Writing 02: Hiring Process

I personally believe that the hiring process as of now isn’t as bad. I believe it all comes down to preparation and work experience. A company wants to hire the person who is most fit for the job. There is no way to tell who is most fit for the job, unless each person is evaluated. Here is where the article “Hiring is Broken And Yours Is Too” says that the problem is. It talks about how every hiring tactic has downfalls. To me, this is no surprise. When we hire, we are essentially trying to evaluate the person’s fit for the job. The only way to fully understand a person is to be the person and have lived the person’s life. All hiring tactics are essentially shortcuts where we try to get the relevant aspects of the person, and evaluate that. Here is where the problem lies. Shortcuts work for most cases, but there will always be the few who don’t make it past the evaluation because the evaluation can’t encapsulate every scenario. It’s like code; code that has been written and has no way to handle edge cases. It’s just life: nothing is perfect. What we can complain about I believe is when a company deliberately does not try to hire in a way that is fair to the candidate. All we can do is hope for the best, but not expect perfect. Personally, the hiring process has been amazing. I was asked technical questions through the phone, coded it live through a Google Doc, and talked throughout the whole process until I got to a solution or until time ran out. This seemed reasonable to me, because I knew beforehand that I was going to be tested this way, therefore, I prepared. However, I do recognize that the company that I applied to does have a lot more resources to put into making the hiring as easy and fair as possible, which other smaller companies might not have. Still, I believe that the hiring process overall is good. However, I did apply to a small company once that they gave me what was basically homework. The homework took me a few hours, but a few hours of a school week is a long time to have to sacrifice just for a chance that the employer say yes. Imaging if I had to do that for every company that I applied to. This would be impossible. So, this is one hiring tactic is one that I do not appreciate, and the same can be said for anything that takes too much time and is particular to one company. I personally believe that a viable option is a mix of past projects and live coding. Not everyone gets the live coding correct, such as the man who wrote a software that is fundamental to Facebook, but was still not hired because he was not able to reverse a linked list. Live coding gives no credit to personal projects, which should receive merit. However, there is the issue of discriminating against people with families. However, personal projects do still deserve merit, so I still think it should be a combination of the two, or either or.