Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- As an engineer working on my company’s top of funnel it’s tough. Currently we’ve switched to a short (15-30m) technical problem that we hand grade before candidates get a call. Async technical challenges are obviously gamed but you’d be surprised at how few people both cheat + take longer than 3m to submit the solutionby paulbgd
- > Currently we’ve switched to a short (15-30m) technical problem that we hand grade before candidates get a call.
Funny because I do the same; I don't commit to doing any work/assessments before at least an honest interview round. Businesses have to understand that _they_ are the ones who have to solve for the filtering problem. Most great candidates that you are hoping to snipe are already in a stable job and do not _have_ to jump through hoops to get past a filter.
by clates - Are you picking a problem candidates can easily cheat on? Could Claude produce the answer in 30 seconds? If so, what's the test actually measuring?
The setups I've seen produce the strongest signal aren't the ones where the candidate can't see the answer that AI produces easily. They're the ones where there is no single answer. Architecture decisions. How you would investigate an outage. How you would tradeoff one constraint against another. The candidate can spend an hour with Claude on it beforehand and it doesn't matter, because the test isn't "did you get the answer," it's "can you talk through the reasoning" and "can I trust your judgement."
Hearing someone explain their thinking on an open problem is a much harder thing to fake. Even if they used an assistant to structure their initial pass, the live unpacking reveals where the thinking is theirs and where it isn't.
by jgafni - > "For the C-suite, this is no longer just an HR headache, it is a critical strategic risk."
I have seen this phrase structure before.
by dude250711 - I'm recruiting for apprentices right now. By definition, they have almost nothing to put on their CVs, and thus their CVs are more or less identical, or rather all of them have almost zero signal.
We took a chance on a flash recruiting session our canton organized. 35 interviews in 2 hr 15 mins. Crazy. But excellent signal, because if you are looking for it, and give the candidate a hint to show it ("tell me a story about how you solved a computer problem for your self/friend/family/club"), you can find the candidates with a spark. And I would not have detected it from their CVs or cover letter alone.
More human connection. Less machines. There, I fixed it for you.
by jeffrallen - What is means is that now hiring is symmetrically broken.
Hiring has always been broken. May be not completely at the FAANG level, but below that, and more importantly across the globe it's seriously broken, and there's a high variance when it comes to hiring consultants quality.
The widespread use of AI vy applicants is very likely surfacing how comfortable consultants were doing the bare minimum when hiring.
Source: I've been working for 10+ years for a company that has an ATS for mostly European clients.
I know for a fact how crappy work around hiring is.
P.S.: the article focuses mostly on one direction of hiring. The opposite direction is also suffering from this (briefly explained in the article about AI fueled hiring bias). In my opinion, that is an even greater problem.
by ericol - 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.
- I like the other comment regarding asking people you know or have hired for referrals. But there's a separate question about what to do when you don't have any referrals to rely on.
In the past, the answer was to rely on recruiting experts and your own experience to analyze resumes, and to hope that some fraction of your time interviewing was well spent. But as others in this thread have pointed out, the quality of resumes as a signal is rapidly decreasing with AI. So now the question is what the new signal should be.
The purpose of hiring is really just to understand three things: (1) can the person do the job, (2) will I and the rest of the team want to work with them for the foreseeable future, and (3) are there any red flags. The latter two are assessed in interviews or backchanneling. But the first, "can this person do the job," is the one that has gotten much harder to tell from the resume alone.
What does "can the person do the job" even mean in the era of AI? For SWE, a lot of teams are still leaning on outdated coding challenges that test the ability to write code by hand (quality, organization, efficiency, speed) and the direct knowledge held in someone's head (vocabulary, concepts, tools). But what we actually need to test for is much more nebulous: thought process, judgment, knowing what questions to ask, taste, context switching, and how the candidate does all of this with AI effectively. Traditional coding challenges (where you prohibit cheating as much as possible) get at some of this, but they're no longer the optimal solution. They're an old comfortable solution being applied to a more modern, complicated problem.
I said this in another comment in this thread, but the best thing to do is offer an open-ended question. One that doesn't have a concrete answer, and one they're free to answer however they wish. Like a Turing test, 5 minutes at most is enough. Want to use AI? Great. Want to curate your answer? Great. Ask them to architect something. Describe a bug and ask if it should be fixed. If they think it should, ask how they'd approach debugging. Or ask about a technical decision they've made that they're not sure was right, and have them make the case for the other choice.
The same approach works in other domains. For sales, have them sell to someone in a specific scenario. For marketing, ask about a campaign they didn't like and what they would have done differently. For accounting, ask about the most common problems they've run into with clients and internal stakeholders, and how they handled those situations.
The goal is to get them talking on video for 2 to 5 minutes about something real that matters to the role. And whenever they put in the effort to do this, give them transparency. Let them know you've personally received it and will watch it. Follow up with an actual response out of respect for their time, even if the answer is no.
