The Best Hiring Tip

<i>"CV's (people lie) and reference checks (everyone knows 2 people they like) "</i><p>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.<p>I believe Marissa Meyer over Zaki Mahomed(the author of the article)

So, the "best hiring tip ever" is a question that's easy to bullshit once you've heard it, and that puts people whose proudest achievements relate to their careers in the uncomfortable situation of inventing a response that dresses up the importance of their hobbies? Brilliant.<p>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.

&#62; "lame excuses like charity work"<p>Buzz off. How is this at the top of the front page on HN?<p>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.<p>edit: language.

I just got done doing a 4 hour long programming problem as the first start in the interview process at a company. In my long history of finding jobs, this is the way to go. It was a well thought out, challenging problem, and the solution really flexed a lot of different aspects of what a good programmer should be able to do.<p>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.

My experience has consistently been that the only reliable way to tell how good someone is is to work with them on a real project. Since that actually works, and nothing else does, I'd say it's the interview and hiring processes that are broken.

Meta point: There's mixed views on HN'ing your own stuff, but I think it's pushing what's "decent" to use such subjective headline as "The Best Hiring Tip".<p>Even if that's the title of the post on your own blog, I think most HN'ers enjoy a bit of objectivity.

You probably shouldn't even have to ask a passionate person this; at some point in the interview, they probably would've told you what they enjoy doing outside of work.<p>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.

In my experience the "Best Hiring Tip" is actually: ask the person to do the thing that you are hiring them to do (or a representative exercise), and see how well they do it, or how much potential they demonstrate.

I wholeheartedly agree with this man. Of course, I'm currently unemployed and would receive heavy bias from a person using this technique.

What 85 years worth of research says about who to hire:<p><a href="http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/selecting-talent-the-upshot-from-85-years-of-research.html" rel="nofollow">http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/selecting-tal...</a>

Although what about the people who, misguided though they may be, haven't done anything outside of work because their passion is their work?