How We Found Great Talents for Our Remote Company Without Spending a Fortune
blog.nightwatch.io
blog.nightwatch.io
Now about your form:
Why would I like to work at ... whatever your company was called? You offer remote (big plus) and perhaps you pay well enough. (opens the main web page) Other reasons, no - you seem to be spammers so the only reason I'd work there is money.
Coolest things you've ever done work wise? Legit ISH but you're filtering out competent people that did their job well at a boring job. Does writing a (admittedly pretty simple) kernel driver without having access to the hardware and having it work with (i think) just one modification count?
Coolest things you've done privately? None of your bussiness.
What are your prospects, dreams or expectations, career wise? No one in their right mind will answer honestly here, they will insert some canned interview lie.
The remote question is legit, but it filters out everyone who has worked in an office and got sick of it. Only people who have worked remotely can answer something meaningful here. Expect another interview lie here.
Btw my answer is "the most challenging thing is to pry out all the information you need out of people, and you need to be proactive about that".
Point is to reduce friction but not too much. (code this big function before applying).
I would add a salary-range too. As insanely cool the work may be, your kids/landord don't care that you're saving/changing the world.
Example: Coolest things can be in the resume, what would you like is usually the job-description/role etc, can you work remote (I already have x years remote in my resume) in same/different timezones .
Many forms double the things that already are listed in the resume (all questions taken from the form are listed in my resume).
I mean, I suppose it's entirely possible that "most companies" are quite pleased with their hiring process and the people they have hired, and truly believe there is no one better that they could have hired. But there's a pretty good chance they could have hired someone better... not objectively, universally better, but better suited to their actual day-to-day needs.
I'm not convinced you can tell that as well as you think you can.
> it's 99% certain that your next hire has a Facebook
If you are hiring a social media manager or SEO person (like in this article), definitely. I feel like hiring devs are often a different challenge altogether.
Note: I have an empty/fake account so I can access client accounts.
I (also?) don't have a facebook account and have, pretty much, zero interest in using it unless required by my job to do so.
This is called the Streetlight Effect[1].
I'm skeptical as well. I remember reading a thread (probably here on HN) where somebody was talking about "obviously fake" resumes where the applicant listed himself as an expert in 10 different programming languages. Setting aside what "expert" could mean to different people... I've been doing this for 25 years. I'm proficient in _at least_ 10 different programming languages, and leave off quite a few like Cobol, Pascal, and ColdFusion. I've had some inexplicable job application rejections, and I've often wondered if they didn't come from somebody who looked at my resume and said, "this dude's lying".
In my experience the single best free tactic for vetting candidates is having them be referred by your employees. Of course you’ll still have to look at them yourself like at any other candidate, but at least they have a direct reference you can talk to. If your employee is any good, chances are the people they want to work with/have previously worked with and enjoyed it are as well.
and that's because so much of why i want to work at a company boils down to the specific tasks and working conditions and the specific people i will interact with in that specific job. the overall company seems like a small factor a lot of times.
also it's hard to know much about some new, private, very small startup anyway. how much info can i really obtain about something that small and that private?
(for some reason, i always imagine companies want an answer like "Well, I've been dreaming about fixing bugs in billing systems for discount airline backend software since I was in the sixth grade. And since your company is the third largest discount airline backend software company in this part of Ohio, I just had to apply.")
It would be much better if they offered multiple pre-defined options, with an additional option to write in another answer; e.g. for the first question it could be something like:
Why would you like to work at Nightwatch? (select all that apply)
[ ] I like the product
[ ] My skillset is a right match to the position
[ ] I hope to learn new skills
[ ] I am the watcher on the walls
[ ] Other (please specify): _________________________________________While considering your inner motivation is great in general, it seems pointless in a job application where you can't just say that you're hoping to be reasonably well-paid to do reasonably interesting work.
Not in my experience.
Which word means "moving towards the state of no longer having?"
