Likes & Launch

Every technology companies’ hiring process has bugs. Not software glitches, but human error, flaw, failure, and fault that causes it to behave in unintended ways.

Hiring practices include only reviewing candidates that attended a small list of schools. An incredibly talented engineer is skipped because his school isn’t recognized by your hiring manager.

An interviewer couldn’t articulate it exactly, but felt the candidate wasn’t a fit for the company culture. The interviewee was a great match for the role, but the opposite personality type of the interviewer, someone from a different team.

A star candidate becomes less interested in working on your team when they realize they are the only person in the company who is not like everyone else. Your hiring manager assumes the candidate took another role (but doesn’t ask) for other reasons and moves on to their second choice.

Leadership insisted the ‘big job’ go to a candidate that came from a big company. The hire had only worked on large teams, experience that had little use within the small company where they were hired. High salary paid, recruiter compensated, and an employee who left after 12 months.

The hardest thing about bugs isn’t the error they throw, it’s finding them in the first place. Only companies who invest time in running QA on their hiring process will build the innovative teams they want. That of course requires knowing what you want in the first place.

Having a hiring process is important, almost as important as remembering that it’s all based on the bias of the people who built it.