(2024-11-25) Procopio The End Of Merit In The Recruiting Process

Joe Procopio: The End Of Merit In The Recruiting Process. When “vibes” take priority over experience and ingenuity, everyone loses. (job market)

*I thought I had uncovered most of the bigger, uglier holes in recruiting and hiring, if not all of them.
Apparently, I hadn’t. Because I got this:

“If you really want to know what’s wrong with the recruiting process, give me a call.”*

it uncovered something I missed. And it’s kinda damning to recruiting and hiring.

conversation with a friend of a friend of mine, someone who has been looking for a job in the tech sector for almost a year.

He has over 15 years in tech, mostly software development with some lead and management experience. He started with a big name company you know and then spent time at two smaller but cutting-edge-tech companies I’d never heard of.

The sentence that followed his opening sentence was this:
“Experience doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s all about the vibes now.”

I did a quick Google search on vibes and recruiting.
Oh boy.

*“What I’ve noticed this time around,” he said, “Is that once you get by the AI resume screen (ATS), your first contact is almost always not a technical interview, or even a standard interview. It’s just a vibe check.”

In fact, that’s exactly what he was told by the first junior HR rep he met with, “This isn’t, like, a high-stress interview, it’s just a vibe check.”*

But then he heard it again, not long after, in another initial screening.

it wasn’t always called a vibe check either, it was a (culture) “fit check” in one, a “personality profile” in another, and an old-fashioned “get-to-know-ya” in a third.

Oddly enough, I’m all for this kind of thing. But… you know… last. Not first.

The problem is when these HR folks decide that they’re the self-appointed judge and jury of company culture — and maybe management isn’t even aware this is going on.

“The vibe check is legit,” she added. “But I still call it cultural fit. Because it shouldn’t be about vibes or… anything that vague

it should only be used to weed out extreme outliers — when the candidate checks all the boxes but you are nearly sure this person would fail in your environment. And it should only be judged by someone who has a hand in shaping the culture. And it should be at the end of the process, not a gate.”

“I think I used ‘I’ too much,” he said. “It was a fast 30 minutes with someone who [admittedly] wasn’t technical, so I did a lot of talking, trying to get everything in and explain it at the same time, and maybe that came off like bragging.”

This reminded me of a story I had just heard a month ago, when a friend of mine brought solutions to the interview instead of platitudes.

The problem arises when they aren’t listening, and just playing the game from a different checklist of buzzwords.

Here’s what I think is going on, and it’s a bigger issue than shoving a recent grad between the resumes and the initial round of interviews.

Company culture is real and it’s a good thing to maintain.

I believe an increasingly wider gap in culture is the real problem.

But I do know that the farther we push tech people away from the end result and the goals of the company, whether that’s through agile-devolving-into-waterfall release schedules or a series of best-intention hiring gates that result in unintended consequences, the wider the disconnect becomes between those company goals (strategic context) and the final product that must be the conduit to achieve them.