Wednesday, April 29, 2015

A College Degree Isn't an Acceptable Hiring Screen

Comment on: Do You Need a Degree to be Hired to Develop Software?
In all the time I hired developers (about 10 years), I never made a college degree a requirement.
The best developer (who was also much more - designer, coach, architect, program manager...) I ever helped hire didn't have a college degree.

Our company had just hired a new HR person that started "showing their worth" with new rules such as the dictate that all hires must have a college degree. Thankfully our team agreed to hiring him was wise and the CIO decided that dictate was nonsense and we hired the applicant.

I have written about what a great software development team we created.

In addition to a college degree being a lousy hiring screen, so are most of the automated screen poorly designed HR departments use. Years of experience, experience with a list of specific software, keywords listed, etc. are just lazy and poor criteria to use to reject applicants.

Related: Dee Hock on Hiring (2010) - Hiring – Does College Matter? (2007) - Google’s Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm (but yours shouldn't be) - The Illusion of Knowledge - Working as a Software Developer

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