Hiring

by Roger in California

One of the fundamental responsibilities of being a development manager is choosing who to hire to actually do all the hard work you've been planning. On paper, this sounds like a straightforward, possibly even easy task: post an advertisement on a job forum, interview all the qualified applicants, and choose the ones that will be the best employees. Unfortunately, like most things that sound easy on paper, it's not so simple in real life.

In a city with a sizable job market, the first thing you will notice is that the breadth and depth of the candidates is kind of astounding, bordering on absurd, no matter how small or large your company may be. If you post an ad for a "Senior Web Developer", you will get all manner of response from all manner of candidates who are related, however remotely, to your field or industry. For development, this can (and usually does) include very confused people from marketing and/or SEO, a few recently emancipated interns or junior developers who think their 1 year gig slinging PHP from a Herman Miller chair qualifies them for a six figure salary, and approximately 15,000 emails from offshore and "placement" firms looking to make money off of your ass, probably because they think you're an idiot, or in HR.

The generally accepted Machiavellian calculus that governs who you do /not/ hire is concise:

1. Don't hire idiots.
2. Don't hire someone who will make you look stupid.
3. Don't hire someone who is overqualified and will quit out of boredom or frustration.

So now that you know who NOT to hire, how do you decide who you DO hire? Unfortunately, there's no concise rulesets for that, and I'm not even going to attempt to construct one. Instead, I will set forth for your consideration several of my pet peeves that will pretty much absolutely guarantee the rejection of a candidate. Now before you call me a self-important jackass and click the back button, give me the benefit of the doubt and see if you don't agree with my list.

1. Don't start answering the question before I finish asking it.

I'm not sure if this is a symptom of nervousness or naive enthusiasm or what, but at least a third of the candidates who walk in through the door interrupt my speaking abruptly when I ask them a question. Most of the time when this happens they end up motor-mouthing forever, which brings me to my next point:


2. Stop talking after you've answered the question.

At some point you have to be satisfied with the response you've given, or just cut your losses. I've tested this out to five minutes length, after which I had to interrupt. During that span of time the topic of conversation (or the soliloquy, as it were) went from experiences developing content management systems to the type of car they like to drive. God damn, right?

Some candidates will simply not stop talking until you interrupt them. I hate interrupting people, it feels so rude.


3. Don't question my technical knowledge when you're answering my question about a technical subject.

"I don't know if you're a technical person but..."

No, I'm not, I'm actually from the accounting department, here to run your engineering interview during my lunch break.



4. Take a shower, wear deodorant, brush your teeth.

Please?


5. Don't start lying just because I'm not grilling you aggressively or testing you on a whiteboard.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, especially when it's a 30-minute written assessment given at the end of an interview.