I can attest to #1 (Be careful who you pick to do the interviewing), the last time I was out seriously interviewing in Denver there was one company who had me interview with some less than stellar engineers (I wouldn’t have hired them).  Some of the others were great, and if I had to judge the interview by the good engineers I may have entertained their offer.  Instead I dismissed it out of hand.

TWO KEYS TO HIRE:

1. PERSON MUST BE AWESOME

2. THEIR AWESOME MUST FIT WITH YOUR AWESOME.

I am in awe of the talent in the field of programming and people who understands applications and code.  I do see a flaw in the recruitment process of this talent.  There is only one recruiting challenge for programmers and that is recruitment itself. 

Why not inverse the process and make the challenge to code for recruitment – set the challenge as one of how the programmer would go about dealing with the whole recruitment process.

It would inevitably lead people into a dead end alley and the winners of such a process will be the ones who are smartest at gaming the system, but the recruitment process is a game in itself and its byproducts are nearly always absorbed by the organization. 

The way my simple mind works, I see that we breed the animal we feed but we don’t create the human we really want.  Programmers like all skill sets do have one thing in common, they all start off in a human form, before organizations seemingly find ways of marrying them to their machinery.

So I ask myself is this really a local problem or is it endemic to a larger degree of how we collectively view technical talent.  We seem to have various versions of open everything except it seems a singular system that can self-organize itself into open source recruitment.

People who have acquired great skills and who cannot afford to sit on their haunches, and so are constantly re-learning those skills seem to be commoditized by those who don’t, in IMHO, in many cases have the same technical know-how, never mind a need to constantly learn and re-learn. 

I don’t think Nicholas Carr was right about technology being a commodity, I think his thinking applies to the recruitment process which apparently treats talent as a commodity that can be screened, rather than a talent that can be expressed.

When we entrust people with code, we entrust people with the heart of a business – that doesn’t sound like commodity to me, that sounds like a transformational strategic relationship.  In other words the way and methods of recruitment in one source, should be a flow into a greater source and the ultimate end of that is a self-managing and self-organizing talent pool that organizes itself through code.

Then there isn’t a hunt for talent but a respect for it, then there is an opportunity to placing human code around machine code, and that code becomes the most open thing imaginable – open capability, changing the way organizations relate to people. 

All talk of transparency often is nothing more than a beeline to the worth of the share of wallet it achieves, true transparency I believe is a function of capability, and in transforming the underlying nature of that capability, it gives rise to the kind of connection which are higher forms of relationship.

At the end of the day, we all bank on the relationship with the client but the client banks on the capability of the organization. 

If that capability is locked in, not shared, not a community that can self-organize itself, using its own prowess to code an emergent recruitment system that benefits all – then there isn’t in my view any value in me considering how to improve a lock-in system, a proprietary hunt for talent, which is subordinate and dehumanizing process at the least and in the long scheme of things, not a 21st Century way.

The day that happens, transparency will acquire a whole new level of meaning for me, because such a state of self-organization can only come about because trust is real.  Otherwise transparency is just code word for distrust as far I conceive it. 

We have therefore, in my mind, a long way to go before we really achieve any semblance of meaningful transparency, not that one we celebrate because I give out all my personal data, but one where a part of organizations absent of fear. 

The day we stop day trading on data and skill and allow capability to develop and flourish for the long-term through open systems, is a great vision to aim for.  On that day we are open source, because the source that then opens is within us, not in our machinery.

Of course I say all of this in such great naivety as is my want and exploration, after all, I am no where near any immediate interview room, so I am simply learning here for my vision is incomplete.

[v.o.M]
“viktor ovurmind” @thoughtspaces:twitter