Hiring: Apples and Oranges

I ran across this great article about hiring in my twitter feed.  (Incidentally, the author is seeking employment at the moment.)  Here’s the author’s take on what’s wrong with hiring in tech today:

Job postings focus on the current tooling and products rather than factor in future plans. Interviews focus on the immediate technical knowledge and abilities of candidates, rather than on the candidates’ capabilities for learning and adapting. Companies hire the wrong people for the wrong reasons, then are surprised to find they can’t scale or adapt to meet strategic goals.

It really resonated.  It crystallized what I’ve seen reading and writing job descriptions over the past 20 years, which is typically an over focus on hard skills and an underfocus on softer skills.  From a higher level, it’s a focus on immediate needs vs long term compatibility (perhaps the emphasis on ‘fit’ is a counter to that).  Job postings focus on current needs to the exclusion of adaptability because it’s a lot harder to measure adaptability.  After all, everyone is capable of change in some aspects of their lives, so how do you know if an employee can handle change in the particular manner you need?

The entire article is worth a read.  Next time you write a job requisition, think about whether you need someone to hit the ground running with a particular technology, or whether you can afford to hire someone who’ll have to either be trained up or transfer skills from a similar but not identical concepts (from rails to django or vice versa, for example).  If the former, do they need to be an employee, and if so, what will happen to them when the exact need is done?  If the latter, you’ve vastly expanded your talent pool.