How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

Hi, this is Brooke, the original hiring manager. I&#x27;m new to HN so please excuse me if I violate protocol.<p>I agree, life is about treating people well. However, although I find hiring is probably the single most satisfying thing I did on my job, it was very hard emotionally because in the case of nearly everyone I don’t’ hire it is because they say “NO” to me, and boy, rejection hurts. But at least I have a job and my candidates usually don’t.<p>More later but first…<p>If my site is unresponsive there is this on slideshare: <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/BrookeAllen1/brooke-allen-has-a-better-way-of-hiring" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slideshare.net&#x2F;BrookeAllen1&#x2F;brooke-allen-has-a-be...</a> I&#x27;ve generalized my approach to hiring all sorts and describe it here: <a href="http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-people/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;88168&#x2F;how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-...</a> …<p>When I&#x27;m lucky enough to talk to programmers I&#x27;ll describe it this way...<p>I don’t want to be stuck in Von Neumann’s bottleneck so rather than me processing candidates in series with the question “Who do I want to hire” I take an OO approach and send a different question, “Who wants to work for me?” to my candidates so they can work on it in parallel.<p>Since hiring is an elimination process I let them eliminate me in the first rounds. I don’t say “no” but I have to take a lot of it, which can be hard on the ego, particularly if I judge people too early and start to want one person over another. Desire is at the root of suffering. (Any fans of the move The Tao of Steve? Formula for getting the girl: 1) Be desireless. 2) Be excellent in her presence, 3) Let her desire you.)<p>I try to be the most flawed (e.g. honest) but-striving-to-be-excellent person I can be in front of my candidates and hope they will be the same for me (and magically they are). If we’re not going to be who we are before we start working together who do we plan on being afterward?<p>Because eliminating candidates is the name of the game, I concentrate on the negatives and that way there are only positive surprised later. Arguably many of my “best” candidates might eliminate themselves, but I’m not looking for the best – I can never afford them anyway – I am looking for the most appropriate for my budget, which I state early on and is almost never subject to negotiation. You cannot increases your desirability to offer to work for less, and if you are worth more than I can afford than I’m sorry, but I cannot afford you.<p>I want what I call hidden talent; those good at doing a job but bad at getting one. After all, the last thing I want you to be good at on my job is getting the next one. I&#x27;ll help you find a better job before I hire you because afterward we&#x27;ve got to hunker down and get some friggin&#x27; work done.<p>Because I form an intentional temporary community of my candidates, and task them with something hard but meaningful that benefits them (like learning a new skill and&#x2F;or helping each other find work) then by the time I say “yes” to someone everyone else agrees with the decision. In fact, in 10 years only once did a person tell me he thought I had made a mistake by not hiring him and the other candidates were so outraged they jumped all over him and one – who happened to be a lawyer – offered to defend me pro bono if he tried any funny business.<p>I never heard from him again but it is my great pleasure to say he is an exception in that regard and I count a few of the people I haven’t hired among my friends. This is a wonderful side-benefit because as I get older it is harder to make new friends, and it is certainly unwise to treat employees as friends as some do.<p>I seldom tell individual candidates what they did wrong, not because I am shy, but because it can be hard to take and I’m fairly tactless. However, I will offer a class on how to find work in which I anonymize specifics enough so as to benefit those who can identify themselves. Also, most people don’t do anything seriously wrong other than be unqualified or unlucky; no shame in that.<p>More later, if you’re interested.<p>After 30 years I’ve retired from the capital markets and they will do fine without me, but the markets for human capital are severely broken. Because I’m not ready to die, stop working, or give up on having a life&#x27;s purpose, if you would like me to help you crack this nut then please do not hesitate in contacting me.

I&#x27;ve done a LOT of interviewing, recruiting and ultimately a lot of saying &quot;no&quot; to people.<p>Over the years I&#x27;ve landed on a series of personal rules on how to do just that.<p>1. Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve 2. Always let people down gently reinforcing positive notions as well, you never know what state of mind they are in. 3. Always respond to requests for more information<p>This takes me a lot of time in my professional life, but it&#x27;s making me a happier person. Ultimately, it&#x27;s people&#x27;s lives you&#x27;re dealing with. You don&#x27;t owe anyone anything, but life is about treating people well.

