One thing to note is that he was hired by one of the co-founders. He would have never made it through HR or a middle manager.
Over the 7 years I've been working as a software developer, I've had many similar experiences. Not once have I been even close to get a project when talking to HR or middle managers. Every project I've landed was because I talked to the technical people in charge or to the owner of the company, even without the necessary credentials.
Middle managers and HR will always apply the "no one got fired for buying IBM" technique to people. CEOs and owners are far more likely to take a chance on you.
This is not necessarily a good thing. As a "middle manager" I had to ditch 80% of all the developers my bosses and company founders had hired before me because they were pretty much incompetent. I found exactly one "diamond in the rough" amongst the people they hired. (And by "rough" I mean the guy landed himself in jail twice while he worked here...).
We could function with a third of the head count in competent people. And by function I mean be more productive, make better products and have more fun doing it.
Taking a chance, sure, but in my experience CEOs and founders are not particularly great at hiring. Even technical founders are often too young and inexperienced to get it right.
Also, if they hire middle managers and HR people that only play it safe, that is pretty much part of the same pattern.
This is one of the greatest advantages startups have over "regular" businesses. They have access to a large talent pool that the regulars have no way of reaching. Its like reaching out and pulling in talent from another dimension while the bigcos fight over the only talent they can "see".
This is the key - a company this size is going to probably be able to review every applicant. A company like HireArt, which is focused on the hiring process (and asking questions of applicants by design, it seems), will probably eat their own dog food at least in terms of the hiring process.
This guy mentions his background, but does not mention what the requirements were for the job. Customer service experience? I'd say retail and waiting tables give you the customer service side of things in most cases, and you just need to learn about the company's product and how users use the product.
This seems like an ad for a method of hiring without focusing on resumes, which I also do support 100% as a practice.
Bingo, ding ding ding. This is true of almost any business process. Large companies have large problems, hiring is but one of them. As soon as a problem exceeds the ability of one person or small team to handle, a process must be implemented. And humans are generally very poor and creating effective large-scale processes. See All Of Enterprise Software.
Quality = Process Control = Effective Management. Large companies fail at quality because they degrade on the other 2. This includes hiring. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming needs a comeback in the western world!
Large companies can get these startup benefits as long as they have good truth-based management practices, which enable good business process control, and enable high quality results. But Western management is about individual reward/punishment and independence, which creates human-limited processes, which creates poor quality throughout the business. Hence the poor hiring decisions, and everything spirals in a vicious cycle until we get the top-down idiocy that is the traditional American corporation.
If you run a company—even a startup—don't go down that road. Learn about Deming, learn psychology and the science behind management, build consistency of purpose and continuous improvement, and put your business on a road to self-reinforced success instead of fighting the spiral of death.
It's very difficult to achieve what you mentioned, though I agree with you. Organization that can easily scale and keep itself stay at organic growth status? I don't see any example existing yet. Do you have some cases like this to share?
We also haven't put a man on mars, but we know almost exactly how we might do it.
There are a lot of barriers to this, most of them cultural and influential. Otherwise it is not difficult, just difficult to change our essential belifs about people and how they operate in a system, instead of as flawed individuals whom we can game and blame for our own advantage.
For companies who do this, the place to look would be Japanese companies influenced by Deming. In tech, many companies take on some of these ideas, but I haven't seen many that do all of them well. Also look at the Deming prize, which was given to companies who used his methods successfully: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deming_Prize
Thank you for your information. It seems we come from different perspectives but with similar conclusions, which is actually people perceive the same thing from slightly different angles. The last place I updated my theory regarding organization is complexity theory. If you are interested to have a look at it, this article on Wiki could be a good start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_theory_and_organizat.... Human beings are interesting creatures. Hope a different way for understanding provides something new to think of. I guess the evolution of organization in terms of how it is structured is closely connected with how people perceive the world and their value system. While this part keeps changing, there could be structures we are not able to imagine now. So the attributes of the fundamental elements, people, of an organization seem to be the thing to limit what an organization can achieve, just like you mentioned. Thanks for the discussion. I think I just got new ideas on this topic through the discussion.