[ ] peacing out
[ ] lossing
[ ] losing
[ ] loosing
[ ] the greengrocer's apostrophe
[ ] people willing to debate standard comma versus Oxford comma
[ ] typos not caught by spell check, because they are also valid words
[ ] a homophone or near-homophone incorrectly replacing a word that would otherwise be valid
[ ] an obvious dearth of proofreading or copy editing
Empirically, I would say that the most optimized hiring strategy is: trial most, keep the better ones.
Funny, that's precisely how I filter candidates too. First question: "Did you bring your Facebook?"
I guess our visions aren't aligned then. Anyone into the sport of making money would agree that SEO is a good thing but the way you sell it to me I'd want to kill myself before I work for you guys.
Nightwatch, you produce market speak aimed towards the completely wrong tree.
Nothing about that sentence makes any sense.
Also “talents”?
After a few years of doing it, I think those fears are silly and it’s all a lot of overblown scare tactics to pressure us into cargo-cult adoption of what Google has done, usually through consulting firms that advise on the recruiting process or through new businesses like HackerRank, etc., that try to commoditize this fictional hiring fear.
What has worked for me is trusting recommendations from my existing team, employees in a company, or my extended network. I’ve also selectively reached out to specific users of GitHub, Stack Overflow, Kaggle, and other community sites. I will also travel to university recruiting fairs, professional conference recruiting fairs, and sometimes local meetups or technology groups.
I avoid opening up a job ad to the whole internet and accepting an undifferentiated stream of resumes. I avoid it not because it means I have to weed out “bad coders” or some nonsense — in many cases, most applicants are fully skilled enough for the job, and it’s just a big lie in our industry when people whine about inability to pass FizzBuzz. It keeps the incentives aligned towards hiring hyper-competitive 22-year-olds who just spent 10 months on leetcode and end up working for a lot less money, while nobody thinks about the impact on culture, long-term design or other expertise, diversity, etc. They just want the 22-year-old leetcode jockeys to arrange them as a doll collection in open-plan seating for VCs and investors to walk by.
Instead I an internet stream of resumes because it’s not cost effective to put myself in a position where I or especially engineers on my team have to scour huge piles of resumes.
I can’t stress this enough. You should not open yourself up to a firehose of resumes. And adding extra filters, like coldly making candidates complete a code test before they even speak to a human about the nature of the job is just a symptom of the contortions you have to do if you open yourself up to a firehose.
Focus on improving the useful signal of the source of resumes. Keep diversifying and improving this, and take on small batches of higher signal resumes.
If I could summarize what has worked efficiently for me:
- keep job ads short and technically focused on the intended job duties
- don’t open yourself to a firehose of resumes
- use technically probing conversation, recursively digging into really technical details of the candidates past experiences or studies
- code tests, if used at all, should be used lightly, involve no hazing-style algorithm trivia, and candidates should have options regarding their comfort and preferences (e.g. doing it on-site vs take-home, using their editor & programming environment of choice, generous time limit, and absolutelt nothing resembling HackerRank/coderpad/whiteboard hazing nonsense).
- Keep initial interviews short and informative.
- Use the max over a candidate’s performance in early rounds, and min in later rounds, explained below:
- In early rounds, always have more than one interviewer to get multiple impressions, and use the best candidate impression to decide to continue them to the next round.
- in late rounds, have many interviewers and use something closer to the candidate’s worst session to decide on an offer, but perhaps with some careful discussion to mitigate the chance it was unrepresentative.
- And of course always give the candidate a chance to ask questions and see the facilities. I would expect a candidate to absolutely turn me down if they aren’t allowed to ask questions, and why shouldn’t they? Especially if my company comes across like we care more about cramming in one more trivia question than about the candidate’s curiosity and preferences, frankly then we don’t deserve to hire a good candidate.
There really is such a woeful lack of Peopleware-style common sense in modern tech hiring; a lack of basic humanity or empathy to such a degree that it actually hurts business.
but then, further down, i was surprised to see the first tip about writing job ads. i mean, won't job ads pretty much turn on that firehose of resumes?
