<story><title>I don&apos;t hire unlucky people</title><url>http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-dont-hire-unlucky-people</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>The article criticises the unquestioning use of bad heuristics. One needs to think very carefully about how accurate the heuristics employed are at describing the unseen (but directly desired) attribute(s) as well as what un-desirable attributes it may be silently signalling.&lt;p&gt;As someone who worked at an investment bank, I&apos;d go ballistic when managers would turn away candidates because their resumes weren&apos;t properly aligned or formatted. The irony was amplified by the fact that we were not a client-facing trading desk. Here the heuristic used (resume formatting) did not correlate with the desired attribute ([trading skills]) but did correlate well with some undesirable attributes (insecure children more concerned with form than function).</text></item><item><author>brazzy</author><text>The article is almost completely useless.&lt;p&gt;It claims you shouldn&apos;t throw out resumes based on simple heuristics and stuff that &lt;i&gt;only correlates&lt;/i&gt; with programming ability because there are so few people applying who are any good, but has exactly one sentence to say about how to then actually find those few people: &quot;I grill them, hard, on actual programming and actual software development.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Right. Sure. Every single one of the 500 applicants. Good luck with that. Get back to me in 6 months.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s nice in theory to be super-inclusive about everything except &quot;actual programming&quot;, but almost completely divorced from reality.&lt;p&gt;It sounds like someone who, hearing about heuristic solutions to the traveling salesman problem responds that &quot;I cannot possibly accept a solution that may not be 100% correct! It&apos;s the computer&apos;s job to give me a correct answer, and I&apos;m damn well going to wait for it, no matter how long it takes! Exponential, schmexponential!&quot;&lt;p&gt;Heuristics have their place. Something that strongly correlates with what you&apos;re looking for but is much easier to test for can be very, very useful.</text></item><item><author>DarkShikari</author><text>This article is superb.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;We tried placing ads for ninjas, rock stars, and so on, but I discovered this was the cultural equivalent of advertising for white males who drink dry martinis. Not that white males who drink dry martinis can’t do the job, but there’s no real difference between advertising for a Ninja and throwing half your resumés away because you don’t like unlucky people. Either way, you end up with fewer resumés.”&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is so true, so important, and so many startups (and even bigger companies!) miss this.  Job ads provide cues, conscious and subconscious, to the people reading them.  Not everyone reading the ad is identical to the person writing it, and a badly written job ad can easily send the message &lt;i&gt;&quot;this company isn&apos;t for you&quot;&lt;/i&gt; to a large number of skilled potential applicants.  This applies not just to categories like gender or race, but even to personality types and personal interests.  Unless you really want a company of only extroverts, for example, don&apos;t write a job ad that scares off introverts.&lt;p&gt;In the canonical example, if you constantly ask for &quot;rock stars&quot;, you will turn off people to whom that doesn&apos;t appeal, including tons of good programmers.  But it goes beyond that: don&apos;t assume that all your applicants are any particular kind of person with certain interests.  A job ad should focus on what the job actually is, and things that are important to the job.&lt;p&gt;The best programmers often have a lot of choice in where they work, and as many HNers know from experience, if they see a job ad that turns them off in some fashion, they will probably not even bother reading further: they know they have better options, so yours probably isn&apos;t worth their time.  If the vast majority of skilled programmers skip over your resume, it&apos;s no wonder you only receive resumes from unqualified applicants.&lt;p&gt;In short, when writing a job ad, you need to &lt;i&gt;think from the perspective of people applying&lt;/i&gt;.  Use your empathy, put yourself in their shoes, rather than just writing what you think looks cool.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>raganwald</author><text>I agree with everything you are all saying.&lt;p&gt;What I was trying to claim is that there’s a relationship between heuristics and the ham/spam ratio of the documents being classified. When there is very little ham and a lot of spam, my claim is that false negatives are extremely expensive. When the benefit of hiring is very high and the cost of interviewing is low, my claim is that false positives are relatively cheap.&lt;p&gt;Given these two, my claim is that given current market realities, when hiring programmers for a mission-critical role the best strategy is to go light on spam-filtering heuristics and heavy on direct inspection of the ham content.&lt;p&gt;But obviously, some heuristics have their place. To a certain extent, everything except “Start work on Monday, there will be three month’s probation” is a heuristic.&lt;p&gt;And “This article is almost complete useless” is also true, given that it says in many paragraphs using a contrived format what I just said in two paragraphs, it obviously contains a lot of redundancy and extraneous noise!</text></comment>