To anyone worried about the time this takes: (1) it immediately weeds out low-interest candidates, (2) I'd rather watch a few-minute video than do a 30-minute phone screen based on a resume alone for someone who's obviously not a fit, and (3) multiple stakeholders can watch the same video and form a baseline for their own follow-up interviews. It makes the rest of the process better, not worse.
by jgafni - Yes. Figure out who your top performers are ask them for referrals. Some people will recommend "meh" people, but more often than not your top performers hang out with other top performers because they appreciate the same things.by jppope
- I do quick interviews, then hire hourly for a single scoped task. Then see how they play, communication skills, code exploring all that happens on the task. Only works when candidate is not otherwise engaged, has never worked for non-coding/sysadmin roles.by edoceo
- We source our intern-to-Junior pipeline from a good state school from which we have a few graduates. We have about an 80% placement rate for the interns. We’ve yet to have any abusive or bad hires, this being a fully remote company. For Senior hires, a prior employee founded a Java User Group and sourced several high quality engineers from the pool of visitors. So, build a pipeline and play the long game?
Previously we’ve sourced candidates via a reputable recruiter from an in-town firm that our manager can routinely sit down with and build a relationship over the years. This had a good rate with only one bad placement. We ultimately traded time cost for money cost in that one, but I liked it.
The worst outcomes we’ve had were via LinkedIn jobs posts. By the time our in-house full-time recruiter would give us resumes half would be obvious frauds with most of the remainder being subtle frauds. I blame this in good part to having non-technical staff as the first filter in our pipeline.
Unfortunately the firm makes money hand over fist year on year so we are no longer a lean mean operation but a burgeoning beauracracy with room to hide, rest, and vest.
by antonymoose - I think various ‘longer interview’ processes can be good by reducing the chance of particularly regretted hires. This could be internships (but note this goes two ways and you want interns to accept offers and recommend the programme to their friends even if they are not hired) or work sample tests. Both have the downside that they are more work for the candidate (especially internships or some other short-term-to-possibly-long-term position) and so experienced candidates who feel they have better options and less need to prove themselves typically won’t take part (this depends a bit on how much they want to work at your specific company of course). Potentially this isn’t so bad – competing to hire the same people as everyone else is going to be more expensive – or potentially it is bad – maybe there’s a reason those candidates are in high demand and you will suffer from only getting a look at people who didn’t fit the typical pattern. I think it’s going to depend a bunch on how good you are at sourcing candidates and how hot your firm is.
- Apprenticeship? Actually spend time working with them on real work.
It's both hard and doesn't scale.
by Bjartr - Recommendation from a trusted 3rd party.
Bill Gurley has a great line about this:
"I use LinkedIn like this:
If Person A reaches out to me and there is a Person B that is a common connection between A and myself, I want to be able to call Person B and have 100% confidence in their evaluation. That's the bar I set to connect with someone on LinkedIn."
From:
by alexpotato - Ask the best people you’ve ever worked with who the best people they’ve worked with are. Recurse. When names start repeating through different graph paths, make those people an offer they can’t refuse. Once they join, ask them to do the same, and give them the budget and role to make it happen.by addaon
- > 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
- When I first tried to get a job, I listed three categories of skills: the ones I'm very confident in, the ones I have some experience with, and the niche ones I only dabbled in. The overwhelming advice, from everyone around me, was to never-ever admit that I'm not perfect at something. I found it perplexing, but after a decade or so, I started having to read resumes, and, indeed, I found almost nobody ever admitting they're not an absolute wizard at everything they put on their resumes. Before starting work at a company, I had this naive idea that HR and candidates are there to help each other, and that approaching it with honesty and goodwill is how it should work. Needless to say, it doesn't work that way at all - on both ends. I'm honestly frightened that I will maybe have to go through the hiring process again at some point, especially since my career turned adult and now my "years of experience" are a dead weight of "you're just old"... The whole process is so antagonistic, so brutal and stressful, that I can see myself going full YOLO and just spamming AI-slop resumes until I get an interview, in which - I want to believe - I'll be able to actually say something about myself and, hopefully, convince the interviewer that I can do the job. I know that would have made the whole situation a bit worse (and I'm sorry if I end up resorting to strategies like that), but the emotional burden of dealing with the "hiring process" before an actual face-to-face talk is so great I don't think I could bear it for long.
> Whatever the reason, it's very easy to assert a candidate competency with a 30 minutes to an hour interview in person.