Usually you’ll still need some type of written job description for a candidate to review, and it should be concise & genuinely informative.
But you should choose which candidates to share it with (e.g. on community sites, at conference recruiting fair booths, or by email sent from a referral).
I didn’t mean to imply writing a job ad for purposes of widely distributing it— but I totally see that my choice of the word “ad” was a mistake. Should just be some type of infrequently shared written job summary.
If you don't drink from the fire hose, you're accepting the intrinsic biases of the lower-flux feeds that you do use, and missing the candidates that won't necessarily know to stand exactly where you are willing to search for them.
But then, if you do disclose your sources, and everyone starts using them, those eventually increase in volume and decrease in quality as well.
The problem is still finding a method to match high-quality employee candidates with high-quality employers, without getting swamped by any low-quality parasites inserting themselves into the signal and masquerading as high-quality for individual benefit.
Why not have some of the candidates vet each other? Give everyone a random set of N partially anonymized resumes, and ask them to pick the one out of the N that they would most enjoy working with at your company.
If you go with the fire hose, you have to pay the weed-through-tons-of-resumes costs, often including build outs of application systems, standardized portals and application/interview pipelines, third-party recruiter overhead, etc.
I would argue that even if the fire hose is allowing you more access to the tail of some candidate distribution, it is not worth that cost, and in all likelihood the best candidates would be reachable through other means anyway.
In reality, many of the companies that use these big recruiting platforms designed to wrangle an internet fire hose of resumes fall into two camps (yes, an oversimplification, but often useful):
- big corps who want a large pool of resumes solely to put downward pressure on salary -- these are the same companies that will ask you to do a 20 minute song and dance interview with someone from HR right at the start, which is nothing but pretense to ask about your salary requirements, and immediately reject you if you either won't say or say something too high. This kind of place right away communicates that engineering managers don't have the power to hire good people, only people who were cheap enough to pass the initial HR filter.
- Places that cargo-cult copy the hiring process of other, uncommonly successful places.
When you focus on cultivating a smaller network of places to request resumes, you do pay a cost. You do immediately prevent yourself from good candidates who wouldn't just happen to be in your targeted applicant communities. But this is life. Trade-offs. Do you know that this cost is worse than all the costs associated with the huge big-box applicant pipelines? I mean, people using those pipelines are still often heard griping about how hard it is to find candidates and how long it takes. My experience has been that the benefits of narrow, specialty / community focused requests for applicants work out to be a lot better overall, even if I have to endure some unpleasant costs to do it that way. No method is perfect, so you have to look at the trade-offs. And as always, your mileage may vary.
> "The problem is still finding a method to match high-quality employee candidates with high-quality employers, without getting swamped by any low-quality parasites inserting themselves into the signal and masquerading as high-quality for individual benefit."
I actually really disagree with this, and I think it just perpetuates the myths about tech hiring. In reality, very few applicants are "masquerading" (and, by the way, all applicants are in it for individual benefit). People seriously overestimate how many applicants are "fakers" -- especially because they will ask some asinine hazing trivia, like some useless question about esoteric data structure internals, and then when someone can't answer it perfectly in 20 minutes, they'll be declared a "faker" and the interviewer will jump on Hacker News and write some comment embellishing the situation, as if the candidate ran away in terms when asked to solve FizzBuzz, despite having 10 Ivy League degrees on their resume. It's nuts.
Few people are fakers. It's safe to assume applicants are sincere, and then technically probe them. If they can't speak with you in good technical detail about their experience or studies, it doesn't meant they are a faker, but it might mean they aren't the match for your role. Be nice to them, give them useful feedback, and move on.
But I can't even imagine how awful it must be to harbor such a cynical attitude that you need to be significantly worries about people "masquerading" during interviews. It really, truly just isn't true, not even when you do use a fire hose stream of resumes.
