Comment by shawn-butler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shawn-butler | Hacker News Reader

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If I had the resources of a Google I would innovate a solution so that the interviewer can focus on the problem that she is actually trying to solve: determining fitness.

Compare this for example to the NFL combine. Or the amount of time and money put into farm systems, feeder teams, and scouting reports. Why not pay the candidates to solve an engineering problem and judge the output? I don't have the answer, but I'm fairly certain that there has to be a better way than stress traps and good-ole-boy networks.

I work very hard to tailor my interview questions to the actual background of each particular applicant so that they can in efffect ask their own questions and demonstrate ability (ala "oh that's interesting how did you solve that problem, and what if you did this instead how would that work in the design, here's a whiteboard show me, etc). It is very hard and I regret very much the "good hires" I have probably let go because they couldn't engage well with me or talk about their own experience well. This obviously takes time and effort so I depend on recruitment/referrals properly to weed out wastes of time.

Is anybody working on this problem? It seems clear google isn't and HR innovation is extremely profitable.

What makes you think google hasn't tried your solution, among others?

Google spends a large amount of time, energy, and money trying to figure out the best ways to hire candidates that are "fit", and tries numerous things (simultaneously, in fact) past "asking stress problems". The fact that most people go through the current interview process (which, btw, has visibly changed in the 6.5 years i've been there) does not mean they don't experiment, or use alternative methods. It's simply the most common.

You are correct, I don't know and was perhaps overgeneralizing based on the belief that the parent was accurately representing his/her experience as common.

What can you tell me about how the process in your experience has changed in the last six years? Experiments, even social ones, have little value unless their results are shared! ;-)

I'm always looking to improve my HR skills. Hiring is so hard. It's my opinion that one of the reasons it is so hard is (primarily?) because of all the subterfuge/deception involved by both parties of the transaction. I wonder whether the experience of successful dating services have any insights to offer? Seems like a similar problem but without the messiness of physical attraction to get in the way.

I would also qualify that as "Google spends a large amount of time, energy, and money trying to figure out the best ways to hire candidates AT SCALE"

There are literally millions of resumes being submitted every year, and the cost of a false positive is high (saying "yes" to a bad hire is generally much worse than saying NO to a fantastic hire).

The people adjusting the hiring process are those that passed it. It is a filtering system that picks out a particular type of person and reinforces it. I find it hard to believe that it will change in any way that adjusts the filtering system. People at Google might experiment, but it will be within the orthodoxies, e.g., choosing between hybrid or gasoline vehicles, rather than considering mass transit.

Err, no they aren't, because they aren't all (or even mostly, AFAIK) engineers. It's certainly not the case that engineering and other positions have the same interview process.

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