Gordian Knot

Gordian Knot

Human Resources Services

Providence, Rhode Island 165 followers

Helping companies hire better software engineers

About us

We provide companies with tools to hire better software engineers with less bias. Our platform provides a more natural coding environment for engineers that helps to reduce stress in the interview process and increase the diversity of your hires. If you need help with: * Needs assessment * Writing job descriptions * Designing Structured Interviews * Developing Practical Code Assessments * Developing Rubrics * Training Engineers to Interview *

Website
https://www.gordianknot.company
Industry
Human Resources Services
Company size
1 employee
Headquarters
Providence, Rhode Island
Type
Self-Owned
Founded
2023

Locations

Employees at Gordian Knot

Updates

  • There are many interview techniques to evaluate technical skills, but they're not all right for every situation. Get in touch with us to talk more about how we can help you identify what techniques to use for your open roles and what services we offer to help create the process that will land you the perfect candidate.

    View profile for Edward Morgan, graphic

    Engineering Leader helping companies build high-performing software teams with evidence-based practices and proven training methods.

    Evaluating technical skills in interviews isn't just about asking hard questions. It's about asking the right question for the role. There are a half dozen or more techniques that you can use to evaluate coding skills in candidates, and they all have pros and cons...well, they all have cons, and some have pros. Each technique needs to balance a bunch of different things, like: → Candidate Experience and Time Commitment → Interviewer Time Commitment → Interviewer Expertise Needed → Cost of Implementation → Decision Confidence Figuring out how to create a great process that addresses all of those things can be difficult, especially when you're an already overworked engineering manager. If that's you, feel free to reach out about how I can use my engineering management expertise to help you create the best process for your open roles.

    • No alternative text description for this image
  • Don’t leave building teams up to chance. Contact us and we can help you train your team to interview effectively.

    View profile for Edward Morgan, graphic

    Engineering Leader helping companies build high-performing software teams with evidence-based practices and proven training methods.

    Who trained you how to interview software engineers? Did you get a careful onboarding, some introductory material, maybe a book to read on interviewing skills? Then were you given some mock interviews to conduct followed by shadowing real-world interviews? Me neither. I was thrown into a room and told to interview someone who was there for a job that was senior to my position. I just had a nice chat with him and then said “seems like a good hire to me.” If you want someone to help your engineers be better at helping you create literally the most important thing in your company—your teams—let me know. I’m always happy to chat.

  • Skills-based hiring is proven to be more effective and inclusive than traditional hiring methods. You’ll get a more talented and engaged workforce if you move away from traditional degree- or experience-based job descriptions. Skills-based hiring only works if you have the right interview structures and assessments, though, and those can be time-consuming to create and maintain. If you want help adopting skills-based hiring for your organization to save you time and money and help you build your high-performing teams, get in touch with us now.

    View profile for Edward Morgan, graphic

    Engineering Leader helping companies build high-performing software teams with evidence-based practices and proven training methods.

    Specifying years of experience doesn’t make sense in job posts or jobs. Why? Study after study (some linked in comments) has shown that years of experience is not correlated with job performance. Yet 100% of the top 10 results for “software engineer” in LinkedIn’s job search require some number of years of experience, ranging from 2+ years to 8+ years. This is probably a proxy for gauging how skilled a person is in a particular skill, but it doesn’t actually tell you what their skill level is. One candidate might have 10 years of experience writing JavaScript, but have terrible readability and maintainability because of the environments they’ve worked in, while a candidate with 2 years of experience might be great at writing clean code because they worked in a company that encouraged and supported that. Instead, use skills-based hiring. Skills-based hiring rejects the notion that you need to rely on proxies like years of experience to gauge if a candidate is qualified. Instead of years of experience, indicate that a candidate must be an expert or can be a beginner. This will open up a larger candidate pool, be more inclusive of good candidates, and be better aligned with what’s actually needed to do the job. Then, create assessments to actually measure those skills. If you’re worried about having too many candidates apply for a role, you can require a short take-home assessment up front to limit the number of applicants you need to review. Be aware that you might turn off some of the better candidates with that approach though. Another approach would be to administer an assessment after the initial conversation with a candidate. In either case, you’ll get a better signal about what candidates are capable of than relying on years of experience as a proxy. If you want help identifying what skills you should be testing for or you’d like to outsource the assessment process, DM me for more details. I’d be happy to help.

  • If you want to help change the future of hiring, check out Jenny Sukut's company, Straightforward Job Site and provide her some feedback here: https://lnkd.in/ePukTcBG

    View profile for Edward Morgan, graphic

    Engineering Leader helping companies build high-performing software teams with evidence-based practices and proven training methods.

    Hiring, especially technical hiring, is broken. But there are a few people out there who are trying to do something about it. One is Jenny Sukut, who's building a new platform called Straightforward Job Site to help folks match with hiring managers more easily and, well, straightforwardly. The platform aims to ensure higher quality job postings and a more human experience for job seekers, among other things. If you're interested in what she's doing and want to provide some input, there's a form linked in the comments to provide some of your experiences with hiring or job seeking and what you'd do to improve it. #hiring #recruiting

  • When you’re hiring, do you look for a team player, and do you measure the performance of that team? Or do you look for an individual high performer and measure their performance? If youre looking to hire and build a high-performing team, we can help. Get in touch with us to learn more about how we help companies streamline their hiring process to hire better engineers more quickly.

    View profile for Edward Morgan, graphic

    Engineering Leader helping companies build high-performing software teams with evidence-based practices and proven training methods.