If you don't believe the fire hose is full of unsuitable candidates, and you can't evaluate more than 100 resumes, then don't take 10000 resumes and try to filter it down to 100 with outside resources. Just take 100 resumes to start with, and go from there.
The assumption that the fire hose is filled with low-quality resumes is intrinsic in your suggestion to get resumes from other sources. Everyone has pumped their resume into the big reservoir at one time or another. Not everyone has supplied--or even known about--all the various garden hoses.
If the fire hose isn't full of junk, why would anyone intentionally not use it?
Even if you can only evaluate 10 resumes at a time, spin the valve on the fire hose until 10 squirt out, and evaluate them. It's okay to have your search fail, because you can always spin the valve again to get 10 more. Even if your search succeeds, you can still get another 10 resumes from the fire hose. That's the whole point of having it. If people stop tapping that reservoir, the candidates go somewhere else. They stop putting resumes on Monster and go to Indeed. They stop using job sites and go to LinkedIn. They get tired of the recruiter spam on LinkedIn and go to Facebook groups. You're relying on the candidates you want to be surfing the same wave of signal-to-noise that you are, and to be fighting the same arms race of eminently-suitable-for-the-job versus oh-yeah-prove-it.
By the way, you may have misunderstood my use of masquerade. When you ask the job-seeker community for a specialist in X, then a generalist, or a specialist in Y may adjust themselves to appear to have more skill with X than they actually have. It isn't that they can't do X, but they aren't what you specifically asked for. The specifics in the job advertisement are themselves a type of filter that some people will work to defeat in order to get past the arbitrary filtering layer to the human evaluation layer.
This is wrong because you are presuming your conclusion (that fakers are the problem) already. Fakers aren't a problem, and it is the other reasons for avoiding the fire hose that matter.
But generally, I would agree. If it were possible to set up big box resume submission solutions and turn them off after a little while, it would be fine. There would be many qualified candidates. It might depend on exactly what specialized skills you need if hiring for a specialized role, but generally, yeah, you collect 1000 resumes and most of them correspond to people who can do the job, or who would need modest extra training or mentoring to do it at a high level.
You collect 1000 resumes and you definitely aren't gonna get 999 "fakers", and this fact isn't really the point.
The real problem is that you can't turn off the resume fire hose when your bucket fills up, because the existence of the fire hose is a political problem. You have to deal with HR having their nose in it, meetings and policy and bureaucracy about how to choose workday or greenhouse or some slick new start-up, whether to pay retainers for recruitment firms (who also might have perverse incentives).
Most often I, as the hiring manager, have no control over resume collection if it is done through generic application portals, online careers sites, or job aggregator sites. What happens is I get a weekly batch of some unreasonably large number of resumes, have to filter them myself or with my team, and then send back the approved ones to someone in HR. HR then does pre-screeners and comes back and says, "you can't hire any of those people because they all want competitive salaries" and we go again over and over, until 6 months have rolled by, my team is ready to vomit at the sight of another resume, and HR finally breaks down and lets us increase the budget, and we go back to some candidate we wanted to hire from the original batch of resumes, but they got a job in the meantime, and we repeat.
Your comment seems to presume that internet scale fire hose of resumes somehow doesn't get managed by a bureaucratic HR system, but that's never the case (anymore, not even in early start-ups).
You avoid the fire hose because it requires affixing a bureaucratic collection mechanism to the front that mediates how you are able to review resumes, and limits you from choosing the candidates you want.
You're right that if you could turn on the fire hose for some time amount of time then you'd move through qualified candidates very fast. But you can't by the very nature of the apparatuses you are forced to use if you use an internet-wide fire hose at all.
> By the way, you may have misunderstood my use of masquerade. When you ask the job-seeker community for a specialist in X, then a generalist, or a specialist in Y may adjust themselves to appear to have more skill with X ...
