Except is hiring!

I read a lot of guys writing about either programming, managing developers, or entrepreneurship; one subject that is common to the three areas, and which several of them have covered in the past from different perspectives, is the process of interviewing prospective hires. Joel Spolsky has been the most clear, vivid and perhaps even rational (maybe because his Guerrila Guide is at version 3.0 already), but everybody follows essentially the same recipe.

Based on this highly scientific research I reach the conclusion that the hiring process at my company is unique, or at least rare enough to be noteworthy.

The process elsewhere seems to be something like:

1. Get in an impossible amount of curriculums.
2. Scan them to pare them down.
3. Do phone interviews to further pare them down.
4. Have one or more face-to-face interviews.
5. Hire somebody out of the group of people who get through the interview process. Hope for the best, but keep an eye open and fire them fast as soon as a grain of doubt about their work or abilities enters your mind.

Me, I think the process is rubbish. It seems to work, in the sense that people are getting hired all the time, but it’s filtering out people you might actually want, and is in general a dehumanizing and denigrating process for most if not all those involved.

How do we hire people? Well, the prerequisite of our way of doing this is keeping an updated list of people we would like to have on the team. This is called the “short list” internally, and is a list of people we already know are great. We know because we’ve seen them work (or have worked with them), either at the University’s CS school (where several of us hold lesser teaching positions), or in other communities where we keep an active interest (such as the local free software users’ group, or the python community). Having that list, when it is time to take people on we:

1. Send an email out to the short list letting them know we’re hiring, and arrange a time for a meeting.
   The response to the initial email is always positive, but varied; it goes from “cool! I’ll be there!” through “aww, man! I just took on a job at Large Corporation! I’ve got to stick around for a few more months at least :(”, to “I’m at INRIA doing my doctorate thesis, but please don’t take me off the list!”.
2. Have a meeting to explain what the position is about, and to tell them a little more about our company if they don’t already know.
   The meeting is very much informal (as is the workplace), and we usually talk about the kind of work the prospects would be doing, and what the company offers that the large corporations in town don’t, and how we rock, and stuff.
3. Choose those who are best suited for the open positions.

We usually hire in pairs; we’ve found that it is much easier for the person coming aboard to have somebody else in the same pupal state, to make the experience less traumatic. No matter what your background, you’re in for a shock; possibly several. We can say again and again that we set out to be a Free Software geek’s haven, that we are values-driven, that although we are a commercial company we are not only for profit, that we are responsible both socially and environmentally, that we value commitment to the communities we work in, but it never sinks in until after the first month.

Hopefully our internal process is less of a shock than that