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Diversity quotas suck. Here’s why.

A few days ago, I contributed to a roundtable discussion-style post about diversity quotas (that is, setting specific hiring targets around race and gender) on the Key Values blog. Writing my bit there was a good forcing function for exploring the issue of diversity quotas at a bit more length… and if I’m honest, this […]

In defense of Palantir… or why the Department of Labor got the wrong man

On September 26th, the U.S. Department of Labor filed a suit against Palantir Technologies, alleging that Palantir’s engineering hiring practices discriminate against Asian applicants. I don’t have any salacious insider information about this suit, but I do have quite a bit of insight into how technical hiring works. Palantir and the DOL are really arguing […]

A founder’s guide to making your first recruiting hire

Recently, a number of founder friends have asked me about how to approach their first recruiting hire, and I’ve found myself repeating the same stuff over and over again. Below are some of my most salient thoughts on the subject. Note that I’ll be talking a lot about engineering hiring because that’s what I know, […]

Engineers can’t gauge their own interview performance. And that makes them harder to hire.

Note: This post is cross-posted from interviewing.io’s blog. interviewing.io is a company I founded that tries to make hiring suck less. I included it here because it seems like there’s a good amount of thematic overlap. And because there are some pretty graphs. interviewing.io is an anonymous technical interviewing platform. We started it because resumes suck […]

What happens when you stop relying on resumes

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I’ve come to rely quite heavily on data. I’ve counted typos on resumes, I’ve sifted through a corpus of engineering offers, and I’ve skimmed thousands of recruiting messages to tag them by personalization level. This post, however, is going to be a bit of […]