Secondly, and following up on my first critique, an ineffective hiring process usually leads to the hiring of candidates who are good at interviewing, not at the actual work. These are the literal “bad hires” that should have been sifted out by the hiring process.
There's no truly bulletproof solution to interviewing, because the needs of every org are different, and the skills of interviewers are rarely nurtured to the point of usefulness. Sometimes you just have to luck out and get a good interview.
Whoa, what triggered and justified that response? I don’t know if the parent was edited, but it seems pretty reasonable to me.
> Firstly, I have yet to encounter a company with a hiring process that is actually, provably, repeatedly tied to any of that company’s business needs.
What do you mean? Why do companies hire then?
> an ineffective hiring process usually leads to the hiring of candidates who are good at interviewing, not at the actual work. These are the literal “bad hires”
This hasn’t been true in my experience. Why would someone who’s good at the work not tend to be good at interviews?
I’ve interviewed hundreds of people and hired dozens. The number one reason for a candidate not getting a position is that there was another better candidate. More often than not, it has nothing to do with how good the candidate is, nor does it have anything to do with how good the company’s interview process is. After that, there is usually a large number of candidates that are young and shooting above their weight, hoping to get in somewhere with almost enough qualification. Occasionally, that works. I haven’t bumped into anyone yet that was great at interviewing but not good at the work, but like many companies, I’m using the interviews to try and find out if they’ll fit it, and if they’re truly interested, and if they’re good at work.
Nope, no edits. I'm not sure where the bitterness is coming from either, aside from the obvious that they aren't pleased with how recent interviews have gone.
>> What do you mean? Why do companies hire then?
Sadly this is very common -- the bigger and more profitable the company the more common it is. Companies often hire for non-business related reasons for several major reasons:
1. Bench strength -- Hire top talent before you need it so you are ready to fire when you have a strategic project. Ideally, hire away talent your competitors might hire. In many ways, this is a good thing.
2. "Burn the Budget" - Divisions will often lose budget if they dont spend it, and they may lose it in future years when they need it ("well you got it last year and you didnt use it, so this year you dont get it...") -- so many divisions will hire to burn the budget and use it just so they dont lose budget when they really really need it.
3. HR - It is common for HR to institute Crazy-8s policies or some variant of it -- where you only get promoted if you have 8 (or N) people working for you. Naturally all sorts of non business related tasks suddenly pop up and people hire just enough to get promoted. This is very common in organizations where promotion and pay is linked to non business metrics (how much budget you control, how many people report to you) rather than business metrics (revenue delivered, revenue enabled, churn reduced, traffic increased, etc.) Often your boss themselves wants to be promoted and needs 8 middle-managers 8 under them to get promoted. And so on up the chain. Almost half the HR departments in my ~20yr career institute such a policy, whether it is internally known or not. It is of course more common in organizations which are not metrics driven.
#2 is a gray area.
#3 is business burn -- when an organization "needs" to hire loads of people to work on useless projects just to align to rigid HR rules, the business has stopped to drive operations and instead operations are driving the business.