I am surprised by this "finding". Why would side projects not be advantageous? Don't side projects establish that the candidate is actively keeping up to date on technologies and is so passionate about it that he/she works on it even outside office hours?
> Here’s what ends up happening. To game the system, applicants start linking to virtually empty GitHub accounts that are full of forked repos where they, at best, fixed some silly whitespace issue. [...] Outside of that, there’s the fact that not all side projects are created equal. [...] While awesome side projects are a HUGE indicator of competence, if the people reading resumes can’t (either because of lack of domain-specific knowledge or because of time considerations) tell the difference between awesome and underwhelming, the signal gets lost in the noise.
It looks like genuinely interesting side projects are a good indicator, but enough people list trivial repos on their resume that just having bullet points on the piece of paper on its own isn't a significant indicator of quality anymore. The only thing she was counting for her analysis is whether or not side projects were listed on the resume, she wasn't taking quality into effect.
And I really support the idea of side projects, preferably on something other than a default Github page though.
Side projects demonstrate that a candidate has other irons in the fire, which is a negative indicator for dependencies on the potential hiring firm. Plus, developers are rarely hourly positions with a well-defined "outside of office hours", outside work may be viewed as a distraction from what they could be doing for the employer.
This is only true for very few companies (massive ones like Google). If you are running and engineering team of < 50 I think it makes a hell of a lot of sense for resume review to be on the engineers. 10 minutes a day of resume reviewing gets you through a ton of resumes (it takes me less than 60 seconds to determine if I want to continue talking to someone from a resume) at very little cost. You don't want your engineers handling scheduling etc., but resume review isn't really much of a time sink until you are getting tons of inbound all the time, which many companies wont ever get to.
And this:
> As you can see, “good” resumes focused much more on action words/doing stuff (“manage”, “ship”, “team”, “create”, and so on) versus “bad” resumes which, in turn, focused much more on details/technologies used/techniques.
Is highly biased by the fact that she was hiring for a web dev company. Resumes including words like "systems", "C++" and "algorithm" were considered bad because they received no offer. You don't really need the distributed systems guy who can write highly performant C++ and actually understands how to apply algorithms at a standard web dev job.
Example:
WEAK
----
- Responsible for development and maintenance of the FooBar software suite
- Skills applied: Java, HTML, CSS, REST APIs
STRONG
----
- Added BarBuzz feature to FooBar software suite, which contributed to 25% increase in product sales and winning 2 industry awards.But to a point it's always felt disingenuous to me as far as engineering goes. Sure, I implemented the BarBuzz feature. But a marketing person gave the idea, a product person specced it out, a UX person designed it, a UI person made it pretty, and all I did was the final implementation.
Did I really add the feature, or did I just implement it?
I wish Amazon had done that to me.
Also, of course as you point out her definition of "Good" is based on whether or not the resume got past her arbitrary ill-informed ideas of whats "good". Self reinforcing.
If there are people of non-English decent, I wonder if they would be more likely to have errors, especially grammatical, that are understandable. If that is the case, this may simply be a correlation to poor interview performance, and a bias towards the singular group of native English speakers, and that they may have let great programmers go.
Now, I'm not saying it is true, I am just saying that is a possibility that would alarm me when errors on a resume is such a huge indicator, and wonder whether that is not something they should be correcting for.
When measuring end-to-end, any part of that may influence the final outcome. If, and I am not saying this is true, if there is a tendency to have a few more errors (especially grammatical with it's its) in a non-native tongue, success outcomes MAY point to a bias in interviewing, or in how people interact internally.
Or not. It is just something I wondered, and something it doesn't seem like you've looked at specifically, and understandably as well, because who wants to open themselves to accusations of bias with their own data?
That said, I totally agree with your comment here that the preparation time available should render resumes free of such errors. They should be peer reviewed, as well. Problems caused by a lack of either indicate a character flaw to me.
decent -> descent.
Muphry's law strikes again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
The USA is more permissive of double negatives for example.
And this ignores the fact that some candidates will have dyslexia.
Still, yes, it's a sign that your own isn't top-company-worthy yet...
Or maybe the most naturally talented candidates self select into the bigger best known firms from the onset?
It is already changing that Engineers filter the resumes and not HR. Good startups do this.
