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and welcome to better hiring practices for fun and profit so we are here to
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actually solve the hiring process in tech once and for all like we are never
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going to talk about this ever again but before we get started I wanted to
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just do a little bit of house clean up so there's of course the lovely railsconf hashtag if you want to comment
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about the panel but then also I'm going to be checking this other hashtag hire
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rails periodically throughout the panel to look specifically for questions or
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comments from the audience we'll still do a Q&A maybe like with 10 minutes or so before the panel ends to take your
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questions but I did also want to just take the time to get questions from the audience as the piano progresses and so
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I will be checking the hire rails hashtag throughout the panel and then
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also you might also notice that at the bottom maybe it's a little bit hard to read but all of our all of our Twitter
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handles are down on each slide so if you ever need to want to have one of the
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panelists or something like that I'll feel free to do that so before before we get started let's
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just have take a second to have everybody introduce themselves I'll start on South Korea I am the moderator
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of this panel - Alison mentioned I'm super passionate about bringing people
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into text so that's kind of what moved me to want to talk about hiring
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practices and then we could introduce the panelists hello I'm Heather Corallo
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my company is called CTO - we help
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companies do organizational agility transformations what that really means
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is we help company cultures not suck and we talk about workflow we talk about
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process we about mapping talent and product and engineering strategies holistically and
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yeah that's me hello my name is Justin
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Herrick and I am a developer a consultant and a teacher been doing that
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for my entire career one of those three also a founder of lunar collective which is a software consultancy focusing on
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training and building custom software for whatever you might need and I'm really hoping to with this company set
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good examples and good practices for how to do things internally in the industry which then can be shared freely with other people that's why I'm here I'm
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going to move this squared I'm Pamela Vickers I work at MailChimp in Atlanta Georgia
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I'm an engineering manager there I work a little bit alongside the products that
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mostly work on career development and processes internally on our engineering team amazing so just to get started I
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wanted to have a bit of an icebreaker and I would like to hear from all of the panelists and all of you are also
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welcome to join with the hashtag hire rails if you want to share what is the
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worst job interview you've ever had whether you were interviewing someone or you were being interviewed okay I have
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one my I don't know if is my worst but it was very memorable I was interviewing
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with a two or three person start-up and they had not done a lot of interviews themselves and they thought they should
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probably just do a whiteboard and exercise since that's what you do in interviews and they were describing it
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to me and it was one of those questions where there's like buckets and there's red balls and black balls in them but
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they couldn't remember how it went so every time I'd start I'd start trying to do something like way no no no you pull
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one out and you do know what color it is and then you put it back no that's fine
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just keep going so maybe not the worst it's definitely not the best all right so I was talking to
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sexy about this last night or I have a bunch of bad interviews that I could tell and worse is kind of in the eye of
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the beholder but I got one story I think works really well I was applying for a
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job at a consultancy and you know you had to like submit a bunch of code and they were going to review it
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I got flown out to Chicago I'm sitting in a big office they actually had like projected the code up on the wall and
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they're kind of just doing a kind like a mob code review they had like four or five people in the room and they're kind of just asking questions it was overall
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pretty expected the code review and I'm answering questions about my code and there was this gentleman in the back of the room and at one point he kind of
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chuckled and he pointed and said what are you doing on line 45 and I look at
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it and as soon I look at it oh god so I had a string and in that string I was interpolating a value and I had called
