It's interesting he starts with the claim he needs to find talented people with technical skills and then immediately starts talking about his need to cyberstalk the personal lives of candidates in order to disqualify those whose beliefs and hobbies he disagrees with.
I don't want to cyberstalk anybody. I want to see what projects they're interested in, what technologies they're loving, what they're hating.
My twitter feed has large amounts of swearing at Jenkins. Says a lot about me and my attitude to code (I love CI, I hate configuring Tomcat, etc.).
If there's nothing there of tech interest, and there's lots of poems to the candidate's other half, that tells me something far more interesting than a CV can.
And my point is that the recruiters will never let me see that. They'll never let me get an understanding beyond one side of A4 with all personal information removed.
How do you connect to an individual in 2012 without some inkling of them online? What value is the recruiter really adding by deliberately blocking my access to that info?
How would the recruiter be deliberately blocking this?
Out of people I know most of them keep their privacy settings pretty tight on things like facebook and twitter so that only their friends can see. So unless the recruiter has befriended them on these networks the recruiter wouldn't know anyway. If someone is using social networking sites to write poems to their other half I can understand they might find it somewhat creepy to give a recruiter or employer access to that.
The type of content they have on their twitter/FB is going to depend on what they use it for primarily and who their friends are.
I don't use FB but if I did I would mainly to communicate with people I know in real life, most of whom are not technical. So I wouldn't see any point in subjecting them to rants about Tomcat6 or whatever because they wouldn't understand or care.
Maybe if I lived in SV and all of my friends were developers at startups then I would post about this stuff, but I don't know what exactly that would signal?
If I want to discuss technical stuff I post on HN, if I wanted to write more thought out longform stuff I would create a blog which I would then add to my CV.
Great, so I'd love to see your HN profile, your github profile, etc.
I don't want to see stuff for the sake of being nosey. I want to understand you better, and to have a better place to start the interview other than "how was your journey here today?"
I think maybe you are reading too much into what people post online. Some people simply share more than others or share different stuff.
For example, here on HN some people link their profiles to their real life identities and talk about stuff that they are working on with their startups or side projects or whatever.
You also get a lot of people like me who post under pseudonyms and just use HN as a platform for ranting about mostly trivial pedantic stuff as a bit of fun.
That doesn't mean I'm not working on stuff, it just means that the stuff I'm working on I don't really feel like talking about them on here. And I don't want some silly comment I write on here affect the stuff I am working on.
The way I write HN comments is completely different to the way I would write a publicity piece for something I was working from for example.
Of course if I was applying for a job I would provide as much info as possible on what I am working on, on my CV.
Basically a CV is a way of saying "here is everything I think is relevant". Perhaps that does give you a one sided view of somebody. On the other hand if your potential employer has access to everything you write online to your friends, then there is a strong incentive not to write anything online to them at all, lest some stupid comment you wrote at 3AM whilst drunk get taken out of context.
There is also the question of which profiles of somebodies you want to see? Maybe you want to see their HN profile, but what about their 4Chan or Reddit account? What about their online dating profile? What about the profile they set up some gay cruising website? Where do you draw the line?
Most developers can't write a CV for shit. Part of the problem is that because they know recruiters are so heavily involved in the process, they cram it with technology acronyms that they barely touched once, just to get through the filters.
A github profile is far more useful to me than a CV.
I've seen CVs that were absolutely dire, and so I was about to pass before I saw the github URL, I checked out their work and it was solid, so I wanted to talk to them.
If you don't want to share what you're doing, that's fine. You're just not going to get a job with me. You're not going to get a job at a lot of startups, as it happens.
That's your choice. I'm not forcing you into it, but I think you and your career would benefit if we moved as an industry to CV-less employment - github, HN, Twitter, whatever, are all far more helpful than knowing what grades you got at University, and 4 bullet-points covering several years of what you did working for a previous employer, for example.
Developers do generally write bad resumes/CVs, and the tech acronyms and buzzwords are probably more intended to get the attention of both human drone scanners and applicant tracking systems that score resumes based on keywords. I think the software industry is moving away from resumes/CVs as we currently know them, and will soon be at a point where someone will list some companies, a brief narrative profile, links to a couple accounts, and access to various code.
You also get a lot of people like me who post under pseudonyms and just use HN as a platform for ranting about mostly trivial pedantic stuff as a bit of fun.
It actually does sound like you are trying to cyberstalk people and pass judgement on their work ethic based on what they do outside of work, in their personal lives. I find it distasteful that this is increasingly considered acceptable during the hiring process, and it's partially for this reason that I keep almost no online record of my day-to-day life.
I have a barebones facebook page, which I primarily use for privately messaging old friends who prefer facebook over normal e-mail. I do not use twitter or involve myself in any publicly identifiable way with message boards or mailing lists. This may be 2012, but I know quite a few people who do not even have facebook accounts.
So I'm curious - how does someone like you react when an applicant tells you he has no online presence for you to stalk? Would you say that speaks volumes about his competency for your job as well, or would you try to make do with the information in their CV? Just curious.