I've been working in tech for 20 years. The key to getting decent gigs/clients is to avoid tournament situations (i.e. a conventional job application/interview process).
Conventional application/review processes can easily turn into "beauty contests": hiring decisions made primarily (or even solely) on the basis of who looks good on paper, who gives a good interview, or who comes across as the most likable and personable on the day of their interview.
Beauty contests have spotty track records for predicting on-the-job performance, but they're often the norm.
Ex coworkers. Last time I got a job traditionally and walked in cold to a job where I didn't know anyone there was in 1994 or 1995 don't remember exactly. Ever since then its all been "Yeah (fill in the blank) who worked with you at (fill in the blank) mentioned your name and the work you did with (fill in the blank) so I figured I'd give you a call and ..."
I predict I'd be freaked out to walk into a new job and not know anyone. I haven't done that in twenty years. I think I'd be lonely for awhile? I have some respect for people who do that, its gotta be very stressful.
Even noobs can kind of apply this via school classmates and to a much more limited extent physical meatspace users group meetings. Locally a makerspace is slowly bootstrapping itself and once its further along, I'll join and meet some interesting people soon (the pioneers of the group only meet while I'm busy at work, so occasional mailing list interaction is possible, although not in person).
One hardware job interview a long time ago involved pulling circuit boards of stuff I designed and built at home out of my suit pockets during the interview. The HR lady was stunned, and I was also stunned to hear that she was stunned. Admittedly I was bringing analog to a digital gunfight but still... they're looking for a hardware dude, and I got interviewed because I know a guy, but none of the guys you selected by yourselves personally own a soldering iron, and you're hiring for a HARDWARE guy? If HR screws up that badly, which happens often enough, if you can find any way at all to get in, you'll basically be the only candidate. There are probably ways for HR to do this with software, maybe HR ends up only providing java candidates but they actually need a Ruby guy and you're a Ruby guy and via an old friend you get interviewed, well, I guess you win.
I can't imagine going to work somewhere I do already know people. In the first 9.5 years of my career, spent at a defense contractor, literally everyone I worked with is either still there or retired. Many have not even moved offices since my original program moved to its current location 9 years ago.
The definition of networking is nebulous. Linkedin spam isn't going to do it. A salesguy where I work now, was a salesguy at our mutual previous employer, and I made his customer happy, which made his commission check happy, which makes him remember me favorably, which is how he ended up a reference on my custom resume for my current employer. Doesn't mean we're personally networked or linked or even rise to the level of acquaintance, but I do have at least some kind of reputation. I had a lot of people on the inside like that for my current job.
In a way, this makes it easier to get a job at a big company after you're been around awhile. At a tiny startup, its statistically likely no one would know me... at a local 500 person office, I am certain to know at least five current employees, even if by nothing more than reputation.
HR people usually know their dept policies are dumb as a group, but are individually smart enough to get excited for a "real" reference from a current employee.
...and if you solve this one be sure to write it up and let us know won't you.
For what it's worth in my experience on both sides of the interview panel you've basically made an 80-90% decision on a candidate in less than 5 minutes (probably less than 1 in most cases). Everything that follows is gathering information to support that decision and maybe, just maybe push on that 10-20%.
Dating coworkers / ex-coworkers? My wife and I worked together although by the time we were seriously dating we both had moved in to other jobs.
Another option is the obvious getting set up blind date style.
The coworker thing seems to work very well if everyone involved can keep drama out of the workplace, which is pretty easy if its actually ex- coworkers not current coworkers. The "set up by friends" thing seems to work only slightly better than "met at a bar".