Hiring -- especially for a startup-- is absolutely the most valuable thing, and it is a valuable use of engineers time (but only have engineers who want to do it and care about the hiring process do it.)
"Before I share the actual results, a quick word about context is in order. TrialPay’s hiring standards are quite high. We ended up interviewing roughly 1 in 10 people that applied. "
A non-technical person (yeah yeah, I don't believe for a second she was ever an engineer, that's vanity talking) is eliminating %90 of the applicants and they think that's a "high bar"? No. That's randomness.
-- Top Company.
I love that she thinks having worked at a "Top company" like Amazon is an indicator of success. I pick amazon because I've worked there and its in the news lately for being totally poorly managed. That poor management means the engineering side of the house is a total and absolute mess. Bugs I fixed in 2006 are STILL BROKEN. Because they were regressed due to mismanagement. The QA team that was focusing on that area is totally disbanded. This areas of the site has not improved at all, and has in fact gotten worse over the past 10 years-- and it's critical- it's product search!
So, they will hire people from Top Companies (and put them thru the incompetent HR filter) over better engineers with good side projects.
Great.
I wish more people could wrap their heads around this. Her process could be rolling a D10 for every CV she receives, then lighting the CV on fire unless it passes the saving throw, and she'd still be able to say "we ended up interviewing roughly 1 in 10 people that applied". It says absolutely nothing about the effectiveness of her methods.
I've been involved in hiring in the past, and discussed this issue with people having this mindset, even using this exact example with the D10, but I don't think I've ever gotten through. Some people will insist on believing that any highly selective screening process is automatically good, without any further introspection.
> having attended a top computer science school doesn’t matter.
Matters to me. Unlike in U.S., the selection process for college/university entrance is more effective in China, especially for top schools. I am not saying those from less top schools are not as good. It is just more efficient for the resume screening. The education system has done this much better than a short interview or resume.
> listing side projects on your resume isn’t as advantageous as expected.
Somewhat agree. It does have some impact, but I will read the code. It is advantageous for me as I can see his previous work in deep details.
> GPA doesn’t seem to matter.
Hm... here nobody lists GPA unless it's very high, and high GPA means nothing to me.
> having worked at a top company matters.
It does. Former employees from Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (BAT) are more welcome, for the same reason as the top school thing. The selection there is much more strict and cruel. But I often ask the question 'why you leave B/A/T while they pay better and are generous in stock options?'. The question implies my concern that the candidate leaves B/A/T for some weakness that may also have bad influence in my team.
The branding of top company is a double-edged sword. While you are enjoying the branding, you must be prepared to explain why giving it up.
As a foreigner (Singaporean), my own experience was those graduating from top Chinese schools actually is a dis-service to the whole team since those graduates tend to think too high of themselves, and thus are arrogant, slacking, demanding high benefits (salary, holidays, etc.), but their outputs don't commensurate with their attitude. Definitely there are good graduates from those schools and your experience may differ, but so far this is my observation.
As such I now no longer hire graduates from top Chinese colleges. Instead, those from second or third tier schools are more humble and hardworking.
No, I am not suppressing any salary. My staff (who came from a pretty not-well-known school) got a monthly basic salary of RMB25K, which I think isn't low in any standard, even in Shanghai. But I think he deserved every cent of it and I am happy to pay.
It's a well researched article, so I don't mind per se.
A candidate who worked at a "top company" was (probably) already prefiltered by "top company"'s hiring practices.
So the people with resumes so awesome that they could land an interview despite having no CS degree did well in interviews? Color me unimpressed.
2 more important questions: 1 - "Which characteristics are more likely to appear in high performers than low performers and non-hires?"
2 - "Are we over-weighting or under-weighting certain characteristics in our recruiting process based on our knowledge of question 1?"
Question 2 is actually much harder to answer. For example, if you find no correlation between GPA and performance, it isn't that GPA doesn't matter, it's that you're already weighing it properly in the performance decision. (It could be that you ignore it, or it could be that you give it tons of weight, but either way, the lack of correlation to performance post-hire means you're doing the right thing)
A new hire at a Startup can and should look more like what I found at lighttable, cf 'Meet the new guy': http://lighttable.com/2015/01/13/light-table-hack-night/
The progression from plugin contributor to new hire is measured in actual results and peer interaction, not through second order measurements. Adapt or die.