UNIX V7

Once upon a time, when I worked for a large software company, my recruiting team and I would sit down each Friday with a huge stack of resumes. I would skim them and sort them into plausible and you've-got-to-be-kidding, occasionally pulling one out and saying, "I want to see this person next week." The recruiters used this as training input, to help them understand our needs. They'd also ask for updates on the project, so they could further understand just what we were looking for - in fact, one of them got so good at it she eventually joined a product team. Of course, this was too good to last. By the time I left, Recruiting was a 'virtual' organization, and you never knew who would be answering your emails. (I never met my actual 'assigned' recruiter in person.) Before that, they'd assigned recruiters to candidates rather than teams, based on the candidate's last name (now that's relevant criteria). In either model, there was no opportunity for the recruiter to grow to understand our team's needs - or to bond with us, becoming part of our success and feeling accountability for it. (In the old days, we invited our recruiters to ship parties and such.) Candidate selection was based on wordsearch for buzzwords - I was actually required to provide a list of three to five 'key words' for each open position. I think they called this 'progress.' -- Ian ________________________________________ From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of blstuart at bellsouth.net [blstuart at bellsouth.net] Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2009 9:23 AM To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Subject: Re: UNIX V7 And of course, I'm aware that you can't really describe in a job posting that kind of person. But the checklist is not the answer. Making sure the resumes are reviewed by someone who knows what they're looking at is. I'd much rather have 200 resumes put on my desk than to have 5 candidates vetted by HR and sent to me on the basis of their depth of knowledge of a specific language because they attended a 2-day training session on it. BLS