<story><title>I don&apos;t hire unlucky people</title><url>http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-dont-hire-unlucky-people</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>The article criticises the unquestioning use of bad heuristics. One needs to think very carefully about how accurate the heuristics employed are at describing the unseen (but directly desired) attribute(s) as well as what un-desirable attributes it may be silently signalling.&lt;p&gt;As someone who worked at an investment bank, I&apos;d go ballistic when managers would turn away candidates because their resumes weren&apos;t properly aligned or formatted. The irony was amplified by the fact that we were not a client-facing trading desk. Here the heuristic used (resume formatting) did not correlate with the desired attribute ([trading skills]) but did correlate well with some undesirable attributes (insecure children more concerned with form than function).</text></item><item><author>brazzy</author><text>The article is almost completely useless.&lt;p&gt;It claims you shouldn&apos;t throw out resumes based on simple heuristics and stuff that &lt;i&gt;only correlates&lt;/i&gt; with programming ability because there are so few people applying who are any good, but has exactly one sentence to say about how to then actually find those few people: &quot;I grill them, hard, on actual programming and actual software development.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Right. Sure. Every single one of the 500 applicants. Good luck with that. Get back to me in 6 months.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s nice in theory to be super-inclusive about everything except &quot;actual programming&quot;, but almost completely divorced from reality.&lt;p&gt;It sounds like someone who, hearing about heuristic solutions to the traveling salesman problem responds that &quot;I cannot possibly accept a solution that may not be 100% correct! It&apos;s the computer&apos;s job to give me a correct answer, and I&apos;m damn well going to wait for it, no matter how long it takes! Exponential, schmexponential!&quot;&lt;p&gt;Heuristics have their place. Something that strongly correlates with what you&apos;re looking for but is much easier to test for can be very, very useful.</text></item><item><author>DarkShikari</author><text>This article is superb.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;We tried placing ads for ninjas, rock stars, and so on, but I discovered this was the cultural equivalent of advertising for white males who drink dry martinis. Not that white males who drink dry martinis can’t do the job, but there’s no real difference between advertising for a Ninja and throwing half your resumés away because you don’t like unlucky people. Either way, you end up with fewer resumés.”&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is so true, so important, and so many startups (and even bigger companies!) miss this.  Job ads provide cues, conscious and subconscious, to the people reading them.  Not everyone reading the ad is identical to the person writing it, and a badly written job ad can easily send the message &lt;i&gt;&quot;this company isn&apos;t for you&quot;&lt;/i&gt; to a large number of skilled potential applicants.  This applies not just to categories like gender or race, but even to personality types and personal interests.  Unless you really want a company of only extroverts, for example, don&apos;t write a job ad that scares off introverts.&lt;p&gt;In the canonical example, if you constantly ask for &quot;rock stars&quot;, you will turn off people to whom that doesn&apos;t appeal, including tons of good programmers.  But it goes beyond that: don&apos;t assume that all your applicants are any particular kind of person with certain interests.  A job ad should focus on what the job actually is, and things that are important to the job.&lt;p&gt;The best programmers often have a lot of choice in where they work, and as many HNers know from experience, if they see a job ad that turns them off in some fashion, they will probably not even bother reading further: they know they have better options, so yours probably isn&apos;t worth their time.  If the vast majority of skilled programmers skip over your resume, it&apos;s no wonder you only receive resumes from unqualified applicants.&lt;p&gt;In short, when writing a job ad, you need to &lt;i&gt;think from the perspective of people applying&lt;/i&gt;.  Use your empathy, put yourself in their shoes, rather than just writing what you think looks cool.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>timr</author><text>You know what&apos;s kind of funny, though?  I bet that a not-so-small percentage of people who are nodding their heads up-and-down wildly in response to this essay &lt;i&gt;think nothing&lt;/i&gt; of filtering their applicant pool based on github profile.&lt;p&gt;After all, it&apos;s a &quot;coding&quot; metric, right?</text></comment>