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2's on that value but I had also called 2's on the string because apparently I wasn't sure if it was a string like it 3
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times and I was just mortified I fixed it he said okay good good good and then
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after the interview was over he walked up to introduced himself he's like hi my name is Robert Martin you can just call
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me Bob
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mine is going to show my age I was in an interview I was working for a financial
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services firm and we were interviewing a c-sharp developer and the developer that
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I was interviewing with asked this woman
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who was from Cantor Fitzgerald what she was doing on 9/11 and why was she here
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you see Cantor Fitzgerald lost 105 people in the Trade Center bombings and
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they were her friends and she had been working in New York at the time and for whatever reason she hadn't gone that to
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work that day and we were now in London and it was four years later and if you
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ever want to see someone fail at sensitivity and empathy in an interview that's the way to do it Wow
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mic drop all right so let's get started with sort of like the first piece in the
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hiring process which is job descriptions and we'll be talking about job descriptions from an employer
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perspective and an employee or potential employee perspective so to get started how do you write a good job description
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how do you write a good job description I think that the first thing is figuring
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out why are you writing that job description to begin with what problem is this new individual or individuals
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going to be solving and what skill sets
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are attribute do you not already have on your team in order to solve said problem
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that question you know there's the idea of you know let's let's throw bodies at
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problems versus let's figure out what problem we're trying to solve and what skills and attributes do we need to
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solve for that and so I think that those questions need to come at the very beginning I agree from my perspective as
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like an employer and as a developer who'll be working with the people I intend to hire in my JavaScript
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and I want the candidate to have a very clear idea of what their day to day is going to be so that they know what
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they're getting themselves into I like to focus the job description on what am I expecting of them when they come in
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what do I expect them to be able to deliver what time frames do we normally do projects on and what how will their
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day be scheduled and I kind of think that fits in the job description because that clearly outlines what the job
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actually is not just a bullet list of like acronyms which you could do that
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for a thousand companies and get a thousand different jobs in the end I'd really rather focus on writing a job description that lets someone know oh
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this company is unique they do two stand-ups a day and they're upside down you know or whatever yeah I'll just echo
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what my other panelists have said where I think focusing on what the person will
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be doing and this job is more important than what their previous experience was
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so focusing on you need to have already done these things might not be as
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important as a these are the things that you will be doing another thing that we are at militants are specifically trying
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to do more of is give an idea of what the organization around you is like
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reporting structure especially since we are a growing company and that's not
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always clear when you look at a job description like who am I going to report to what sort of team am I going
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to be on and and how far away am i from people who can you know make decisions and pass along my feedback so we try to
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give a really clear idea of what your life in this role would be and I think
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this might be a little bit more applicable to larger organizations but how do you manage different sort of
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requirements between groups because often times you have an open job wreck but this person is going to be shared
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among do you know two three different teams and then there's like all of these different sort of responsibilities how
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do you how do you manage those sort of different types of requirements when you have multiple groups involved do you
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mean if one person in a role will be wearing multiple hats I think you have
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to be very explore about that I know that I have interviewed before somewhere and realize that I was interviewing for five jobs