Often by modifying the candidates resume without asking.
[edit]
Example: I have a friend with lots of industry experience, who also happens to have a PhD. A recruiter removed the PhD info from his resume and submitted it to a company. After flying out and going through a half-day interview process a certain topic came up and he said "Oh, my Thesis topic was related to that" To which the manager said "Oh, we don't hire people with PhDs" and the interview was over.
Obviously there is plenty of stupidity to go around here, but recruiters regularly remove (or move to a 2nd page) things from resumes that they know would immediately disqualify a candidate and they do so without the candidates knowledge.
We know that when you mention stalking up their "barbaric rituals" you don't mean that you want this sort of employee because of the way you have phrased "barbaric rituals". You want to eliminate them from consideration. What are barbaric rituals? It is a well known phrase used to describe religious practices one doesn't like. So we are left to guess which ones you might mean. Possibly it could be photos of the Day of Ashua, the Shia islam festival where they cut their children's heads with swords. This seems a long shot though since most developers don't post this sort of thing to their Facebook page. I also don't see photos of the Bulgarian dog spinning ritual on pages, which is the #3 google hit for "barbaric ritual". I do though see the occasional photo of brit ceremonies (jewish circumcision) on people's facebook accounts, and it's also the #1 google hit for "barbaric ritual" because this phrase is very often used to describe it on various web forums by anti-circumcision advocates, nearly all of whom for which their anti-circumcision stance is just a veiled attempt to justify their deep seated hatred of muslims and jews.
Reading what you wrote, it in essence says "Jews and Muslims need not apply". You'll of course insist that is not the case since that would look bad, but that is why you wrote "barbaric rituals" rather than specify what you were really getting at explicitly.
On to Facebook stalking in general. As far as candidate's Facebook pages where they communicate private things with friends and families, you as employer are neither friend nor family, and their Facebook account is none of your damn business. That you think it is your business shows that you are a control freak who can't mind his own business, and that your company is a hellhole to work at.
I am speaking here as someone with hiring authority who has hired hundreds of very talented people. I do not need to know their religion, their barbaric practices, their baby photos, their friends list, or their poetry in order to evaluate their technical ability. And you know what? I have no problems recruiting the best, and I don't use recruiters.
Companies that have problems finding talent always have attitude problems and deep systematic problems within their firms.
How to find talent? It's easy. Here are some tips I have used, which are not comprehensive, they are just a starting point for how to wise up to the right attitude.
* Make sure one's firm is not a lousy place to work. If you are not sure, it is probably a lousy place. If you ever say "why do I work with idiots" then it definitely is.
* Make sure one's firm pays at least at the 75th percentile and above for one's area for talent because the fact is that the average talent is quite poor.
* Be upfront about compensation. If there is a job ad somewhere, state clearly the salary range and benefits including if full relocation is paid.
* Pay full relocation after a hire and interview expenses before a hire, that is just common sense. If the employee would have to sell his house at a loss in a down market to move because the market is underwater, the company buys the house from the employee to cover the difference so he doesn't lose money selling, which can make it impossible to move. When the employee is moving from a cheap housing area to an expensive one, signing bonuses can be used to cover the difference in housing prices between the two areas so the employee can move into a house comparable to the one he left.
Lousy places to work will go haywire when reading these sorts of tips and start making excuses about why some or all of the above are impossible policies.
Yowch. That's a pretty extreme interpretation of the guy's words. Especially as you refuse to let him deny it by stating in advance that a denial would be false.
You're talking shit. As another poster has pointed out, you will refuse to let me deny what I actually meant, because you will insist I had no reason to obfuscate unless my intention was perverse and bigoted, but I needed to disguise the fact.
"barbaric rituals" was a flippant and throw-away comment inspired by the fact that quite a few developers really, really like emacs. That's enough barbaric ritual for me.
I had no thought or concept of religion in mind when using either that phrase, or penguin-murdering. I was being deliberately dramatic in an attempt at humour. I was pointing out the irony of how there's actually nothing to be ashamed of by talking to your potential employer in terms of who you actually are, so why do recruiters try and hide it?
You have cynically twisted my words, in as insulting and degrading a manner as possible. You're wrong, you know nothing about me, and the Jews and Muslims I've hired in the past would happily correct your interpretation of my character if given the chance.
You're also within a whisker of libelling me, so, you know, please turn it down a bit.
On a related subject, the only recruiter I've ever interacted with that I thought was earning her paycheck (she cold-emailed me) was from Facebook. Her email showed that she had done some research on my startups and read through my (public) Facebook profile, discussing some of my favorite hobbies (motorcycles and travel).
I still declined, but I actually wrote a nice response instead of dustbinning it as spam.
I suspect a lot of what differentiates a good recruiter from a bad recruiter is the ability to connect on a personal level. Even though it's obvious what the motivations are, it's still better to [pretend to] be human. Perhaps the recruiting field needs to draw some lessons from online dating.