Is anybody else stricken by the fact that the email seems to be too much like a boilerplate support email, providing little useful information and offering no real information about the next steps? Even in the context of this hypothetical exercise, the email could be made better:
- "we'll be contacting you soon" is vague. The client might wonder if it is minutes, hours, days? When should he be expected to reach back to Support if the problem is not resolved? "I'll be contacting you in the next X minutes/hours" would tell the client exactly when he can expect the next step to take place.
- the support representative could have added "call me at (XXX) XXX-XXXX if you wish to talk to me directly" to make it clear he wants to go above and beyond his job duties to provide fantastic support.
- the mail could be made more personal by using more "I", as in "I attempted to check with the members of my team, etc" instead of "the members of my team [...] aren't available".
Being too specific on timing is a bad thing if you're a remote rep relying on technical people you haven't spoken with to fix the problem
I thought a bigger weakness to the email was that it didn't gather generic useful information that might help the people actually equipped to fix the problem. It doesn't even ask the login name the customer is trying to use, never mind other any error messages, browser version etc. Asking those questions should speed up the tech team's work, and might even result in the customer trying something else which fixes their problem. Even in the worst case scenario - the information being useless and irrelevant - it at least gives the customer the impression they're being listened to rather than apologised at.
Since plenty of people that wouldn't be well-suited to helping customers with problems (unreliable, disorganised, lacking initiative, technically illiterate etc.) could also write a nice canned apology for an interview exercise, I'm more intrigued by the process after the initial screening was complete that earned Dylan his permanent role
"Being too specific on timing is a bad thing if you're a remote rep"
It is not. I did not promise a time by which the pb will be fixed, but a time by which a status update will be given (even if it is "I have made the technical team aware of the pb, they are still looking into it and will give a ETA for a fix").
Is anybody else stricken by the fact that the email seems to be too much like a boilerplate support email
Yes, I find that email profoundly unhelpful as well; it sounds like generic level-0 helpdesk drivel. The client was promised 24/7 support (and is probably paying for that level), he hasn't been getting anywhere, and is meanwhile losing money. In that situation people are past looking for empathy, here it's no longer "about onion soup, Obelix, it's about sesterces. About mo-o-oney!"
A competent secretary would have emailed something like "I contacted XY, who was supposed to be on on-call duty, but he is in hospital with food poisoning. I then contacted ZW, who is next on the on-call rota, he is looking at your ticket. His cellphone number is XXX-YYY-ZZZZ; he is waiting for you to call."
In a well-run company a secretary has no place on the totem-pole, he can run up and down and talk to whomever he pleases. Good secretaries are worth their weight in gold, bad ones, on the other hand are only fit to serve as boat anchors.
I'd be curious to see what percentage of the applicants were simply able to write a grammatically correct response. I'd guess it's fairly small. Many people, and frankly most college grads I know, couldn't have done better.
It was also superbly nuanced. Empathized with both the customer and the problems this was causing him, and didn't imply the whole company was out to lunch.
I disagree. As a customer reading that email, I would feel pretty powerless. Any response is certainly better than no response, but the answer reads to me as, "I can't get in touch with anyone, so I don't know when your problem will be looked at, let alone fixed, and I'll be in touch at some undisclosed time in the future." At the very least he could have replied, "I'll get back to you in an hour with an update". Even if that update ended up being, "I'm sorry, I still haven't been able to get in touch with anyone, but I'm still trying and will get back to you in another hour", at least that's something concrete, and implies an action being taken and a set of follow-up steps.
As a tech person on the team who would have to help the customer, my first question of the support person would be, "why didn't you gather more information, like the customer's username, error messages he/she saw, browser type and version, etc.?" Not only would that be useful information to help track down the problem, but it would also give the customer some actions to take that would a) potentially lead to a solution, b) make him/her feel like he was actively pushing his problem closer to resolution.
I'm not saying the poster was a bad hire; given that he's risen in the organization and has spent a lot of time there, I assume he quickly learned how HireArt's business works and what questions to ask to get solutions faster for customers... I'm just a little baffled that this work sample got him a job. Presumably it was the process that followed that the founders really liked. Maybe this was just a good filter that easily disqualified resume-spammers and people who can't form sentences.
