The burden of hiring software developers

posted by Jeff | Wednesday, February 20, 2013, 10:46 PM | comments: 1

I've had the unusual opportunity to hire and manage people on and off starting with my first real job after college. I think it's one of the hardest things to do because it's time consuming and expensive to make mistakes. When I first had to assemble a team in a consulting gig (I think it was 2005, for context), I found out it's even harder to hire software developers.

First off, check out my former boss, Jonathan, and the talk he did with another guy about how not to do technical interviewing. The irony to people who have had bad experiences interviewing at Microsoft is not lost on me, but Jonathan gets it. Obviously, since he hired me. :) Go rate up his video!

The problem in hiring starts with the fact that resumes don't mean much. You look for the key word matches for what you're looking for, and from there look at the depth and breadth of the experience. If it doesn't smell like bullshit, you move on to a phone screen. From there you further dismiss the fakers. By the time you bring someone in, I would guess that 90% of the time you can already be pretty sure they would be a good fit, and you can have your choice of candidates provided they like you and your offer.

But it's the screening part that is such a huge burden. The resume part isn't that big of a deal. I can get through a stack of resumes pretty fast and figure out who I want to follow up with. It's the next stage of the screening that takes too damn long and sucks the life out of you.

My typical phone screen is more about the gauging the person's knowledge. I don't ask them to identify acronyms like SOLID or DRY (I can never remember what the former stands for), but I can walk them through questions about language and object-oriented patterns and get a pretty good feel for where they are. But even if you're trying to get a faker off of the phone, these still take a half-hour at least, and that's not counting the overhead in agreeing to a time to talk.

If I bring someone in for real interviews, that's going to take at least three hours, including some time working on a real software problem with, you know a computer. I don't complain about that part, it's the screening process that is a huge burden.

Hiring people, even for something as technical as a software development position, is still largely a problem with human beings. Expectations are set, social contracts have to be followed and of course people have to get along. It just doesn't feel like it should be so inefficient.

First off, job boards are nearly useless. They're just keyword matching devices. The quality of candidates varies by board, but it's still not a great value prop. Staffing agencies add even less value, especially now that it's common for a person sitting in India or China to just roll through a database, making keyword matches, spamming people.

I've been talking with people a lot lately about how to make the discovery and vetting process more efficient. The use cases for smaller to medium sized businesses in particular interest me, since they might not even have someone who is technically proficient enough to make that first critical hire.

I'm open to suggestions. How do you make the discovery and vetting easier? Is there a technical process that could help?


Comments

Peter

March 1, 2013, 8:30 AM #

Hi Jeff

Quite agree with you on the subject. However as I had myself experienced it as a a job seeker, the whole experience of finding a developer's job is a real burden.
One new thing I noticed in my search is the tendency for a company to test people before talking to them. It is also a waste of time for a candidate, because technical tests should never replace the human factor.
I got a job at the end but it was with a company who use traditional screening and real one on one interviews.


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