How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring
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@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
Never through traditional questions, tests or what have you. Normal interviewing is useless for this and produces completely unpredictable results. You will often filter out great people and get people who studied useless stuff likely to be asked as a question.
If @JaredBusch would be a good candidate to run your interviews, would he not also be a good candidate to write a good test as well? Now, knowing him a little bit I think he would absolutely find the right person but living up to his standards would be very difficult. That's the kind of person you want doing this though.
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@Carnival-Boy said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@Breffni-Potter said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
I would not use recruiters, many of them are generically average at best, incompetent at worse. I would seriously think about head hunters though.
What's the difference?
This is a bit of a hard one to define and I've struggled with this for a while. But a recruiter is really just someone that holds loads of job listings and loads of resumes and blasts trying to get matches. Recruiters work with the lower side of the field, under six figures in the US. It's the people you know by name here, the big firms that SPAM you all of the time.
Headhunters know you personally. They run interviews. They know the hiring managers. It's all about relationships and connections. They are part of your team. They take you to lunch. The companies hiring spend loads of time with them figuring out what they need to hire, then they go out and find that. It's a totally different process and totally obvious when you switch from recruiting to head hunting. And only head hunting places senior level people. I've never seen recruiters do this. They call things senior, but it's not at all the same.
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Some places do cross over this line a little, like CTG in Buffalo. They are a recruiting and staffing firm, but start to get into the headhunting range just a little for their top people.
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So do the headhunters that you've dealt with know more about IT than you?
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@Carnival-Boy said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
So do the headhunters that you've dealt with know more about IT than you?
No, but I'm also their top person to place and the people that they sell me to already know who I am. I'm a bit of an anomaly. But they have a lot of experience that I do not have, for sure. These are all people who were seniors on Wall St. before switching to head hunting.
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@wirestyle22 said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
If @JaredBusch would be a good candidate to run your interviews, would he not also be a good candidate to write a good test as well?
That would only be a good theory if you could test candidates with a test. But as we established that you cannot, then no one is a good test writer. Right?
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@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@wirestyle22 said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
If @JaredBusch would be a good candidate to run your interviews, would he not also be a good candidate to write a good test as well?
That would only be a good theory if you could test candidates with a test. But as we established that you cannot, then no one is a good test writer. Right?
I guess it depends on what level you are at. At my level you absolutely can test and see what a person knows or doesnt know just by asking basic questions
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@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
I'm a bit of an anomaly.
OK, fine. I'll rest my case. But please change your OP to "You must have someone doing the hiring that is dramatically more skills and experienced than the person you are hiring. Unless you're hiring Scott Alan Miller"
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@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
Social media. People who are active on social media for IT will produce giant bodies of work that are pretty impossible to bluff. Look at sites like SW, ML, SF and so forth and see how helpful, logical, up to date and well rounded people are. You can't hide what you do online and someone who has years of good technical interactions will shine easily.
Uh-oh... runs and hides
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@Breffni-Potter said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
Yes but a good head hunter does not just look at that, that is trivial and easy to discover.
I think we're in agreement here. What I'm objecting to is the assertion that a headhunter should be more skilled in the role than the person he's trying to recruit. So, for example, a headhunter trying to place a C# programmer doesn't have to be a better coder than his candidates. That's not a headhunters role. He has to know something - he just doesn't have to be better. I couldn't recruit a C# programmer because I know too little about it. But I could recruit an IT support technician, even though I'd hopefully know less about IT than the candidate - because I know something about IT.
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@wirestyle22 said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@wirestyle22 said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
If @JaredBusch would be a good candidate to run your interviews, would he not also be a good candidate to write a good test as well?
That would only be a good theory if you could test candidates with a test. But as we established that you cannot, then no one is a good test writer. Right?
I guess it depends on what level you are at. At my level you absolutely can test and see what a person knows or doesnt know just by asking basic questions
I don't believe that that is true. Can you give me an example of a universal question that by knowing the answer you'd show competence, by not knowing it you would show a lack of competence?
