Ask HN: Tips for hiring? It has been difficult
7 aprdm 14 6/19/2025, 5:02:57 PM
Recently we had an opening in our organization, the amount of very well crafted CVs we received it's crazy, they are really good.
Which imposes a challenge in itself, since we have to filter 100s of CVs for a role somehow.
Then in the interviews, it's clear that the person doesn't know how to go deep on the topics.
The conversation feels very unnatural, and very "buzzword driven".
In fact I am convinced that some of them are straight out reading from some AI prompt that "prepared" them for the interview.
I know hiring has always been difficult for both sides, but probably with AI's help the signal:noise ratio seems way out of the whack.
What have people been doing ?
When we interview we don't try to assess how much technical knowledge the candidate has, but rather, of the things which they have gained experience in (and they are allowed to dictate this), how much can they confidently relay to us. From this we can estimate how much talent the candidate has. We get some interviewees with seemingly strong CVs e.g. particle physics PhD who does Kaggle in their free time, but then they are not able to explain in detail anything they have done. We also get some interviewees who have seemingly mediocre CVs e.g. bad grades, didn't publish their thesis and bare github, but they turn out amazing.
I guess my point is, experience is not talent, and some good talent does not sell themselves well and for the rest you get inundated with mediocre talent who know how to sell themselves.
I do hire juniors and interns as well. And I have similar issues for those. On interns we had 1000s of people interested.
In my experience of placing software engineers in tech startups, the only way to find the best talent is to talk to them. If we give them coding test, they get done with it somehow but when we talk to them in the interview, that's when we get the real sense of their skillset. I know it's time consuming, but it saves you a lot of time and money in the long run.
Also, if you provide feedback to candidates whom aren’t faking expertise, major kudos and respect to you. Feedback loops were relatively common when I started my career and they’ve become mostly nonexistent today.
I haven't used them, but read the testimonials:
> ...sent us two profiles of solid candidates, one of which we hired!
> ...other recruiters sent like 50 CVs and we couldn't find anyone, and then RC sends a single candidate and we hired him.
How they do it: the Recurse Center puts more thought into collecting a small set of excellent candidates, then puts even more thought into matching them with employers.
- Arrange 10min screening call with 20% (randomly selected from this pile)
- Use the screening call to verify the individual can convincing speak to the experience on their CV, and that they are a real person from the location they claim to be from (fake remote employees are a huge problem these days)
- Take a random sample from those who pass the screening call to do a tech interview
- Use the interview to get a better sense of their experience, culture fit, and end by setting a tech challenge
- Follow up on those who complete the tech challenge and make them talk through a few decisions they made (pick a few things in the code to discuss before the interview).
- Those who produce good code, can explain why they made the decisions they did, have good experience on paper and have past all previous steps are generally going to be pretty decent employees
Cut corners at your own expense. A bad hire will cost more in time and money long-term. Don't penalise those who use AI. Penalise those who use AI then can't explain their code.
Recruiters. Any recruiter who sends you someone like that, lose them. Find a recruiter that can actually judge talent - not perfectly, but enough to not fall for someone reading from an AI.
I haven't seen a better approach tho.