It's not always that easy. Yes; there's a fraction of programmers who cannot code, and yes, it's usually possible to tell them apart with a FizzBuzz-style question. However, the vast majority will have some skill, and testing the limits of that skill (again, assuming we can't just expect the candidate to ever say "no, I'm weak in this-or-that area") in a limited time of an interview is hard at least on two counts: misunderstandings/communication problems instead of skill problems, and the need to wrap the obviously confrontational (instead of cooperative; it would be the latter if we could be honest with each other, but that's a pipe dream) process into something that doesn't look confrontational on the surface. It's indeed a "hiring theatre", and you need pretty solid acting skills and some psychology to pull it off as an interviewer. Of course, very few interviewers have the required combination of knowledge and skill; in effect, over the past year, I was able to form an opinion (good or bad, but at least an informed one) about the candidate's skills maybe half the time. In the other 50% of cases, I just couldn't pry any info about the actual skills from a candidate. It's like they're saying: "hire me if you want to see my cards" - and honestly, I can't even blame them too much! We're not exactly perfectly honest from our side, either, in the end...
Basically, I dread the possibility of being subjected to what has become the prevailing model of hiring in tech; I don't think I have it in me to either game the system or get good at using it, so the only thing I can count on is just dumb luck: that, at the exact time I will need it, some company will show up and either come to me directly, or will have both the process and people staffing it compatible with me by chance. If not that, I don't see myself ever getting hired again.
by klibertp - We had a process where C or C++ competence was acceptable and they would need to do some simple list creation tasks without STL. One guy was adamant about using C++ despite being assured C would be fine. It didn't look good when he new'ed an array and forgot to delete[] it when free() would have been mistake proof.
- Lying on resumes is very common, so is lying on job postings. It's a really weird arms race where no one is getting what they want.
I will say that I'm not surprised by this at all. I think a ton of people have been convinced that basically all languages are more or less the same, so they are confident putting languages they barely know on their resumes. "I know python and Java, how hard can C++ be?". This isn't a new problem, or even a "coding bootcamp problem"
I studied computer science at a small university in 2006, several of my friends went to a much larger university and studied Software Engineering
They didn't learn pointers back then either. They learned Uncle Bob Java and that was basically it.
- 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.
- Because it is really hard to reliably hire good people. Almost all typical signals & methods (CVs, experience based interviews, …) have very low reliability. An IQ test has the highest reliability according to studies but would be illegal in most jurisdictions. Plus, hiring managers frequently don’t know what they want or they believe they want something that they actually don’tby thesumofall
- The best hiring is generally expected to happen through referrals, so there's not a ton of pressure to improve the public application pipeline beyond the minimum required to keep it functional.
- Here's the secret: it's still just gambling. Elon musk isn't a trillionaire because he brought something special to the table; it's because he was able to perform the martigale enough times and he arbitrarily reached the top.
Hiring is exactly the same thing, even when trying to do it on merit, people are simply poor judges of character, ability and the rest.
Most of society is governed by people who simply kept getting lucky and kept doubling down because their ego demanded it and their last roll of the dice didn't drive them to poverty or happiness.
by cyanydeez - I think being successful makes hiring easier because you can source better candidates, and being big makes hiring easier because candidates are more likely to know people at the firm who can use referrals to work around otherwise broken systems.
It’s perhaps also worth noting that lots of companies used to copy how Microsoft did interviews and later they copied how google did interviews so clearly there were some ideas that those companies were good at hiring. (I’m not sure this strategy was that good. The problem for the Microsoft or google type companies is filtering out acceptable hires from a deluge of applicants with acceptably low errors and costs; the challenge for less desirable firms is sourcing candidates who are both high quality and not about to be hired by Microsoft or Google)
One company that comes to mind when I think about being good at hiring was one that recruited a bunch from my university around when I was graduating. Their particular specialty was hiring illegible graduates with a lot of potential (eg classicists, science students without little programming, etc), training them well, and effectively underpaying them a bit for how skilled they were (which only worked out because the UK has a pretty shit job market for tech and because those people liked working there). I think it was more effective for them than trying to hire the same computer science graduates as everyone else would have been.
- Because like a lot of things, metric of "What does recruiting cost us?" is very easy number to quantify so companies will attempt to reduce it.
"What does bad recruiting cost us?" is very hard number to quantify because it's just sand that gets thrown into so many gears, but cost of that sand is across a ton of departments and so measuring for it is very difficult.
by stackskipton - I’ve worked with places that have had HR bungle the hiring and places that haven’t. The only difference is whether it’s HR or Engineering bungling the hiring. Writing a job description that actually matches what you want is hard work. Sifting through 300 applicants that don’t meet the requirements or lie on the application form is hard work. Doing 10 30 minute intro calls is hard work. Desigining “standard” questions for comparison is hard work. Wrangling 2 rounds of interviews per candidate, dealing with people who are too busy with work for hiring is hard work. Chasing people for interview feedback that isn’t just “yeah seems fine” is hard work. And then getting the group to stop saying “we want to speak to more people” is harder than any of the previous steps.
I’ve interviewed hundreds of people over the last few years as a peer, hiring manager, and as a “bar raiser”, and it’s just a lot of work no matter who does it…
by maccard - 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
- There were phone screens before Covidby lokar