I actually think this is more of a symptom of bureaucracy as well. Companies don't usually create job ads for specialist in X, and when they do, they usually are not coherent, and the hiring filters are also not coherent. So the company creates a job ad for specialists in X, but everything about the interview and hiring process makes it impossible for specialists in X to actually get hired (from coding trivia to salary limits to impossible wishlist job ads claiming to want 10 years of experience in a technology that has only existed for 5 years, etc.)
The problem is more that the company is saying, "We define 'specialist in X' as: costs less than $150k, has 13 years of experience with data science, and is an expert with React" because they don't know what they are talking about. The job ad maybe looks like it's a data science position, so someone who would actually be qualified for the job maybe has 5 years of experience in data science and no experience in React because that part is totally a mistake for whoever created the ad.
Then some pointy headed recruiter gets the application and thinks, geez this guy only has 5 years experience as a data scientist but we wanted 13, and he doesn't even have experience in React, but it says right here in the job ad they you need it! This guy is masquerading!
Anyway, it seems like we probably won't see eye to eye on it, and that's cool. I don't mind if lots of people keep cranking on big solicitations for thousands of resumes, because I can keep flying under the radar and using different techniques to find candidates.
You use garden hoses because you can sneak them past the fire hose monitors and connect them to a tap in your team's office. Once you have tasted the water and selected an appropriate candidate, then you can smuggle them past the gatekeepers and get them hired.
But that still leaves me with the question: if I want to get hired by you, how do I know which garden hose to use?
I have seen sane, descriptive job ads that instruct interested applicants to ignore the standard application instructions and e-mail their resume to a particular address, with a specific keyword in the subject line. That indicates a simple filtering program, perhaps with an auto-reply function, that goes to someone not an HR gatekeeper. Some people out there are connecting their own garden hoses to the main reservoir, such that they control the flow rate and the filters.
If the reason you don't use the fire hose is because your own company makes it unusable, that doesn't necessarily mean that other companies--especially small ones, with maybe one part-time HR employee--will also make it unusable.
I guess it's a matter of words and it might dissolve our question, because the way I see it, "fire hose" == "people are often blocking or restricting the manner in which you access it". At least, that's what I'm trying to mean by opening yourself up to the problem of managing a fire hose of incoming resumes. The platonic ideal of a large stream of resumes that I can easily slice and dice of my own accord, in practice, doesn't exist and would be so rare as to not factor into the discussion.
You don't happen to be hiring around Los Angeles, do you?
What "price" range were you aiming for?
Companies too often assume that a) applicants know everything about them, and b) are keen to work there from the beginning. But hiring is a two-way street, and the candidates -- especially the best ones, and especially in IT -- can often afford to shop around before deciding which offer to accept.
Alternatively, you could use it in another sense ("He is a great talent," and "Our employees are all great talents.") Interpreting the title in this sense is slightly awkward but certainly grammatical.
"Define your company values and mission" 90% of these are tautological marketing catch lines, anybody with a brain will be able to smell the bullsh*t on this one.
Also keep in mind that their tagline is that they "create enterprise-level search visibility tools for internet samurais of the future". Samurais - enough said.
Second, I want to say that the 10% of a company's values/missions that aren't tautological marketing catch phrases are actually -incredibly- important, and can directly contribute to a company's success. The fact 90% deviate is more to do with companies not realizing how important it is to not just be marketing fluff, than any intrinsic value or lack thereof of having such a statement.
Fundamentally, a company has many decisions where they have to choose A or B, not both. Oftentimes these decisions are made at a level the CEO or similar has no insight into. To be able to ensure people make the right decisions and are all pulling in the same direction, a culture has to be adopted. Mission statements, value statements, etc, are the only tool the CEO really has to shape that culture, beyond simply hiring into the roles directly underneath him (which is hard to do without insight into what is going on beneath -them-). The Culture Code has a great segment in it about how Johnson & Johnson's credo (specifically, "We believe our first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses and patients, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services") led to its handling of the cyanide in the tylenol incident, which saved the product line (when every analyst was like "that's done, no one will trust Tylenol again"), as well as introduced the now ubiqitous tamper proof packaging.