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The problem, is that if you are not skilled enough yourself, you won't know what to ask and look for. If you don't know about something, then how will you think to ask about it and properly evaluate someone's skill regarding it?
If you are completely unaware of a technology or method of doing something in IT, then that is one thing you will never be able to recommend to a company in order to improve business flow from better IT.
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@Carnival-Boy said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
I'm a bit of an anomaly.
OK, fine. I'll rest my case. But please change your OP to "You must have someone doing the hiring that is dramatically more skills and experienced than the person you are hiring. Unless you're hiring Scott Alan Miller"
Now you are just being silly. And I never suggested that the headhunters were a replacement for having a hiring person that is paid to represent you rather than paid to make the connection. I can't have made that clearer with my continuous talks on buyer's and seller's agents and aligned contracts. Headhunters make their money getting you a candidate that you will hire, you don't use them to replace the hiring process unless you are stuck getting a CIO and the CEO can't do it (they often can't.)
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@Tim_G said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
The problem, is that if you are not skilled enough yourself, you won't know what to ask and look for. If you don't know about something, then how will you think to ask about it and properly evaluate someone's skill regarding it?
If you are completely unaware of a technology or method of doing something in IT, then that is one thing you will never be able to recommend to a company in order to improve business flow from better IT.
Then it becomes how do you know you are hiring the right person to ask the right questions. At some point you're taking a leap of faith when hiring.
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@Carnival-Boy said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
But I could recruit an IT support technician, even though I'd hopefully know less about IT than the candidate - because I know something about IT.
how would you do that? If the candidate knows more than you, how would you know if he was bluffing or if he was amazing? Wouldn't they seem the same?
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@Tim_G said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
The problem, is that if you are not skilled enough yourself, you won't know what to ask and look for. If you don't know about something, then how will you think to ask about it and properly evaluate someone's skill regarding it?
Example of this... I knew the most standard Solaris question in interviews at a place where I worked was "What are the four running processes of NFS?" They asked this in every single interview that I didn't run.
Problem was.. candidates often knew more than the interviewers so this question would confuse them because they had to assume that the interviewer knew the answer. But in reality, the interviewers had all memorized this and didn't actually know that they all had it wrong. And they had it REALLY wrong.
- NFS is not one thing and there were several different potentially correct answers.
- The list that they had wasn't QUITE accurate.
- NFS only requires two, but often uses four.
So they always evaluated people as positive when actually having gotten the answer wrong. And marking against the people who rightfully got confused. They made assumptions and thought that they were right, but actually didn't know enough about the topic to realize they were asking something that wasn't answerable without loads of false assumptions that they were not filling anyone in on.
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@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@Carnival-Boy said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
But I could recruit an IT support technician, even though I'd hopefully know less about IT than the candidate - because I know something about IT.
how would you do that? If the candidate knows more than you, how would you know if he was bluffing or if he was amazing? Wouldn't they seem the same?
Headhunter: "How do you fix a VM that is non-responsive in KVM."
You: "In the options, you change the setting to use left-handed keyboard and then it should start responding to ctrl+alt+delete so you can reset the virtual CPU cache."Now if a headhunter knows nothing about IT, that may seem like an amazing answer.... maybe not, but just trying to make a point.
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@wirestyle22 said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
Then it becomes how do you know you are hiring the right person to ask the right questions. At some point you're taking a leap of faith when hiring.
Not nearly the same. This is where the Claptop Hendrix thing comes in. You CAN hire top end people to do hiring roles. You can't realistically hire them to be your mid-range staffers. There are people and firms that do this stuff as a speciality and you can use the same ones for decades.
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@Tim_G said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
If you don't know about something, then how will you think to ask about it and properly evaluate someone's skill regarding it?
If you are completely unaware of a technology or method of doing something in IT, then that is one thing you will never be able to recommend to a company in order to improve business flow from better IT.
A great example is... how many shops ask candidates about managing a SAN, but don't ask if they should be using a SAN? They will often hire based on skills they assume that they need rather than the skills that they actually need.