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maybe instead of just one so and I think that's fine depending on where you are in your career and the sort of
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investment you want to put in to a new role but I think putting that upfront either in conversations or in the
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listing itself it's always ideal yeah I think it would be helpful if that that's
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particularly the case to try to filter for people who get excited by something like that I know there are people who
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really enjoy having multiple reports and be able to jump between different things they like the pseudo challenge like okay
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this is I'm working on this on Monday and this on Tuesday well if you if you want someone who's going to have to do that you should live you should say in
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the description like looking for someone who enjoys this type of this type of work or this type of a workflow so let's
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switch over to the jobseekers point of view and what advice would you have for
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those who are looking for a job and they sort of need help navigating and reading
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through job descriptions sort of almost reading between the lines I don't want
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to sound like I'm plugging my work but I gave a talk at an altar consonant lanta
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called job listing minesweeper where I focus on this question but high-level
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there are very common phrases that you'll read that mean a very common thing so read a lot of them and ask good
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questions be very critical about what's something that can sound fine might actually mean I know there's a lot of
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talks about culture fit being a good signal that there might be a problem there's lots of things along those lines
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so I would also say send job listings that you think sound great to someone
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who's been doing it for a while and they might help point out some of those things to you I had something really
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good and then I lost it I know everything can you elaborate a little bit more on some of those specific words
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that might be a red herring for someone trying to decipher a job posting some of the ones that I picked up on
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where sometimes there's this really aggressive language that I tend to expect out of maybe an all-male team you
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know and like we just kill it 24/7 crushing it ninja hackers only apply yes
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definitely avoid the ninja hackers but there's some but I think are also fine
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you just need to make sure you clarify what it means at that company things like flexible vacation that might
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be great but it also maybe never take vacation because people kind of you know
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look askance at you and you suggest the idea taking a day off so again it's not
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all bad things but things that are a little vague or a little too pointed
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sometimes like strict strict requirements probably shows that they don't really have a good awareness that
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there's great developers that come in all packages yeah I think along those
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lines it helps to look for the technologies they require and make sure they're not asking for more years of
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experience and the technology has been in existence so you see any of those like need five years minimum react
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experience you might want to go maybe they don't really know how this should
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get written very similar what you were saying I think when I sit down I sat down a lot of juniors as they're kind of
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like postcode school getting ready to ramp up and they're looking for jobs and I go through these interviews and it is
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kind of this like game of like ticking off boxes of like okay this is a plus this is a get this is a plus this is a
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negative and then you kind of get a feel for it by the time you get to the end yeah things that are pluses are like oh
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let's talk about our process like I always tell the students okay look look for them to mention any agile practice
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or mention testing or mention their version control and stuff but if it's not mentioned but they mentioned their
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ping pong tables or they mentioned certifications it might not be what you're looking for in this in our
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community but ultimately I think the job descriptions are there to make sure you at the job seeker know what you're
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getting into so if you have no clue what that company is going to be like it well you won't know till you get there I
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guess and that's not really very helpful for you when you're trying to apply the different places I'm curious are there
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any HR or tech recruiters in the room right anyone who writes job descriptions for a
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living awesome okay well you're very brave to raise your hand sir we won't tell anyone yes so I was a tech
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recruiter forever and I think that there's this great intention to make