The first time I got a front page link to my site on HN, it did this exact same thing, which prompted me to move away from Wordpress. Static HTML ever since.<p>But to comment on the article, I think this is a fantastic idea. I do wonder though how he found so many enthusiastic people. Maybe it&#x27;s just a new era, but I have a hard time finding people who even want to do a 1 hour coding challenge. He got these folks who were willing to learn something, and build and spend DAYS on it? It&#x27;s awesome but it seems unlikely these days.<p>Taking that kind of time to choose the right person, then helping the other people network with other APL folks... that just spreads good vibes all around. I would like to see the &quot;care more&quot; trend spread in our industry. Even now with a programmer shortage companies are still unicorn hunting and making people jump through stupid hoops for jobs.

This story reminds me of how broken software engineer interviewing is. Imagine if a company decided to hire software engineers by giving them five 6-sided dice. Then they have to come to the company building and roll each dice once every hour. And during that hour they have to dance and sing in front of someone while being recorded. If they roll all 6 on all 5 dice, their dancing and singing will be judged by the committee! And if the committee likes their performance they might get the job! The acceptance rate is 0.01%, the company is so elite. And this company is also complaining about a software engineer shortage. They wish they could find more good engineers!<p>It&#x27;s pretty obvious which company (or group of companies) I&#x27;m referring to. The interviewing process of these companies has done great harm to the software industry. And now they&#x27;re trying to do further harm by using it as an excuse to get cheap foreign labor to reduce salaries.

I wonder how much of this kind of thinking can be traced back to a persistent startup-culture problem: the delusion that the people who work for you are, or even <i>should be</i>, your friends.<p>If that&#x27;s the lens you&#x27;re looking at candidates through -- as people auditioning to be your friend -- of <i>course</i> you&#x27;d feel you&#x27;re obligated to help them through their job search! That&#x27;s what friends do for each other.<p>But the people who work for you -- and even more so, the people who have only <i>applied</i> to work for you -- are <i>not your friends.</i> You can (and should!) be friendly with them, of course; but you can&#x27;t have a real, true friendship with them, because you have power over their lives that they don&#x27;t have over yours.<p>Moreover, if you try to just ignore that power differential and relate to your employees like they&#x27;re your old dorm buddies, all you&#x27;ll find is that the power differential poisons the relationship. They&#x27;ll constantly be second-guessing their own reactions to you, out of fear of negative job consequences. You&#x27;ll constantly be second-guessing <i>your</i> own reactions to <i>them</i>, out of fear of appearing to play favorites. And they&#x27;ll all be second-guessing <i>each others&#x27;</i> reactions to <i>you,</i> out of fear of someone brown-nosing their way past them on the career ladder.<p>It&#x27;s the same reason why it&#x27;s always a bad idea to date someone who reports to you -- you can never have the kind of relationship with them you have with someone outside the hierarchy you sit at the top of. Suspicion and jealousy and gamesmanship taint it from the moment it begins.<p>The solution to all these problems is to learn, understand, and internalize the distinction between <i>colleagues</i> and <i>friends</i> -- two groups of people you owe very different things to -- and then act accordingly.

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Hi, this is Brooke, author of the original story.<p>Wow, other than the grief I&#x27;m going to get from my ISP I&#x27;m so glad to see all this and when I get a chance over the next few days I&#x27;d like to add more.<p>Some quickies: I&#x27;ve generalized this approach and talk about it in a Quartz article: <a href="http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-people/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;88168&#x2F;how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-...</a>

When you hire for a <i>person</i>, you find that personality traits are much more important than what an applicant has done in the past, including passion, drive, etc.<p>When you hire to fill a position, all this goes out the window the applicant goes into the hiring lottery pool to maybe get an interview, and then the traditional &quot;You could totally goog this IRL, but I&#x27;m going to hire you based off your memory&quot; type of hiring.

To generalize the point a bit:<p>I don&#x27;t think enough companies are doing enough to help the ecosystem.<p>Like foresters chopping down the Amazon, or fishers taking the last fish from the ocean, they want to harvest good talent and then stick them in jobs where they can be a cog in the wheel it is hard to grow. They expect other companies to have given them the training or perfect relevant experience.<p>And then we hear complaints there there is a shortage of hackers etc.!

So unless I&#x27;m reading the cached text wrongly 38 people read the given manual and answered programming questions based on it. They then met informally. Lets say they burnt a day on this.<p>27 of those people then suggested being taught how to program in APL (after building a classroom). I&#x27;m assuming anyone who didnt want to attend got cut. 3 additional days spent.<p>They were then given 3 weeks to solve some difficult problems. Estimating they spent 4 days solving those problems.<p>They then re-met and were interviewed. Another day spent.<p>So to get to the end a candidate had to spend best part of two work weeks doing nothing but learning and programming an obscure language. No time for interviewing elsewhere, earning a wage, or attending college classes.<p>I would really hope he cared about the majority of the candidates who spent so much of their own time and money to be rejected with nothing to show for it. Most companies would have interviewed a couple of times, given a few hours of programming&#x2F;aptitude testing and made a decision as to whether to hire the person (and teach them the job while paying them a fair wage).<p>Feel free to vote down if I&#x27;m getting this all wrong or an being overly cynical.

