Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections
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@scottalanmiller said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:
@guyinpv said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:
Also, I would assume for larger companies, hiring from within the walls is the first/best bet. Promote someone up, and another and another, and then after promoting people all you have left are bottom level positions to fill.
That's what the worst companies do, but obviously good ones cannot because the best people won't come work for you that way. Wegmans in NY does this, promoting all IT from the ranks of cashiers, and it shows. Even the most basic tasks need to be outsources and everything is shoddy, slow and costly.
Are we talking about IT companies?
There is a huge benefit to promoting internal talent. I.e. they already know the work ethic and temperament and how they work with others. That they've shown some leadership ability and drive, or actually enjoy the work and the product. You don't get a lot of that in a couple job interviews. It's a safe bet to promote internal talent if you see the potential in someone to move up.
And what employee wouldn't like a fresh set of responsibilities and a nice pay bump?It's also a benefit to start people at low positions because you tend to get the beginners and new talent. People you can mold a little bit and grow into what the company needs.
This as opposed to hiring some veteran person stuck in their ways and has a hard shell for change.
I'm making an assumption that it's a bit easier to hire for lower positions than higher. Higher positions have more security clearance, more responsibilities, more control. That must be difficult to make the decision to hire.But obviously, what you described can happen too. I'm just surprised you think that is the norm rather than the exception.
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@guyinpv said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:
There is a huge benefit to promoting internal talent. I.e. they already know the work ethic and temperament and how they work with others.
That's a bonus, but most of the time what they know is that they are not very good. Knowing someone is mediocre isn't all that great if you have to promote them anyway.
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@guyinpv said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:
It's a safe bet to promote internal talent if you see the potential in someone to move up.
But in finance, a safe bet is a losing bet. It's like bonds, they are predictable, but predictably bad.
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@guyinpv said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:
And what employee wouldn't like a fresh set of responsibilities and a nice pay bump?
Normally, good ones, because leaving the company normally provides even more pay bump and more experience. Staying in the same company means bubble syndrome and an inability to bring new value after your initial hire.
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@guyinpv said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:
It's also a benefit to start people at low positions because you tend to get the beginners and new talent. People you can mold a little bit and grow into what the company needs.
This is very true, but only works if your mentors are amazing. If you don't have amazing senior staff, this becomes a negative because the youth get skewed with bad habits. It's also very hard to determine who is going to be great at 50 when they are 15.
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@guyinpv said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:
This as opposed to hiring some veteran person stuck in their ways and has a hard shell for change.
I feel like this is more the opposite. You get stuck in your ways getting someone that has never left the one company. The only know one thing, they've only seen one thing, they've only done it one way, they know politics rather than IT, they move up normally because they know the system rather than their jobs (good people are less likely to move up compared to connected ones) and they tend to be change averse because that's why they didn't move on somewhere else.
It's people that have moved from company to company that are the least stuck in their ways. They have to be adaptable because they've been forced to adapt time and time again. They have broader perspective and are more likely, even at an older age, to adapt to changing needs, ideas and so forth.
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I think we can just assume everybody is mediocre to some degree. Most of us just work for a paycheck after all.
So, the conversation seems to be changing from "how can companies find people?", to "how can companies find the absolute best people because existing talent is too mediocre?".
Well then my assumption here is that they steal the talent from other competing organizations!
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@guyinpv said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:
I'm making an assumption that it's a bit easier to hire for lower positions than higher. Higher positions have more security clearance, more responsibilities, more control. That must be difficult to make the decision to hire.
I agree here. But good lower level people are more likely to leave you. If your process is to depend on hiring from within, you have a brain drain problem.
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@guyinpv said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:
I think we can just assume everybody is mediocre to some degree. Most of us just work for a paycheck after all.
So, the conversation seems to be changing from "how can companies find people?", to "how can companies find the absolute best people because existing talent is too mediocre?".
Well then my assumption here is that they steal the talent from other competing organizations!
It needs to be from non-competing ones, normally. For both legal and fresh blood reasons. This is why I went to Wall St., in 2006, they wanted someone with the same level of experience but from another sector because I brought fresh perspectives to the financial realm. All of the corporate incest between the financial companies was killing innovation.
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@scottalanmiller said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:
@guyinpv said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:
I'm making an assumption that it's a bit easier to hire for lower positions than higher. Higher positions have more security clearance, more responsibilities, more control. That must be difficult to make the decision to hire.
I agree here. But good lower level people are more likely to leave you. If your process is to depend on hiring from within, you have a brain drain problem.
I would guess also that if you hire someone on the idea that it's a benefit they have worked for many companies, bouncing around and becoming adaptable, that you can also count on them leaving you also.
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@guyinpv said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:
@scottalanmiller said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:
@guyinpv said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:
I'm making an assumption that it's a bit easier to hire for lower positions than higher. Higher positions have more security clearance, more responsibilities, more control. That must be difficult to make the decision to hire.
I agree here. But good lower level people are more likely to leave you. If your process is to depend on hiring from within, you have a brain drain problem.
I would guess also that if you hire someone on the idea that it's a benefit they have worked for many companies, bouncing around and becoming adaptable, that you can also count on them leaving you also.
