Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

There is steady, day-by-day interest here on Hacker News in what the best hiring procedures might be for technology companies. Some of us are in a position to be hiring workers, and many of us have been in the position of applying for jobs. The fundamental error in hiring procedures the author of the submitted article identifies is putting biographical data about the job applicant, which is just one thing to look at in a hiring procedure,

http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes...

in too crucial a role in hiring procedures. Don't screen out people on the basis of biography until you know what they can do for you. A job applicant's biography may possibly tell you what the applicant did for other employers, but it is a demonstrably low-validity way to find an applicant who can and will do a lot for you. The best hiring procedure is to give your applicants a work-sample test.

Because I posted the latest revision of my detailed FAQ for Hacker News on company hiring procedures

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4270768

just yesterday, I won't repeat all those keystrokes here. If you would like to know more, read the FAQ and follow the links to the references included in the FAQ.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4270768

But the bottom line is that most companies in most countries use stupid hiring procedures, because their managers are too lazy to do even elementary research on the HUGE prior literature on what hiring procedures are most effective (and most legal in countries that have laws about hiring procedures). In the United States, if you are looking for the "best candidates for jobs" that the submitted article here talks about, you had better be using a work-sample test as part of your hiring procedure.

Is there any literature on portfolio-based hiring? That's basically how people are hired into most research positions: hiring managers evaluate the research you've done, and invite you to interview based on it.

Interviews still are important, but they're usually not about assessing the technical ability of the candidate - that's already been established from their prior work. Rather, it's more: do I want to work with this person?

The github-is-my-resume meme is rather similar to this approach, I believe. I don't believe that one's github account is a resume, but it is a portfolio.

Anecdotally, I can say that IBM Research does well by hiring former interns. (I did two internships as a grad student before being hired.) That's exactly a work-sample scenario, and I know that it's often the easiest hiring decision for managers: they already have worked with the candidate, and have observed what they can do.

> Is there any literature on portfolio-based hiring?

From the world of higher learning, the emphasis on portfolios is well-known. The interesting thing to emphasize is that the focus is on long-term development - e.g. have you become a better researcher or teacher over time.

Remember, we don't want someone with 7 years of experience if those 7 years were spent doing the same thing, not getting better/learning more skills.

I think this is something that checklist-based interviewing fails to uncover. Behavioral-based interviewing (e.g. STAR) does better but it forces the candidate to know that this evidence of programming maturity over time is what is being probed for (if it is). Whiteboard-based interviewing is probably the best but it requires dedicated interviewing by engineers and there are flaws to it (emphasis on reducing false positives v. false negatives)

> "In the section where I describe the various courses I have taught, I include several sentences that detail how both my successes and my failures in one course led to improvements in subsequent semesters. I refer to this development in my statement of teaching philosophy as well, but in the teaching portfolio I can point directly to the evidence of those improvements in sample syllabi." [1]

> "In some ways, it's like a two-year-long take-home exam," says A. Mitchell Fraas, a graduate student in Duke's history department. When the system was introduced, in 2005, he and his peers could opt to complete either a portfolio or the traditional exams. Mr. Fraas chose the portfolio, he says, because it offered a measure of control and a permanent record of his progress.

"I liked the sense of being able to see in a tangible format everything I was doing working up to exams," he says, "rather than blurting stuff out in a four-hour oral and never seeing it again, or scribbling something down on a 24-hour exam."

Felicity M. Turner, a fifth-year graduate student in the department, says the portfolio gave her an opportunity to revise her papers and think through an issue until she was happy with the result. In the portfolio model, she says, "the responsibility is on you to formulate your own argument, so the process of creation is yours." [2]

[1] http://chronicle.com/blogs/onhiring/developing-an-effective-...

[2] http://chronicle.com/article/Portfolios-Are-Replacing/9141/

Let me give you a hint, look for big fish in a small pond. Seriously, there is so much unappreciated talent out there simply because a person has graduated from a university that is less than top-ten, or even, way lower. There are people out there who are smart who haven't traveled the tradition route to get there who are ignored and even ostracized just because they aren't from a top ten school.

There seems to be a binary relation to hiring. Either you graduated from a top-ten school or you dropped out. There are plenty of disadvantaged people who couldn't get into those top-ten schools for various reasons but are the big fish in their small pond who you may want to look towards.

Graduates from my top-20 school have done fine.

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