Hiring is Broken… And It Isn’t Worth Fixing
Usually I fly home from client sites late in the day, but the whims of fate had me driving home instead, early (for me, anyway) this morning. The end result was a pocket of uncommon free time this evening, before resuming long days and seemingly non-stop travel on the morrow. Naturally, I wasted this free time poking around the internet.
My travels led me, via Twitter, to this blog post entitled, “F*** You, I Quit — Hiring Is Broken.” Apparently, this led to some heated, sometimes-angsty debate on Hacker News, where the original piece earned a good number of points. And, why wouldn’t it? “Hiring is broken” would serve as a rallying cry for those who don’t play the interview game well, while seeming a shot across the bow of those who do and are now on the other side of it.
Read the article, please. You need to for context, because when I reference it further, it’ll just be a reductionist tl;dr. I’ll come back to that. First, I’d like to address one of the few points that almost everyone seems to agree on, before they get down to armchair dissection of Sahat’s character and market worth.
The hiring process is imperfect deeply flawed (if not broken), but no one knows how to fix it.
Except, that’s not actually true, because I know how to fix the interview/hiring process. It’s actually pretty easy. Just stop doing it. If the value proposition you’re offering to prospective laborers is so weak that you have to solicit and subsequently torture strangers, you should prioritize fixing your organizational mess above making the mess larger (or, in the case of attrition, before doing the same thing again).
I’m honestly not kidding, but let me come back to the mindless growth point later.