Ask anyone about hiring developers and the advice is always the same ‘only hire the best’. The principle reasons being that
- Developer productivity can vary by an order of magnitude between apprarently similarly qualified candidates.
- The best people only want to work with the best people. A graders hire A graders, B graders hire C graders.
On the face the face of it this seems like great advice, who wouldn’t want to hire the best? It turns out pretty much everybody.
For instance, how long are you willing to wait to fill the position? What if you are really really stretched? What if you’re so stretched that you worry for existing staff? What if hiring a specific individual will mean huge disparities in pay between equally productive staff? What if not making the hire is difference between keeping a key client or losing them? At some point every company has to draw a line and elect to hire ‘the best we’ve seen so far’.
The difference between the great companies and the rest is how to deal with this problem. Great organisations place recruitment at the centre of what they do. If hiring is genuinely everyone’s number one priority then hiring the best becomes more achievable. For starters you might even have half a chance of getting ‘the best’ into your interview room in the first place.
Fragile 
Thanks Neil –
This needed to be said. I’ve heard this a dozen times this week while scouting out a new job, and I suspect their understanding of the phrase is weak.
– Rodney
LikeLike
interesting article. There are a lot of myths around recruiting, I think techcrunch yesterday were trying to say there’s no reason to hire anyone who hasn’t created their own app online somewhere (http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/07/why-the-new-guy-cant-code/) which would have meant not hiring a number of great people I work with.
Joel Spolsky sums up the problem of everyone hiring the top 1% here http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html.
‘what happens to the 99 people you turn away. They don’t give up and go into plumbing. They apply for another job’
ie someone somewhere hires one of thm and probably still thinks their hiring the top 1%. But it’s just the top 1% of applicants they saw.
Anyway, thanks for the blog post (shameless self promotion, my new jobsite is over here http://www.jobstractor.com, I’d kind of like to help fix some of the mess recruitment can be in our industry)
LikeLike
Hi Robin, thanks for the comment. I agree, even if you genuinely believe that you are hiring the best, you have no way to know for sure if that is the case.
I think that Jobs Tractor is a really interesting idea, I’d probably shy away from ads on fragile right now, but can you point me at a blog that uses Job Tractor?
LikeLike
@robin, just read your blog, sounds like things are in the early stages. Really cool idea though, looking forward to seeing how it plays out.
LikeLike
Yeah, still early days. You can get an idea of how it looks over here http://thecodeofbob.blogspot.com/ which is my personal blog so I stuck the ad code in there to test it out. No jobs yet though and I’ve just spotted a problem with one of the links opening in iFrame. Doh’.
LikeLike
Neil, I completely agree that companies that put a premium on recruiting the right talent are indeed stronger for doing so. When I say “right talent” I mean appropriate technical as well as cultural fit. Hiring a technical architect that has deep technical skills over consensus building skills maybe exactly what a team needs or a complete disaster depending on the culture of the team and the organization as a whole.
A bit regionally focused to my locale in the USA, but I’ve written on this topic before but from the angle of talent and compensation in a low growth local economy: http://bit.ly/4wl2Oe
LikeLike
@jfbauer
That’s a really interesting post. So I guess the three ingredients are, setting yourself up to be able to source and assess well, make the candidate feel /really/ wanted, and finally make sure that the job on offer is something that ‘the best’ really want to do.
LikeLike