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your company sound so cool and fun because it's so competitive to get out
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there and your hiring managers are breathing down your neck because they desperately need these people and you
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know damn it we just bought a new keg why isn't anybody wanting to work here and and the thing of it is is that if
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you write work hard play hard free beer unlimited vacation what that's
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really telling me is I'm going to work 60 to 70 hours a week I'm going to work
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in an environment that may or may not be safe for me as a woman that identifies
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as a woman in that space and unlimited vacation is not the same thing as
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minimum vacation and that's a that's a little pro tip minimum vacation is
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awesome unlimited vacation is a sure sign that you are going to not be able
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to take it I've seen that over and over and small and large companies so really talk to your HR teams or your you know
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talk to your teams and say what does this really mean to us if you do have unlimited vacation you can say minimum
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vacation on our team three weeks a year right like I'm going to I'm going to apply to that job so alright so to move
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things along I want to talk about you know once you have a job description out there you have applicants let's talk
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about how to assess your applicants tech ability and I wanted to sort of take a
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little bit of time to set the stage for this question there was a great episode of a podcast
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called in visibily where they talk a lot about the mind and they did a study
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where it was called the white code study and they gave people a task to perform
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and half of those people were told you're wearing a doctor's coat the other half were told that they were wearing a
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painters coat and the people who were told old that they had a doctors code performed better than those who had who
00:16:50.930
were told that they were using a painters code and I often feel like how
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we assess TAC ability in tech is either telling someone that they have a doctor's coat or a painters coat we
00:17:02.500
aren't always setting up people to succeed or giving them the best sort of environment to assess the tech ability
00:17:09.470
so the big question is and it's not an easy question but we'll try to tackle it
00:17:14.569
what is the best way to assess tech ability make them do what they're going
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to do on the job is kind of my go-to so that depends a lot on what the role is recently I was hiring for my consultancy
00:17:32.000
and I basically had like a two-step code challenge where the first one was they had to just build this app out and any
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technology they wanted they had unlimited time to do it just give it to me and you're done and I wanted to see their ability to do something would they
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had full control over the choices and the timeframe and the methodologies and then I made them do a second one where I
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dictated everything like the requirements the language the framework how much testing coverage they should be I wanted to see what the difference is
00:18:00.080
in their output from working with dictated technologies versus they can choose their own because at my
00:18:05.990
particular business the consultancy they're going to be doing both they will be able to do greenfield projects but
00:18:11.090
they'll also be having the opportunity to like just use what's being given to them so you would need to adapt that to
00:18:17.960
your company but I find things like code challenges things like bringing them in and pairing with them for a few hours for me personally as a developer gives
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me the best insight into this person into how they work and how they think
00:18:29.920
we've had a lot of conversation around how to do this because this is really I
00:18:35.210
think one of the toughest things it's not as hard to find people that you like that you know would fit into your team
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and be a great teammate in general but to know whether they can come in and
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make the impact that you really need for whatever level you're hiring for is really tough
00:18:52.220
we are very reluctant to ask them to do work outside of you know their
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that they're probably already doing because not everyone has at that time but it truly is a great way to tell that
00:19:05.720
ability so what we have been doing and we've been very happy with what we've
00:19:11.210
been able to find out by doing this is we just asked for a code sample and we try to frame that as best as we can and
00:19:17.720
let them know that we're not judging them on the code sample we just want a foundation for conversation we so we we
00:19:26.480
ask technical questions but then we also just sit with their code with them and we ask them if you had unlimited time
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resources money what are some things you would do to improve or expand this so we
00:19:38.900
try to work with something that they're familiar with because you get a lot of insight when you hear someone talk about
00:19:45.470
codes they've written and sometimes the insight is they don't understand the code that they've written and sometimes
00:19:51.860
the insight is just so much depth that you wouldn't get just from reading the code so we try to have a conversation
00:19:58.400
almost like a live code review without us being critical necessarily asking
00:20:04.160
guiding questions or you know I see you did it this way in my mind I think I
00:20:09.920
