Abstract:

As an applicant pursuing a new role, I feel like I'm walking into a bookmaker and putting €10 on a pony, without knowing anything about its genetics or having historical knowledge about performance in races. Winning gives you a salary and benefits, losing hits where it hurts, "Am I actually good at this stuff?". Feedback is often simply not provided, and where it is, you think "WTF?!" more often than not.

It's easy to overlook that sitting on the other side of the table is a hiring manager who also has a dilemma. There is huge variability in C.V. format and quality, and no proven correlation between a well-presented candidate and a high-performing employee. To coin a phrase: it's a goat rodeo.

The status quo doesn't make sense to me. On both sides of the table, the stakes involved are massive. Making a bad hire can be hugely costly to an employer; pursuing the wrong role can be a devastating setback to an individual. In both cases you wish for a Tardis and ask "How did that go so wrong?".

As developers and operations professionals, we preach that instrumentation and monitoring are essential. We have entire conferences (e.g. Monitorama, Strata, et al) concerning the capture and analysis of data, we've coined terms like "Big Data", and yet, as an industry we are largely not practicing what we preach within recruitment despite the criticality of such decisions.

We're going to embark on a journey down the rabbit hole of hiring, analyse the common techniques employed in making hiring decisions today, and talk about opportunities to instrument your processes and the immediate benefits of doing so, to both the applicant and employer.

Speaker: Alex Howells

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