    I think measuring individual performance is a bad idea. Yet I think that measuring team performance is an absolute necessity. Measuring individual performance goes awry really quickly. Campbell’s law states: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” That’s a super fancy way of saying that people will game the metrics to get the results they want. While Campbell (and also Goodhart, who has a similar law) meant these for public policy decisions, they’re relevant in day to day business decisions, too. So, here’s the conundrum, though: you can’t measure individual performance because of Campbell’s law, but you need to measure the impact you’re having in some way. You need to know if crime is going up or down, but you can’t accurately measure individual police officers. You need to know if your business is making or losing money, but you can’t accurately measure the performance of (most) individual employees. So, there’s a definite need for measuring impacts like profit or crime, but not for individual outputs, like tickets issued or lines of code written. But how do you bridge the gap? For me, that’s where the team performance measures come in. But picking the right measurements is critical. My personal favorite measurement is sprint completion rate, with a goal set at 80%. That commits the team to being predictable and reliable but allows for some experimentation and learning. What’s your take? What do you measure?

  • View organization page for Gordian Knot, graphic

    165 followers

    If you’re looking for help improving your hiring process to find engineers who will help make your teams great, come find us.

    View profile for Edward Morgan, graphic

    Engineering Leader helping companies build high-performing software teams with evidence-based practices and proven training methods.

    Don’t hire a rockstar, or a ninja or a 10x engineer. Ok, maybe a ninja—when I was 10, I totally wanted to be a ninja, and I’d love to work with one now, as long as they didn’t try to assassinate me. But really, don’t aim for the rockstar or the ninja or the 10x engineer. I don’t believe the myth of the 10x engineer. I’ve yet to meet one that’s truly ten times as productive as a good engineer. I’ve certainly met arrogant engineers and seen them be confused for 10x engineers, and I’ve seen engineers that use lots of complicated and inaccurate terminology (like “Markov chain” instead of “workflow”) also get thought of as the mythical 10x engineer. Building software anywhere other than a one-person startup requires you to work in a team. Everyone in the company, from customer support to sales, to be on board with the idea. If not, you’ll have zero customers, or, worse yet, thousands of unhappy customers. Some people have said that 10x engineers push past the company dogma to create brand new things. But even just creating prototypes requires a bunch of support from others. No one in a Series C company is building a product from scratch without any support from DevOps, QA, UX, DBAs, and the like, and if they are, they’re probably creating a whole new tech stack that now needs to be supported by people who have little or no familiarity with it. Plus, they’re stepping on the toes of the people they’re supposed to be working with. A truly great engineer would develop a quick paper prototype and then get folks on board with it. She would find ways to make it cost-effective and minimize the impact to the folks that would need to support it. She’d work with Product to make sure that there was a market for it and help make the case to leaders to support and fund it. She’d listen to people and incorporate their feedback to make it better. In short, she’d be part of a team. That’s a truly great engineer. Not an arrogant individual who wants to be seen as great, someone who quietly asserts herself and helps others around her be great too. #recruiting #hiring #10xengineer

  • I'm looking for an engineer. Trust Fund. Six-five. Blue Eyes. ...but good luck finding one when you're that specific. If you're having trouble closing an open role, think about each of the traits you're looking for as points along a spectrum instead of binary requirements. For example, if you're looking for someone with a trust fund, consider someone with just a sizeable bank account. Is 6'5" a must, or would 6'3" be okay? Does he have to have blue eyes? What about green? The same is true for software engineers and product management folks. Don't get too hung up on the specifics. Make sure you're defining the roles well, and you understand the traits and skills needed for success, but be flexible when evaluating candidates.

  • The top mistake that hiring managers make when hiring engineers is repeating the same process that was used to hire them. Many managers reason that if they're good employees, and the hiring process they went through got them the job, the hiring process must be fine. However, that's far from the truth. Hiring managers and recruiters are only slightly better than a coin toss at guessing which employees will perform well and stay beyond 18 months. Across all industries, the new hire failure rate is 46%, according to a study of 20,000 employees conducted by LeadershipIQ. So why do managers keep repeating the mistakes of the past? Partly because there are few good resources on how to hire, partly because change is hard, and partly because there is a lack of accountability in hiring. When hires work out, managers are quick to take credit, but when they don't, they're (no, not all of them) quick to blame the employee. While it's certainly incumbent upon the employee to perform well, they're only partly to blame when things don't work out. What do you think? Do you learn from your hiring mistakes and try to improve?

  • Skills-based hiring can go a long ways towards providing a better candidate experience and finding a better match between job-seekers and employers, but it shouldn’t be the only dimension you look at. People aren’t their résumé, nor are they test results. They’re human beings in all their beautiful complexity. Having an interview process that only evaluates hard skills and doesn’t take into account personality, culture fit, experience, learning ability, or other dimensions of who they are as people will lead to a poor match and higher turnover. TestGorilla is a great solution for adding more objectivity to the hiring process, but you should still treat people as the massively complex creatures they are when evaluating them for a role.

    View organization page for TestGorilla, graphic

    38,664 followers

    The resume is not the candidate. Let that sink in. For too long, we've relied on resumes. Degrees. Job titles. Years of experience. But what do they really tell us? Do they show a candidate's true potential? Their ability to learn, grow, and excel? Not always. Not fully. That's where skills-based hiring comes in. It's a game-changer. A way to: ➡️ Look beyond the paper ➡️ Focus on what really matters ➡️ Give every candidate a fair shot And companies are catching on. In 2022, 56% embraced skills-based hiring. In 2023, 73%. By 2024? A staggering 81%. These findings are just a snapshot of what's to come in the State of Skills-Based Hiring Report 2024,set to be released soon. ✍️ The writing is on the wall. Skills-based hiring is the #1 way to recruit. 📅 Save the date: June 4th

    • No alternative text description for this image

Similar pages