would have tried it this way did you consider that so we try to have those conversations while setting up early
00:20:15.110
that it's not about the quality of the code it's really about the quality of the interaction around the codes that we
00:20:21.050
can get a lot of helpful information out of I think something else to take into
00:20:27.440
consideration that I've seen happen in larger companies is if you're hiring
00:20:32.720
more senior engineers that might have a primary language that's different from your current stack making sure that you
00:20:43.520
have the right person interviewing and reviewing that person's code versus just another person who's on that team who
00:20:49.940
might not be as familiar with that language and I don't know if this will
00:20:56.720
be true or full statement that people will not their heads within this room but I think the more seasoned an
00:21:02.420
engineer becomes the more strong a point of view they might have in their code piece and what they're writing down and
00:21:10.760
and that should be okay and so having someone who can just make sure that you
00:21:16.700
have someone who's interviewing that person who's capable of understanding a that language and be that point of view
00:21:23.750
and where that might be coming from because like what could be a false negative may just be a point of view
00:21:29.770
that's a great point I want to take a second just to see if we've had any
00:21:36.320
questions from Twitter that's actually a
00:21:43.730
great question go ahead honest we want to let's just do
00:21:51.110
it how do you best inventory your team's existing skills that's really hard why a
00:22:01.669
lot of people don't do it like how many units of Ruby you have on your team we
00:22:09.679
have three widgets or Ruby two widgets of JavaScript want to react um that is
00:22:15.919
tough depends on the size of the team I feel like on a small enough team I could pretty quickly whip up an estimate of
00:22:21.919
like yeah my team is 3/4 really strong full stack rails developers one person that likes JavaScript and I would feel
00:22:28.070
confident with knowing that spread but if I'm managing a team of 20-plus that'd be really hard to kind of get the
00:22:33.320
nuances of what everyone's at and where they are what's their detail like I almost feel like you could kind of
00:22:38.929
self-report that almost like you could you could get information pass out a survey have everyone sit down with you
00:22:44.360
for a one-on-one and say hey I want to know how good are you at Rails no just tell me how good you think you are you
00:22:49.700
wouldn't be working here already if you weren't good at it so I want to know you know and then we can kind of look they all say they're
00:22:54.740
good at this now we kind of have an idea at least of the averages for RTL it's a good idea you could even look at good
00:23:00.530
stats I would say it's probably easier to look at the negative space right if
00:23:06.200
it's probably harder to look and see what you have then to look and see where
00:23:11.600
you're a little bit weaker so if you have certain projects that don't get good momentum or you have certain parts
00:23:19.070
of the code base that just never get the attention or expert and in there it's easier in my mind at
00:23:27.710
least especially when you have a larger team which our team is rapidly growing it's easier to see we really could use
00:23:34.760
someone that really knows this or has a lot of experience dealing with this type of issue so I I would have a hard time
00:23:42.710
telling you what our current inventory is but I could tell you some of our needs for sure I think it depends on the
00:23:49.760
health of your team but doing a team retro when you're starting to look at
00:23:54.920
workforce planning or hiring the next person for your team bringing and engaging the entire group into the
00:24:00.800
conversation about about their skill at their own skills and where they're where they're really like kicking butt and
00:24:07.940
where they're I'd like to learn or you know what they would what someone new to the team could bring is a really great
00:24:14.420
conversation to get people engaged in the interview process as well so I have a bit of a devil's advocate question why
00:24:22.040
do we even need to assess tech ability after a certain point like if you are a developer you've been doing this for 10
00:24:28.700
15 years like at once at what point can you just move past a code challenge or a
00:24:36.710
whiteboarding I mean to be very just crass to know how much to pay them you
00:24:44.870
want to make sure that people with similar abilities are getting similar salaries so we have an engineering
00:24:50.540
ladder that we use to kind of compare people we don't really want to say a
00:24:56.810
person a or person B but just groups of people and what they should know what they should excel at and where it's okay
00:25:03.020
for them to have you know things that need to be stronger over time so I would
00:25:08.570
say someone can come in with 15 years of experience but not be able to contribute more than someone with five years of
00:25:15.170
experience but they might be wanting a 15 year experience salary so that's my
00:25:22.010
first answer good answer all right so to move things along I
00:25:28.100
think I'm actually going to skip this question let's talk about this
00:25:35.750
how do you get noticed in a sea of applicants this is a question that I
00:25:41.300
hear a lot from people saying especially of their junior developers you know should I just print a bunch of resumes
00:25:47.390
and start dropping them off at companies because I'm just not hearing back so how
00:25:52.850
do you get noticed making everyone
00:25:59.240
nervous by doing that listen so when I would teach what I would tell my
00:26:04.850
students is halfway through like the entire cohort I'd be like okay here's the secret to being noticed when you
00:26:10.790
apply for places and it's a horrible secret suppose one you never want to hear which is give talks and write blog
00:26:17.150
posts don't just go to meetups the problem with that is it's not a like that fits for everyone solution but it
00:26:22.910
is a guaranteed solution if you're not just the person who sits in the back of the meetup but you say hey hi I don't know about cucumber I can give a
00:26:29.420
talk on it a little gold ruby meetup that's going to make you stand out because hopefully the companies are
00:26:34.580
applying for in your town are also there that meet up and they see you at the one on stage not just the one applying same
00:26:40.760
thing with blog posts like writing blog posts that are like informative and telling a story or really sorry solving
