Recruiting process in technology firm is in need of serious change, and the problem is widespread in all companies, big or small, but more so with big ones.

I had a phone call with Google recruiter this morning. 1 minute into the call, I realized I am talking to someone who is not technical at all. The outcome of that is I start having to field standard questions like: what's your strongest language, how man years have you done this, etc. If you ask the wrong questions, how often do you get the right answer? The questions that are being asked these days simply do not help surface the superstar from the mediocre.

Companies rely on hiring great people to become successful. But technical companies have thus far rely on non-technical person to do the recruiting. This is a major problem that requires serious innovation (or renovation?). Good companies will naturally attract a lot of strong candidates, and the weak ones can later be filtered out by more technically oriented interviews. One problem though, what happen if the really good ones have been filtered out prematurely? The loss in revenue caused by such mistakes is hard to calculate, and it's being made as we speak, and common sense tells us the result of that is like walking over a pile of gold mine thinking it is just sand. (ok, maybe sand is more valuable these days given the ubiquity of computer chips in our lives)

So what's the proposed solution to this? While some might think that all we need is to train the recruiters more, there is simply no substitute for someone with actual experience in the field. After all, would you ask your mother in-law to evaluate the authenticity of a Ming dynasty vase you just got from China?

One good solution for this is to have the technical lead goes through all submitted resume and make the initial phone calls. While this might seem like an obvious waste of talent, it's not. If all you want is to increase your headcount in your company, by all means, get anyone to do this. But if what you want is the best person you can find that will help grow your company, you gotta do it yourself. Of course, there are a lot of logistical issues to work out here, especially when you have a company with lots of teams looking for their own candidates. But that's a small problem to solve.