Absolutely. It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Or in the case of employment, it is better to have hired someone temporarily that is valuable than to keep someone that is worthless.
Knowing that people will leave when they are no longer growing and driving your company is something you can plan for. You can have a good relationship and work together for transitions. It can work far better than being stuck with otherwise unemployable people.
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Why would any company keep around worthless talent or "unemployable people" to begin with?
If we drag these ideas to their farthest extremes, it seems there are some logical issues.
If every company decided to not promote within the ranks. AND if every company only hired people who have been in that position in other companies. AND only that position in other companies in different sorts of fields. Then we are starting with a talent pool that came from nowhere and is going nowhere.How did they get those positions if not by promotion? How did they get their first job if they didn't already work it in another company?
Perhaps some of this is politics, but some is moral, to a degree. Companies should, to some degree, help bring up talent, and not simply play these numbers games in such a way where no new people can enter the market at all.
Somebody has to take the risk of hiring somebody where it's their first time in the position.
Somebody has to take the risk of molding good upper management.People in these positions don't just appear in a basket by a stork! So where does "best hiring practices" give way to politics or to moral goodness? How do new people get into these jobs?
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@guyinpv said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:
Why would any company keep around worthless talent or "unemployable people" to begin with?
That's the natural situation when you only or primary promote from low ranks to higher ones. The people you have naturally lack the experience that other companies would want and they become heavily silo'd and the company generally loses the ability to gauge skill and competence. Keeping unemployable people is the key value proposition to the promote from within system - when it is all or nearly all that you use. You get people without the skills, but that feel trapped and cost less.
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@guyinpv said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:
If we drag these ideas to their farthest extremes, it seems there are some logical issues.
I'm talking about what is clearly visible in real world companies that I've consulted for. It's not a logical extreme, it's the visible outcome of a logical result.
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@guyinpv said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:
How did they get those positions if not by promotion? How did they get their first job if they didn't already work it in another company?
None of these systems refuses to hire initial people. It's levels above the entry point that are up for discussion.
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Example:
Company A hires 20 new L0 right out of high school each year. Company B also hires 20 new L0 right out of high school each year.
Company A fills the ranks of the L1 roles "purely" by promoting from their former L0 pool. Their L2 roles will eventually be filled by people coming from the L1. And so forth.
Company B fills the ranks of the L1 roles "purely" by hiring people from other companies where they are ready to move up from L0 or laterally over from other L1 roles. Other companies are generally Companies C, D and E.
In the real world, most companies don't outright refuse to promote from within, but make it impractical. For example, if your company doesn't have L0, L1, L2 and L3 but only L1 and "Team Lead" positions, it can be almost impossible to make the leap. But going to another company for L2 experience and returning to be a Team Lead can work out just fine.
Wall St. does this all the time. You move up twice as fast bouncing while getting more training and experience.
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@guyinpv said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:
Perhaps some of this is politics, but some is moral, to a degree. Companies should, to some degree, help bring up talent, and not simply play these numbers games in such a way where no new people can enter the market at all.
I don't necessarily agree that it is a matter of corporate ethics. Outside of the Fortune 1000, this isn't even realistically possible. You can't expect a company that isn't large enough to have a solid IT practice to maintain loads of impractical or useless job roles just to give people working for a company outside of their career path a way to move up the corporate ladder.
Think about this outside of IT. A bookkeeper is not expected to ever be promoted from BK to Accountant to CPA to CFO in a single company, it's unreasonable. Or for an attorney to be brought in as an intern and eventually be general counsel for a company of only 100 people that might only ever hire a single lawyer, if even one.
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@guyinpv said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:
People in these positions don't just appear in a basket by a stork! So where does "best hiring practices" give way to politics or to moral goodness?
Most people argue that best hiring practices and moral goodness are always one and the same. Good practices are there so that everyone can excel as much as possible. Any short circuiting of that will necessarily hold back both companies and employees equally. Any change to the best hiring practices means that the best people are being held back to allow those that are not as good to be more easily "carried."
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@guyinpv said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:
How do new people get into these jobs?
Which ones?
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I don't think we're talking in the same train of thought here. But I think it's a bit off topic anyway.
As for finding talent. I've seen some new marketplaces come up which help people in certain industries find jobs near and dear to their heart.
For example GitHub's job market. Or StackOverflow's market. Or CodePen's market.
People who are a bit heavily invested in those platforms would be apt to find jobs from companies who also love those platforms and what they represent as far as potential talent.In other words, instead of one huge market covering everything like Monster, you have mini-markets ran within various "networks" where desired talent is bound to be found.
If I'm a designer, I'll probably be hanging out at this or that place. Or programmers on Github. Or general developers on Stack. Or whatever industry. I even see job boards now on many Slack channels that grow in popularity.
Linkedin was kind of this way. A "network" of "business-y" people, companies and employees, all hanging out trying to find each other. But it became something else.
So it kind of reverses the role of the recruiter. Instead of me hiring a recruiter to go find stuff, the company hires a recruiter that hunts down the talent where they like to hang out and post jobs there.
