Hiring is broken

If you care about diversity, don’t just hire from the same five schools

EDIT: Our university hiring platform is now on Product Hunt! If you’re a software engineer, you probably believe that, despite some glitches here and there, folks who have the technical chops can get hired as software engineers. We regularly hear stories about college dropouts, who, through hard work and sheer determination, bootstrapped themselves into millionaires. These stories appeal to our sense of wonder and our desire for fairness in the world, but the reality is very different. For many students looking for their first job, the odds of breaking into a top company are slim because they will likely never even have the chance to show their skills in an interview. For these students (typically …

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LinkedIn endorsements are dumb. Here’s the data.

If you’re an engineer who’s been endorsed on LinkedIn for any number of languages/frameworks/skills, you’ve probably noticed that something isn’t quite right. Maybe they’re frameworks you’ve never touched or languages you haven’t used since freshman year of college. No matter the specifics, you’re probably at least a bit wary of the value of the LinkedIn endorsements feature. The internets, too, don’t disappoint in enumerating some absurd potential endorsements or in bemoaning the lack of relevance of said endorsements, even when they’re given in earnest. Having a gut feeling for this is one thing, but we were curious about whether we could actually come up with some numbers that showed how useless endorsements can be, and …

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You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview.

In the last few months, several large players, including Google and Facebook, have released their latest and ultimately disappointing diversity numbers. Even with increased effort and resources poured into diversity hiring programs, Facebook’s headcount for women and people of color hasn’t really increased in the past 3 years. Google’s numbers have looked remarkably similar, and both players have yet to make significant impact in the space, despite a number of initiatives spanning everything from a points system rewarding recruiters for bringing in candidates from diverse backgrounds, to increased funding for tech education, to efforts to hire more candidates from diverse backgrounds in key leadership positions. Why have gains in diversity hiring been so lackluster across …

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Resumes suck. Here’s the data.

Note: This post is syndicated from Aline Lerner’s personal blog. Aline is the CEO and co-founder of interviewing.io, and results like these are what inspired her to start this company. About a year ago, after looking at the resumes of engineers we had interviewed at TrialPay in 2012, I learned that the strongest signal for whether someone would get an offer was the number of typos and grammatical errors on their resume. On the other hand, where people went to school, their GPA, and highest degree earned didn’t matter at all. These results were pretty unexpected, ran counter to how resumes were normally filtered, and left me scratching my head about how good people are …

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Lessons from a year’s worth of hiring data

Note: This post is syndicated from Aline Lerner’s personal blog. Aline is the CEO and co-founder of interviewing.io, and results like these are what inspired her to start this company. I ran technical recruiting at TrialPay for a year before going off to start my own agency. Because I used to be an engineer, one part of my job was conducting first-round technical interviews, and between January 2012 and January 2013, I interviewed roughly 300 people for our back-end/full-stack engineer position. TrialPay was awesome and gave me a lot of freedom, so I was able to use my intuition about whom to interview. As a result, candidates ranged from self-taught college dropouts or associate’s degree …

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