00:26:47.240
problems and like contributing back to the industry build up a body of work and your name that speaks volumes to you
00:26:53.300
that differentiate you from every other applicant it might be applying for the same position if you have technical
00:26:58.520
recruiters who are good they're probably also looking at your github so if you're
00:27:04.580
a boot camper and you've been contributing to your github and I see
00:27:10.940
your progression for the 12 weeks and you're adding stuff and you're working in open source and you're doing you know
00:27:16.220
great work and then you graduate and it's six months later and you're working at West Elm waiting for somebody to pick
00:27:23.390
up the phone and you haven't put forth any new code and you haven't been working our contributing that that's a
00:27:32.510
signal and I think that can that can limit your opportunity as well especially for your super junior so we
00:27:41.450
have about 12 minutes left and we still haven't talked about diversity which I feel is a really important topic so I'll
00:27:49.460
just throw it out there there's a lot of talk about hiring diverse ly and a lot
00:27:56.180
of people feel like it's not needed it's no longer a problem and a lot of people feel like no it is something that we
00:28:01.940
should address so why is hiring diverse Lee important for companies I mean if
00:28:10.730
you go back to the idea of looking at the edges of your team and what's
00:28:16.010
missing if everyone has the same background you're going to have a lot of the same missing pieces so even from the
00:28:22.370
business perspective having people with different backgrounds and different life experiences you get more of those pieces
00:28:29.870
covered so you can just build better product I feel like this isn't a cloud I
00:28:36.470
have to sell the the human value of having a diverse team but you definitely
00:28:44.210
get better coverage when you have people that know different things for different reasons yeah for me every team I've
00:28:53.720
worked on that's had a diverse group of people in it from different backgrounds different ethnicities different genders the products ended up better in the end
00:29:00.710
and we had we all grew more in the process because what you're saying you kind of learn from the the gaps in your
00:29:08.240
own understanding in your own perspective and that can be filled out from the people in your team and having
00:29:13.970
those different voices with different backgrounds can just show dividends to the whole company culture as well you're
00:29:21.050
wrong if I talk about culture fit are we jumping ahead go ahead I think when we
00:29:28.130
think about hiring diversity or diverse ly we need to change our vernacular I'm
00:29:36.560
a I'm a recent nonsmoker I quit twelve days ago and yeah uh-huh but I don't say
00:29:46.970
if someone asks me I don't say I'm quitting smoking I say I'm a nonsmoker I don't smoke
00:29:53.480
anymore which is helping me to not smoke anymore so instead of saying culture fit I think
00:30:00.380
it's really important for us to start changing our vernacular and start talking about culture ad because if we're adding to our culture
00:30:07.280
it's much easier for us to connect that to hiring diverse and inclusivity into
00:30:13.610
our teams and into the organization that we have yeah and I could talk about this for a long time so I won't go on on Iran
00:30:19.430
but yes like culture fit comes from this idea of our culture is good now we don't
00:30:24.440
want to ruin it because a lot of companies aren't proactive about shaping their own culture so they just kind of let what happened to be the way it is
00:30:30.860
and they're scared they're going to break it you should be proactive about shaping the culture of your company and that
00:30:36.530
means how can I add to this culture in a way that's going to benefit everyone on the team so I want to before jumping
00:30:44.450
into questions from the audience I want to touch on the gender gap and just to
00:30:50.060
set the stage there is an article it was a study that hewlett-packard conducted a
00:30:57.590
few years ago and there was a Harvard Business Review article about it I couldn't find the original study
00:31:02.870
unfortunately but the study essentially found that women applied to a job posting if they meet a hundred percent
00:31:09.920
of the criteria whereas men apply if they meet sixty percent of the criteria and what I found really interesting
00:31:16.130
about the analysis from the Harvard Business Review article is that they felt like what women felt was holding
00:31:23.750
them back with more of this perception it's not necessarily how they perceive their skill but a mistaken perception
00:31:31.790
about the hiring process I think that's really interesting so question here is
00:31:38.090
do you agree or disagree with the student study's findings and what can we do to address it I totally agree with
00:31:45.320
this I see it happen all the time stop putting so many bullet points and stop putting five plus or six plus or seven
00:31:52.130
plus years of some experience which isn't really what you're really saying somebody might have three and be great
00:31:57.560
so what do you really what are you really articulating in that bullet point and maybe create a narrative out of that
00:32:03.470
rather than a bullet point because that is I see it happen all yeah I I don't
00:32:09.770
know if I've seen it as much on the hire inside that I definitely see it as someone who works with new developers in
00:32:18.730
the community a lot where I have to just basically direct people and say you will
00:32:25.210
apply to this job and you will interview and I get very like mama bearish about it and I only have to do that with women
00:32:33.639
I've never had to pull a male friend assignment like you can do it you can do this I have to sometimes tell them I'm
00:32:40.809
not sure if you're quite ready for that so no I completely agree in both of what
00:32:47.649
you said is basically what I've seen as well and it's interesting to me because I think it goes go back to our first
00:32:53.409
question about job descriptions and how we just have this default of just laundry listing every acronym we think
00:32:59.350
they might need to know in passing and for one person you know that might be Oh
00:33:04.929
have you heard of that another person might be do I know that in decide and out I'm terrified of applying for position and I don't know those things
00:33:11.580
and I think another thing we could do going back to the Job Description answer is try to list all of the things that
00:33:20.620
actually occur on the job which could be like there's a lot of jobs like sorry every job you do in tech involves a lot
