So your plan would be to hire all the college applicants that applied (or a random sample) and then mentor and train them to see who works out the best?
Re:Hiring and the market for lemons (2016)
by sokoloff on Friday April 13, 2018 @08:02PM
(#16834964)
No, you hire the ones who seem interested, skilled “enough”, and intelligent (possibly in reverse order of importance). You can very safely make a cut against some very likely poor candidates.
But yeah, you have a light filter and then let them grow and evolve. You can’t possibly learn in 4 hours anywhere near what you can in 2 years. In college recruiting, you’re looking for “could be solid” and you get the raw material for that a lot. Some happen to turn out great.
Finding greatness in industry is driven mostly by asking some of your best employees to search their networks for their best ex-colleagues and otherwise by dumb luck (someone tried a startup that went bust and no one in their network had an opening, someone is moving to a new city with no network, etc)
Those three traits are exactly what I use for college recruiting. I guess some people look at great developers on an absolute scale but I consider it on a relative scale within the role under consideration. I consider those three traits make a junior candidate great. Actually those same traits are important for all roles. It is just that for junior roles I don't expect much beyond that.
The simplest answer is to predict that 0 of the 1000 are great developers. That will be reliable for most cohorts of 1000 people and most active industry applicants for developer positions.
You can only reliably find greatness by filtering through many college applicants, training and mentoring them, keeping, motivating, and incenting the best, or by using networking and references to find the standout performers. It’s so rare for these industry experienced people to need to apply for a job cold that that is a tremendously adverse pool from which to select in my experience If greatness is the goal.
If good enough is the goal, there are plenty more of those devs available.