This hiring process is great, but requires lots of time, for the applicants and especially for the hiring manager - I suspect the author was targeting unemployed people, so they would have time for this long application (he put his job advert on the New York Times). To be honest, that is what surprised me the most in this article: that someone who runs a statistical arbitrage desk has the time for all of this.<p>I wonder if companies could collaborate to create this hiring process. It would save hiring manager&#x27;s time, applicants&#x27; time since one application will count for different jobs, and then a system could be set for candidates to rank their employees, then the candidate who performs the best get his first wish, the second candidate gets is first wish if there is still room, otherwise he gets his second wish, and so on - a similar system is being used in France for students to chose in which universities they want to go after competitive exam entrance, basically lots of universities pool exams together.<p>On one hand it would scale hiring process, on the other hand it&#x27;s not flexible and offers have to be transparent (it&#x27;s currently not the case but maybe that would be a good thing), and it would hurt the pride of companies who are ranked in the last position.<p>In the case of the article, I am sure someone who is able to solve in a language he recently learn the non trivial software that are mentioned will be able to land a job at some point. It was written in 2004, maybe Github, Stackoverflow and Open Source in general are now contributing to that selection.

Money quote : <i>&quot;I started No Shortage of Work to encourage my unemployed friends to re-frame their status not as a disaster but as an opportunity to explore new vistas.&quot;</i><p>This is something which people often forget, is that learning needs to happen life long, it isn&#x27;t a &#x27;did college, check that box.&#x27; kind of thing, its about always learning. Its the first thing I check for when I look at people to hire.

Hey, other then the grief I&#x27;m going to get from my ISP this is great that you&#x27;re interested.<p>While we figure out how to get my site working again, I wrote this in quartz: <a href="http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-people/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;88168&#x2F;how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-...</a><p>and this for Science Magazine: <a href="http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2007_11_16/caredit.a0700163" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sciencecareers.sciencemag.org&#x2F;career_magazine&#x2F;previou...</a><p>And there is this Slideshare: <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/BrookeAllen1/brooke-allen-has-a-better-way-of-hiring" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slideshare.net&#x2F;BrookeAllen1&#x2F;brooke-allen-has-a-be...</a>

How bad can it get? Several years ago I had a Russian team lead at a software company who ate code for breakfast (clearly the top guy amongst over 100 coders) and had excellent leadership qualities.<p>Later, when the financial crisis hit he was out of work and I found out that he was really bad at interviews. Ever since I&#x27;ve wondered if I was hiring would I be able the spot the diamond in the rough where evidently, very few companies&#x2F;people can. I&#x27;m still not sure.

I sometimes consult to clients on improving their hiring process. Candidate experience is now a topic that at least some companies consider.<p>This isn&#x27;t your typical candidate experience - applying for a vague job ad, being asked to answer 6 puzzle questions, invite to an open house, two days of free training and then left alone for three weeks, followed by a vote by the tribe to see who will get the job.<p>It&#x27;s definitely a plus that many of the students were hired elsewhere, but this is likely a method that would only appeal to the unemployed. I hear quite a bit of negative feelings towards companies that ask for extensive amounts of time commitment during the hiring process, and this is probably the highest level I remember.<p>If most companies asked candidates to go through this process, I expect they would want (and feel entitled to) some explanation at the end of the process.

In the US are there legal reasons why employers generally are tight-lipped about why a candidate didn&#x27;t get hired?

I have mixed feelings about this.<p>It&#x27;s easy to see what&#x27;s to love: an open, honest, and collaborative hiring process with a boss willing to train employees. Awesome!<p>But he also got about 30 people to spend four weeks building trading software for him. Collectively that&#x27;s over two years of uncompensated work, the results of which the hiring manager may use for free. And from the perspective of the applicant, how many applications could they complete in a year if all were so time intensive? 12? 24? I suspect many top applicants would avoid this process entirely.

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This is quite similar to how we hire Ruby on Rails developers. We organise two-weeks long Bootcamp where we train people in Rails. At the end we offer some of them to join us as junior developers, with further training during next year. Those who are not hired still win—they receive two weeks of training which helps them find jobs elsewhere. We’ve had some fantastic hires this way over the past two years.<p>This article made my think that maybe we can do better and provide more assistance to those we do not hire after Bootcamp.<p>More details about our Bootcamps are available at <a href="http://pilot.co/bootcamp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pilot.co&#x2F;bootcamp</a>.

