Wheat from the Chaff – Getting Real Candidates

I’ve been a hiring manager since the late eighties. My first attempt at hiring was relatively messy. I realized my notes were bad and I had a hard time deciding between one candidate or another. The second time around, I decided to create a spreadsheet with the most pertinent info in the first tab and background notes with observations on subsequent tabs. Over the last several years I developed quite a, dashboard of sorts, whereby I’ve been able to help my sourcers and recruiters deliver to me the best candidates on the market. The debut version of the Staff IT Right© product implements the first layer of a multi-layered spreadsheet that was my, candidate dashboard.

In our first installment of Hiring Needs Objectivity, we discussed the resume review process. It’s quite simple to just write a few notes on each resume and then sort each one into the “Call” or “Dunno” pile – oh, then there is the “No Way” pile. But, once you have made all those notes, are you able to communicate those results to your recruiter? Are you able to provide clear and objective analysis? How can you best capture those attributes that aren’t obvious on the resume and communicate that back to the recruiter? Other than keywords and the basic vetting done by your recruiter or HR team, what are the most important hidden attributes in your next candidate? And finally, can you compare and contrast your candidate pool fairly and objectively?

I just stumbled upon a great post by a gentleman in reference to finding the best programmer. He has provided a list of very basic attributes that can be grouped into positive and negative indicators. I’ll share Daniel’s bulletized summary that truly speaks to anyone interested in this subject:

Positive indicators:
- Passionate about technology
- Programs as a hobby
- Will talk your ear off on a technical subject if encouraged
- Significant (and often numerous) personal side-projects over the years
- Learns new technologies on his/her own
- Opinionated about which technologies are better for various usages
- Very uncomfortable about the idea of working with a technology he doesn’t believe to be “right”
- Clearly smart, can have great conversations on a variety of topics
- Started programming long before university/work
- Has some hidden “icebergs”, large personal projects under the CV radar
- Knowledge of a large variety of unrelated technologies (may not be on CV)

Negative indicators:
- Programming is a day job
- Don’t really want to “talk shop”, even when encouraged to
- Learns new technologies in company-sponsored courses
- Happy to work with whatever technology you’ve picked, “all technologies are good”
- Doesn’t seem too smart
- Started programming at university
- All programming experience is on the CV
- Focused mainly on one or two technology stacks (e.g. everything to do with developing a java application), with no experience outside of it

I’ll grant that this is far from scientific. However, how much science can truly promise you a great candidate? As long as you are objective and use the same criteria, scientific just sounds, silly …

Being objective is the key to securing great candidates for your company. The above attributes, which Daniel spells out quite eloquently, can be quantified to provide you a very powerful way to compare any candidate pool appropriately. The best part: these soft attributes become objective assessments that see beyond age, title, role, and formal instruction.

Unbelievable segue here — we’ll move on to the phone screen phase next … oooh … stay with us here at Staff IT Right© … we’ve got your “six”!