I think the real value in this post is pointing out something that many recruiters, HR departments, and hiring managers should seriously think about: asking a candidate to solve an actual real-world problem is much more useful than most interview processes.
You raise a lot of good points, but given the constraints presented to the applicant I think that's as good as anyone could do. E.g. the customer feeling powerless is a true reflection of his being powerless as well; when it comes to this sort of thing I go for as much honesty as is palatable.
The "get back to you in an hour" ... not sure about that. You don't want to string someone along with a series of these, and in this artificial case he has no idea exactly how long it'll be before he can get back to the customer. Worse, if enough customers are messed up he'd be sending a lot of identical messages like that out, and for each reply he'd need to make a more personal reply.
The points you make about his interacting with the tech team are well taken, but we might assume the info gathering was already done (ideally there's a ticket system and he could confirm that before sending this sort of reply), and I'm not sure they're relevant for a first level screen like this. If the company has its act together, their next step would be to test all that with some of the people he'd be working together with in the future.
I see where you're coming from, but I still disagree. The last thing a customer wants is a reply that has no useful content outside of apology.
Even if he was powerless to help at that moment, the customer does not want to hear that. The customer wants to believe that they are being helped and that the person on the other end of the line is actively taking steps to get them there.
And those things are ridiculously hard to get across in the traditional cover page + resume + online "application" that more traditional companies would use. This was a great way to screen applicants for this kind of role.
Personally, I'm not super hot on the phrase 'necessary credentials.' As a pretty early, non-technical YC hire I think the idea of a required background is intimidating for a lot of people who could really add value. Sometimes the best employees are the ones who feel the least entitled - I wish they were easier to find!
Well done. Imagining that you're probably not going to the best candidate (on paper) but having the tenacity to apply anyway, plus being good at what the job actually needs, and, dare I say, being very inexpensive as you're looking for part-time hours and you can work from home is a powerful and heady mix that adds up to the perfect candidate for a start-up hire.
The lesson here is not to be defeated by your own (perceived) failings. What you think is a fault might not matter to a hiring manager. Don't fear rejection. Step up and apply anyway. You never know.
(Plus, if you hire someone like this, your startup gets a really good human-interest news story 18 months later. ;) )
This seems like not just good for applicants with weaker resumes, but for all applicants who are serious about a particular job. One problem with open job hunts in the Internet era is it's too easy to apply - applicants can resume-spam companies easily, applying at hundreds of places, and then the companies end up wading through a thousand applications - of course they'll just get discouraged and hire someone they already know. Making it a little bit more difficult to apply for a Job - cant just forward a generic résumé and cover letter - means companies might get only a limited pool if applicants, who actually want THAT job - so if you're one of those applicants, and it's your dream Job, you have a much better shot a really being seriously considered.
Yes, clearly it is the applicants who are fault here. What a nuisance they are. They just shouldn't apply to jobs so much. Maybe instead of trying to work they could try doing something else, like just dying.
I propose that candidates should purchase a big engagement ring for the company to prove their commitment. This will filter out the losers who don't really want the job. If the rock is big enough, they pass to the next phase, which is to fake an earth-shattering enthusiasm about how awesome the company and job are. If we are convinced that we are the best they ever had, then they can be allowed to solve our problems for us.
Maybe tokenadult will chime in here. But every time they have a how-to-hire thread he drops in a link to a meta-study outlining the most accurate predictors of hiring success[1].
The top two by far are general mental ability, and work task sample.
This guy did a work task sample and nailed it. Then he got the job. Kudos for him, and kudos to hireart for using statistically relevant hiring criteria.
[1] Schmit and Hunter 1998, Don't have a link handy.
Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274
FWIW, Elli (the HireArt founder) posted an Ask HN thread a couple years ago asking people how they hire, and tokenadult chimed in with the normal post full of links, including the one about work samples. Elli seemed quite intrigued by that finding in particular.
So this is probably not a coincidence - it's the implementation of some decent academic research.
Honestly, I'm amazed that email was enough to get the gig.
As an engineer who's admittedly not very social, I would have no trouble writing that email. Are standards for non-technical people really this low when someone applying for an engineering position has to go through grueling interviews, code reviews, and resume checks?
(I'm sure that he was a great hire, I'm just amazed that this was sufficient to even get an interview.)
I have a theory that due to long term permanent structural economic changes, there's a whole generation (or more) younger than myself who never worked a "summer"/"teen" job. This would normally be a bit excessive as a filter at that level, but he's probably their first/only/works independently customer service position, so they can't just hire anyone and see how/if he fits.
Most "big company" customer service jobs are up or out in a couple months on average, annual turnover ratios in the small integer range. So even if you make a mistake, as long as the hire passed legal, and the general firing policies and procedures passed legal, it doesn't really matter.
I think this post is more beneficial for start ups/companies/recruiters more than job seekers. The author makes a very honest observation that speaks volumes about the current US job market:
"I know I wouldn’t have landed this job if HireArt had been hiring using exclusively resumes. "
For example, I have been unsuccessful in even being contacted/screened by YC companies I have applied for, and in positions I would be highly qualified (not necessarily over-qualified). Example, I am an attorney with 3 years experience practicing business transactions and I applied to Contracts Manager and Legal Coordinator positions.
I often felt if I could only get in front of a recruiter/hiring manager and become a face rather than being just a resume in a pile that would make all the difference, of course companies can not afford to sit down with every candidate. Therefore, I think the author is right on point that performance based application is a good middle ground to be employed by more employers (pun intended).
I recently wrote about how eng hiring is not nearly as meritocratic as it could be. As soon as a company gets large enough to have non-technical people doing filtering, people who don't look great on paper end up getting cut before anyone even gets to see their code.
InterviewStreet, Codility, and Hackermeter may not be the right tools to test a candidate's skills. During the in person interview or phone interview, if a candidate is not clear what the interviewer is asking, s/he can ask questions. If a candidate gets stuck on an online site, who should s/he talk to? If a candidate does not understand the question, how is s/he supported to answer it?
These sites aren't for candidates, they're not intended to test a candidate's skills and they're definitely not intended to help a candidate get a job. They are intended to filter out candidates. If you have to ask a question, if you get stuck, then you buckled under the pressure and how can you be expected to do real work with bosses and clients giving you vague specs and yelling at you? We only want A players. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
But the corollary to this is that the industry is really not measuring or even very interested in skills other than interviewing-under-pressure skills.
You are saying that "not understanding a question" means "being under pressure" How so?
)!@#$%^&*( <- Do you understand what that means?
"how can you be expected to do real work with bosses and clients giving you vague specs and yelling at you?" Asking questions, communicating with your boss and clients.
I would love to learn what an A player would do in that situation.
Are there necessary credentials for being hired by a YC startup? I never had that impression.
Edit: Not trying to be snarky, I just wouldn't foresee the average YC company putting red tape in someone's way if the person demonstrates enthusiasm and value and the company is looking to grow.
Since you got hired by one YC company, even if you felt underqualified, I'd guess there are probably multiple YC companies out there who would hire you. So it seems possible that these 'necessary credentials' weren't real requirements in the first place, just imagined ones.
Very interesting and spot on. I've always thought that most interviews (especially at the corporate level) do a pretty poor job of determining who would actually perform well in the specified role, and I imagine a whole host of qualified folks don't even get in the door based on a variety of circumstances that could be out of their control...
This is a great story for the simple reason that ODesk was able to find a very effective way to "test" candidates, without going through the boring, repetitive, outdated task of checking the resume, doing phone interviews, etc.
Well done, and congratulations for your job.
