreign” or “ethnic” or “female” often do not get interviews, even when they have the right qualifications and experience for the role. Those who have white sounding or male names get proportionally more interviews. Here’s a paper on this issue for further information.

It’s something I’d love to see more companies introduce. 

Conclusions, if any?

If you’re doing some or all of these things, don’t feel so bad.

I mean for this to be a path to rethink how you hire. The tech world changes all the time and the way we hire changes all the time. I’ve only been in recruitment for seven years and things are completely different to how they were when I started. 

Hiring is an obsession for me and I could talk about it for days so if you want assistance with your own process, get in touch with me on [email protected]

As some social proof that I'm not full of it, I'll be mentoring start-ups at @dogpatchlabs First Friday event this March 5th. Apply here to be mentored.