<p><pre><code> So, here is my answer to the question, &quot;What do we owe the people who we do not hire?&quot; - Information on where they stand. - An explanation of what they are doing wrong. - Help improving. </code></pre> Things you will never get from companies like Google.

The best example I&#x27;ve seen for putting together a team comes from my high school football team. Instead of tryouts, they let anyone play who wants to play. The best players excel from day one, but the crappy players quit after a few days. The coach never says to a player &quot;we&#x27;ve decided you aren&#x27;t good enough, so you&#x27;re off the team&quot;. It was each players decision that they came to themselves to leave the team.<p>The guy in the article pretty takes the same approach. I&#x27;ve always felt the best way to interview engineers is to go over installing the company&#x27;s development environment on their machine. In other words, there is no evaluation, just expectation of results.

&quot;So, here is my answer to the question, “What do we owe the people who we do not hire?”<p><pre><code> 1. Information on where they stand. 2. An explanation of what they are doing wrong. 3. Help improving.&quot; </code></pre> Nope! You don&#x27;t owe them those things. Good for the author that they tried it and it worked out, but it&#x27;s not a general rule.<p>Everything works smoother in lots of different parts of life if all parties understand the concept of a Clean No. Not &quot;You can say No but then you still owe me such and such&quot;. Just &quot;No.&quot; Anything beyond that is a gift.

FutureAdvisor&#x27;s in-house recruiter here.<p>I recently ran a hiring event in San Francisco with Brooke called Staffup Weekend. Brooke is one of the smartest, hardest-working and most generous people I know. I read the post linked to above last fall, and worked with him to bring jobseekers together to work on meaningful projects. The event was called Staffup Weekend, and it was held in the Chron building on Mission and 5th.<p>Our hypothesis was: The only thing that correlates with performance is performance. Everything else -- degrees, pedigrees, buzzwords, interview skills -- are a waste of time. About 20 people worked through the weekend to create various apps. They made wonderful things: one was a Chrome extension that gives you the emails of the founders of the company web pages you visit. Another was a LinkedIn 2.0 for people who wanted to feature their work and themselves. We made 8 interview offers and one hire from the weekend, and I think everyone involved came away feeling like it was worth it. Write me if you&#x27;re curious to learn more: chris.nicholson@futureadvisor.com

I interviewed an engineer today. Probably a lot of companies would not hire him. He was not that great. I said &quot;Yes&quot; because I noticed a passion and a huge desire to learn and grow. We&#x27;ll see if that was a mistake or not.

I attended a bootcamp at ArsDigita on building database backed web applications back in 1999. I don&#x27;t recall now if it was two weeks or three, but the things I learned in that short time have been useful in almost every job I&#x27;ve had since. Just knowing my way around Oracle an PL&#x2F;SQL landed me a position at a telecom. The bootcamp was free, and at the end of the bootcamp after a code review I was offered an interview. I declined because I didn&#x27;t want to live in Boston. I realize that Philips motives weren&#x27;t entirely altruistic but I am sincerely thankful that he took this approach to staffing up.

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The real solution here is not to interview people, but to discover people OUTSIDE of a hiring scenario, and recruit them after you&#x27;ve determined they would be a great fit (inverting the game). It&#x27;s just unfortunate that it is much more effort to invest as the employer, but it is essentially the best way for everybody involved.

As a job seeker having recently completed a web dev bootcamp (with no prior experience), how might I go about getting my first tech job? Or, taking a step back, my first interview? I find it frustrating that entry-level positions seek people with years of experience.

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This sounds like the job search from hell. Let&#x27;s break down this trainwreck:<p>1. The guy posts a vauge help-wanted ad that implies no experience is required. Then he&#x27;s surprised that 300 people applied and none had relevant experience.<p>2. He asks applicants to read a 500 page manual, then solve some programming puzzles. With no pay. As if the applicants have nothing better to do.<p>In the rest of the story, the guy does a nice thing for the remaining applicants. But why does he ask candidates to jump through so many hoops for this job, especially when, as he states in the ad, experience is not required. Not every unemployed person has the time to read a manual, waste time solving puzzles, or attending a class with no guarantee of employment. Some of them <i>really need jobs</i>. Some of them have bills to pay. Some of them have other opportunities, and can&#x27;t afford to put their life on hold while you make up your mind.

Or &quot;How my life improved once I started making friends&quot;

&quot;Resource Limit Is Reached&quot;<p>this is how

brilliant!