I hope that many companies will be inspired by this post.
FWIW - in my previous company I/we tried to hire the best people for the job, regardless of credentials and I think we did a good job of it. I take that experience now and apply it to hiring for our newly minted YC company. Same leadership, better pedigree.
The Ask The Headhunter guy says this is the very best way to get hired: demonstrate to the hiring manager that you can do the job (and the author is modest, there was a lot more that was good about his prose than that he'd "used proper spelling and grammar", although I'm sure the promptness was critical).
it's better than any set of "credentials", which are a poor proxy for demonstrating this.
It's one reason lots of us test programmers on both simple coding (FizzBuzz or hopefully a bit harder, I also put some code with errors on the white board), and then, at least in my case, work through a design problem with them. All proxies for showing they can do the job.
Great Story. Stories like this give me back my faith in humanity. Often Companies are looking for the 20 year old senior with 10 year experience in the same job, they are applying for.
However in the startup world the hiring process you experienced at ODesk is very common.
Most startups don’t have a HR team to do all the personnel stuff. The CEOs and 'techies' decide who is joining the company and they are focused on your skillset. Can that applicant deal with our everyday problems? Which of course makes sense; they don’t necessarily need a senior or principle. They need someone who can get the job done.
I’m happy for you and wish you best of luck doing the job you’ve always wanted.
Soft skills are a form of credential too. I'd say it's one of the most important credentials you can have.
People can learn to program, learn systems and even learn whole languages. But often, they have the most difficulty learning to communicate empathically and effectively. This is a vital skill that, I believe, is more important than just knowing systems or knowing how to program.
The other stuff you can work on the side.
Talking to people on a humane level seems to be largely ignored or even regarded with condescension among technical people and I think that's really a shame.
so i had no credentials or experience when i got my first tech job. although my experience was at a AAA game dev. i became a rendering programmer which is generally considered to be a specialised role as well... this was down to a combination of personal connections, having a rock solid demo and knowing my stuff inside and out.
my experience there was that oxford graduates with 5 years + experience ranged in quality from 'gifted hard worker' to 'dead weight' with a heavy leaning towards the 'dead weight' end. literally you could have replaced some of these people with large rocks and it would have saved the company money.
being able to demo skills is valuable and should be expected during hiring imo, but sadly many employers have not grasped this in their interview and selection process. on the other hand in small high pressure teams avoiding bad hires is super important...
imo this is the genius of the test you were given - unlike almost every single examination and course work in academia, it puts you into a real world situation and demands a solution without warning (knowing when your exam is) support (lecturers) or cheat sheets (textbooks).
Congrats! Awesome story and very encouraging. As an employee who was hired based on a "list of credentials" I know how intimidating it can be to apply for jobs. I've heard quite a few of these cases where a company has diverged from the traditional hiring process and has had success and I think it's awesome. The current traditional process is definitely broken and needs change. Enjoy your new job!
Awesome story. I'm in a similar boat myself with trying to break into the QA field with no prior experience. I've been turned down from every position I've applied to so far despite teaching myself some Selenium and putting my tests on Github. I'm not going to give up my dream but damn if it doesn't get discouraging after having so many doors closed on you.
I feel like the title is little misleading or maybe I'm just bias and I immediately thought that he got a developer job when he is "just" a social media/helpdesk kind a person, which is a job that needs to be done of course, but there are a lot more qualified people to do it than there are engineers
He didn't have the necessary credentials for a tech position at the start-up, but he obviously had what was needed - not necessarily "credentials" - for his current position. Kudos to him.
Over the 7 years I've been working as a software developer, I've had many similar experiences. Not once have I been even close to get a project when talking to HR or middle managers. Every project I've landed was because I talked to the technical people in charge or to the owner of the company, even without the necessary credentials.
Middle managers and HR will always apply the "no one got fired for buying IBM" technique to people. CEOs and owners are far more likely to take a chance on you.