00:33:27.370
of things we call soft skills but those are never on a job description or as they are they're like one line the very
00:33:32.980
end but like being able to talk to a client communicate effectively with your team members are things that don't
00:33:40.210
necessarily have like a gender bias either way but they round out the requirement other than just technical things people feel that they need to
00:33:46.389
know great so I want to turn it over to questions from the audience I want to
00:33:53.950
take a question from Twitter first and then we'll open it up for Q&A from people here so let's see hmm so many
00:34:06.190
good questions I'll be over there I'm kind of interested and how important is
00:34:11.290
education versus experience how important is education versus experience
00:34:17.500
like one of can I posit experience is
00:34:24.520
education to an extent in my background I have a computer science degree and I
00:34:33.250
think it has allowed me to know lingo that made other people feel lesser and I
00:34:40.929
did not have to feel that lesser sting and that's about what I got out of my
00:34:46.090
degree so to kind of add on to that I don't have a computer science degree
00:34:51.760
which I kind of mouth as she was speaking but what that means is I have spent over the years of being a
00:34:57.310
self-taught programmer countless nights reading Wikipedia articles for no value
00:35:04.090
other than I wouldn't feel dumb any more when people would say things in passing so I I can throw out all this
00:35:09.340
conversation stuff about monads is because I read them because someone said they're hard and I wanted to make sure I didn't feel dumb in a conversation one
00:35:15.130
day you know all right so let's turn it over to the audience so just to repeat
00:35:22.170
on the mic for the recording are there any practices that you're trying to recommend in your company that
00:35:29.230
are considered too progressive if you
00:35:34.930
want to talk about teal organizational structures you can talk to me after this session I scare HR teams a lot more than
00:35:44.440
I scare engineering and product teams I think organizing your business and your
00:35:51.640
organization versus organization geing your engineering structure is super
00:35:57.130
scary to people so that doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do though yeah I would say not too progressive but
00:36:04.960
the same where our engineering team is on board to do anything it's just a
00:36:11.590
matter do we want to formalize things in the policy while we're still figuring out how well it works so that's kind of
00:36:18.640
where we are on things yeah I don't think I've currently come up with something that's too progressive for
00:36:23.980
someone but I have had the conversation of talking to a client or a company about their existing hiring process and
00:36:30.280
telling them that they're filtering for the wrong thing like a lot of companies that notice have made their hiring process longer because it's hard like
00:36:37.510
I'm not going to fault them for that it's hard and they don't know what they're doing half the time um and you just got to wait it out
00:36:43.540
sometimes but that just means you're filtering for the person who have the most time and has the most ability to
00:36:48.760
wait which normally is filtering for some some type of privilege where which way you look at it and that's normally
00:36:54.760
not what the company wanted at all they wanted someone who wanted to work there it was a good fit for what they do and
00:37:00.640
instead they filtered for the person who could wait around a month and a half and then another month and a half and then
00:37:05.680
do the fifth interview in a row and they don't mean to do that so I think we have time for one more question yes so the
00:37:14.350
question was how do you measure productivity after a new hire when your
00:37:19.390
whole team is remote I normally use
00:37:25.360
agile for that I'm not trying to say that as a dismissive way but in most the remote teams that I've worked with we
00:37:31.780
kind of roll them into our like sprint planning process we have them do the same estimations we do and I normally
00:37:38.350
expect a certain amount of lag time as they ramp up on the project and I kind of build that into the hiring process
00:37:44.620
but after I would say after like a month or two we start evaluating okay this is where we expect to use to be this is
00:37:49.900
where you should expect yourself to be well let's measure what the output was you know sprint after sprint and start
00:37:56.260
to see how we can maybe make changes on them great so we have like one more
00:38:01.720
minute so maybe one more quick question so how do you normalize feedback from team members who are conducting
00:38:09.010
different interview we use a application called green house and you do scorecards
00:38:14.830
and we worked very hard on the questions on the scorecards and you're not allowed to talk to anyone that was in the
00:38:20.890
interview until everyone's done the scorecard because it's so easy to introduce bias they're like how did you
00:38:26.200
think it went and you're thinking and went great someone makes a weird face and you're like oh I must have missed
00:38:32.110
something so then you start looking for the bad things so we have everyone do this big brain dump with some very
00:38:38.890
specific questions and then we read it all and it's very clear if some people had a very different experience and then
00:38:45.610
we debrief but a lot of times there is pretty good alignment or you can kind of pick out where the similarities are so
00:38:52.390
keeping it keep not talking until you write down all your thoughts and then getting the thoughts
00:38:57.770
together is been immensely helpful for that I can't like stress this enough
00:39:03.440
every person who goes into an interview is representing your company they are ambassadors and they should have
00:39:09.349
interview training before they go into that room so if you aren't interviewing interview training the people who are
00:39:15.260
interviewing those candidates so that they can feel comfortable in in writing
00:39:20.809
in that green house and having that conversation in the debrief it's a huge win it's very low cost and high impact
00:39:28.809
right well thank you everybody if you still have questions we'll be here we
00:39:34.549
can talk out in the hallway or you know maybe we'll do a Bob I don't know but or you can also reach us on Twitter so yeah
00:39:42.650
we're here to continue to talk to you about all this stuff it's super exciting I'm glad we solve the problem