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- Hacker News
- Are there any battle-tested strategies for hiring that are generally known to be good, but aren't often used because it's hard or doesn't scale?
Asking because my business is growing and we've gotten lucky with our hires so far, but I'd like to add my discipline to hiring well.
- > The era of the standard behavioral interview (“Tell me about a time…”) is over; those answers are easily scripted by live-assist tools. Instead, organizations should introduce dynamic friction: sudden constraints, changes in project scope, or prompts that require candidates to defend a counterintuitive tradeoff.
Isn't this already easily faked with an ordinary general-purpose consumer $20/month AI tool?
> Cultivate a culture of intellectual honesty over polished perfection.
This is one good idea I saw in the advertorial. Or, better yet, start with honesty at all.
But you have to understand and believe in it, or it will immediately be twisted into yet another gamed performative bit of interview theatre, like most other aspects that emerge from big-corporate mentality of herding worker drones.
(Perhaps the authors, coming from Meta and Microsoft, appreciate that reality.)
by neilv - I was walking through a startup neighborhood in San Francisco the other day and I encountered several telephone poles which were posted with advertisements for software engineering jobs. These were not generic or scam advertisements. This was a particular startup, looking for software engineers. What is old is new again.by cleandreams
- I'm responsible for hiring junior C++ developers in a small company (first role). Let met tell you that almost all candidates are stating "medium" level in C++ in their resume but don't even know how to work with pointers or references, they don't even have the level of someone studying the language for half a day. And I don't even think it's related to AI. Whatever the reason, it's very easy to assert a candidate competency with a 30 minutes to an hour interview in person.by cocoto
- Good hiring almost certainly has to be a significant competitive advantage.
It makes me wonder why so many otherwise successful companies let HR bungle the hiring process.
- I don't understand why tech companies are so reluctant to go back to in-person interviews. This used to be the norm before COVID and it would solve most of these issues. It's also ironic that the authors are from Microsoft/Amazon and Meta which have very structured interviews that tend to be about just hitting the right keywords during the interview itself. None of these places even really care about what you've done previously, for better or worse.by cloche
- My favorite "funnel" so far was applying for certain company in Colorado. It twas I think 10:45p in the evening, and I got a reply about 15mins later indicating that I was invited for an "interview". Scratching my head, I mean who was up working at this time, I looked into it...
It wasn't an interview, even though they insisted it was. It was a completely automated skill assessment "interview" with an AI. Or put better... it's a CAPTCHA that takes roughly 60mins to complete. If you just happen to pass their CAPTCHA, you might get to then talk to a real person.
I laughed and of course did not continue. This is the biggest honkin piece of baloney I've seen yet. It puts 100% of the burden on the candidates, so the HR department at the company can go back to trimming their hangnails or whatever they do.
by exabrial - > “There is a growing gap between the candidate’s written persona and their live presence. I’ll see a cover letter that is poetic and a résumé that is flawlessly structured, but then the person on the video call struggles to explain their own bullet points.
This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”.
I can remember a few interviews where I asked candidates about something I read on their resume (which I study before every call) and they corrected me to explain that they did something different. Then I held up their resume and pointed to their exact words and they turned bright red while they tried to come up with a new explanation.
That was rare, though. You could catch a lot of little cases of stretching the truth, but it wasn’t common to feel like you were reading a resume that didn’t match the candidate.
What has changed in the age of AI is that more people are feeling more brazen about letting the AI speak for them. These situations are happening more frequently. You get the feeling that people are less shy about trying to cheat and manipulate because it feels like the AI is doing the cheating and writing the words, so it’s done at arm’s length.
I spend some time helping with resume reviews occasionally. It’s getting sad to see in the general discussion of the group when people go from elated that they got an interview for their dream job to embarrassed when the interviewers saw right through their AI written resume and ended the hiring cycle. I wonder if we’re seeing a peak in AI resume junk while everyone tries it out, but before it becomes common knowledge that an AI junk resume is a way to shoot yourself in the foot when applying to companies you actually want to work for.
by Aurornis