Again, going back to the J&J case, placing their priority on their customers, their community, above their employees, and above their stockholders, meant that everyone could align in "We have to do what is safest for them, despite the cost or inconvenience to us". It would have been much easier to just issue a localized recall; they instead issued a national one. They could have pointed fingers (the addition of cyanide was, after all, not their fault); instead they took ownership over how to make their product safer. Etc.
It's not a catch all or magic bullet, but it -is- important to know, when making decisions, what to prioritize for.
Does every/any company adhere consistently to that? Of course not; companies are made of fallible humans.
But how do you -ever- bind a group of people together to pull in the same direction, -especially- when it's at the expense of short term gains, for unclear long term gains? By creating a guide, a set of principles. That's what a mission/values/etc statement is supposed to be. Not just marketing bullshit, but something that helps determine what action to take. "We're gonna be the best" isn't useful, "We're going to prioritize X" is; it's a guiding star to recalibrate against. Yes, it takes someone to point out when you drift, and corrective action to be taken, but without it, you have no hope whatsoever of staying on a given course.
Instead of doing the minimal amount they had to do, they took it a step above. It would have been perfectly okay, and business as usual, to recall in Chicago, and then to do nothing. Instead they did a nation-wide recall, and didn't reintroduce the product until they had a solution to prevent it from happening again.
I don't have the case study details in front of me, but just as an aside, companies can be sued and will lose if the plaintiff can prove they were negligent; for example, not taking reasonable steps to prevent tampering.
The one I always think of as good is "Move fast and break things". Not that it necessarily is a good idea, but rather that you can quite clearly use it to help make decisions like "do we launch now to capture a transient opportunity or later to ensure full QA?"
I'm not saying that culture doesn't exist but it exists in the decisions that are made by the people who run the companies themselves, they set the tone and precedent for how the company works and the employees take note and follow.
The decisions are important, yes. But the person at the top isn't making every decision. They may have the best intentions, but if somewhere down the chain of command someone is prioritizing the wrong thing, focusing on the wrong thing, but still doing their job okay, they won't be told to do differently or let go. Defining a focus allows their immediate superior to recognize they're not doing their job. It even allows their subordinate to tell the manager "Hey, our mission/values statement says X; are you sure we should be doing this?" and possibly fix it without escalating it (though if escalation is necessary, it also provides a reason to escalate it, and a reason for the superior to pay attention).
Corporate culture provides a framework for understanding why managers make the decisions they do, and for employees, peers, and the public to hold managers accountable for the decisions they make.
If your opinion is that the people who run companies have no constraints or influences on their decisions, I would strongly disagree with you. The Tylenol example shows the power of culture--it gave J&J leadership the license (but also the pressure) to set the correct priorities when making decisions on how to handle it.
There's a book called The Leadership Moment by Michael Useem that I really like. About half the stories in it pertain to corporate culture either positively (Merck) or negatively (Salomon Brothers).
A classic example of a difference in corporate culture (how employees contribute to quality) is illustrated by this story from This American Life:
To go back to Tylenol example -- reading the news at the time, it looks like the company was praised for quick product recall and good communications. All of those are top-level decisions, and I am sure CEO had insight into them.
So I suspect you are confusing cause and effect here -- the cause was top management's beliefs, and the effects were (1) nice-sounding credo, and (2) good reaction of Tylenol accident.
In other words, the company can talk all they want about "excellence in details" on their culture page -- but CEO can still say "demo is in 1 week, just disable all tests". The opposite is also true -- there plenty of companies which have mo mission page at all, but have the great code.
However, I am convinced that having values and employing them everyday can massively help to recruit and retain the right people, and, to communicate efficiently in large organizations. I’m talking about those companies, where in any meeting anyone can speak up freely and say such things as “We should be doing this. This is against our values”.
I think those companies will have a strategic advantage in the long run. And, for me personally, I find it much more rewarding to work for such a company.