Marissa Meyer was asked on the Charlie Rose show about Google's hiring process, and she answered that they had done the numbers and the only correlation there was between the hiring process and how well new employees worked out was their CV. People that had prior experience in the area they were hired for did better than people who didn't. Except for that there were no significant correlations to be found.
I believe Marissa Meyer over Zaki Mahomed(the author of the article)
1. The candidate has to be truthful or you have to actually verify. Also, its worth being very careful about exactly what is said. I have met someone who genuinely had 4 years as a Senior DBA. It was true, and his former boss loved him. But when I proved for details, he was the senior DBA because he was the only DBA in the small company and mostly maintained a system consultants had set up earlier. He did not seem ready to do new development or manage a major system to me after a thorough interview.
2. The candidate is straight out of school. While there are exceptions, most people don't have much of a resume at that point.
3. The candidate is making a career change. Similar to being straight out of school (in fact they may be straight out of school for the second time) they won't and can't have a lot of experience in that particular field.
Of course, 2 and 3 might indicate you don't want to hire them for a senior position anyway, but it does make using the CV as the primary determinant challenging.
His suggestion is to be applied on top of the traditional gauges of qualification to reduce the margin of error so that the truly spectacular individual can gain an edge over the noise caused by exaggerations.
First, most truly good workers, especially in the tech industry, aren't sitting idle for a long time, so they are often either being hired away from a job they already hold and possibly being asked to relocate. A lot of those good people will not make a commitment like that to you and disrupt their lives if you aren't ready to make something of a commitment to them. So, this might work well for entry level positions but probably less so for senior people.
Then there is the cost of dealing with them for three months or until you figure out if they are right. While this is much less expensive than keeping the wrong person on for a long time, it is still very expensive. Most managers want to try very hard to find the right person the first time not go through a whole series of short term hires looking for the right person.
In some situations this is a great idea (and what many companies actually do), but there are many occasions it is impractical.
I could definitely see this reducing the applicant pool, although a surprising number of people have been looking for hotels on their first day, and then live here during the week and drive several hours home on the weekends.
Advice like this makes me realize why employers believe that qualified applicants are so hard to find. If this is the garbage that passes for best practice in interviews, they might as well be sacrificing chickens to the gods of employment.
It seems to me that it would be both simpler and more effective to spend your energy trying to determine if the candidate can do the job for which you're hiring. Leave their hobbies out of it.
Buzz off. How is this at the top of the front page on HN?
Also, it's idiotic to to perpetuate the "rock star programmer" meme. All the great developers I have ever known would never consider themselves rock stars, however most of the biggest assholes I've ever known did consider themselves rock stars. As a developer, I'd never work somewhere that looked for rock stars, ninjas, or what have you. It clearly shows they don't understand programmers and programming.
edit: language.
most people do very little charity, and brag a lot about it. If you have hired people and seen otherwise, i'd love to stand corrected.
While it is true that people who program outside of work tend to be good programmers, it is not true that all good programmers program outside of work. And your note about charity work is outright insulting to anyone who has spent their free time helping those in need.
It has the added bonus of me thinking this might be an above average company and I'm more interested in them than any of my other prospects.
Even if that's the title of the post on your own blog, I think most HN'ers enjoy a bit of objectivity.
Regardless, there's no perfect way to interview someone for a development job. It's equal parts experience, your feeling about them, how they fit into the existing organization, and a ton of other variables.
http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/selecting-tal...
