from Hacker News

Yahoo's Mayer gets internal flak for more rigorous hiring

by lucidquiet on 3/26/13, 4:56 PM with 61 comments

• by zalzane on 3/26/13, 5:37 PM

  At first I was thinking this would be an article where management was upset that they couldn't hire java jockeys anymore because of some rigorous hiring practice - but it turns out that the hiring practice in question is to require applicants to have degrees from prestigious universities.

  I think this reflects well on Mayer's distrust of yahoo's HR department. Even though hiring employees from only prestigious universities is a terrible decision when it comes to getting as much good talent as possible, it's the only "solid" solution to force HR to at least be hiring candidates who might almost be good at what they're doing.

  The reforms taking place in yahoo are quite interesting. Mayer's probably running under the knowledge that most of yahoo's employees aren't really good at what they do, so it's going to be very interesting to see what kind reforms she can pass so that the quality of the work produced by yahoo doesn't correlate with the quality of employees they're currently dealing with.

• by swalsh on 3/26/13, 5:31 PM

  Let me backseat CEO this for a second. To me, the problem with Yahoo is they're no longer relevant, they no longer have a thing people want. In the past they made their money by being the "default" they WERE the front page of the internet. You open up a browser, there's a search bar, the weather, and a bunch of fluffy reprinted news articles.

  But this isn't 1996. People don't need ANY of this. If I want the weather, I have a gadget on my phone, which by the way is the first thing I look at in the morning. If I want to search I type the query into the URL bar (I use chrome) If I want news I go to reddit or hacker news. Nothing is drawing me into yahoo. Reprinted badly written blog articles do not attract me. My mom would probably read them, but doesn't know how to search for them.

  Basically, having an army of the top engineers in the world isn't worth anything if they're not working on something people want to use. Yahoo needs to rethink who they are if they want to survive, they lost news, they lost search, and they lost "hosting gadgets".

• by lmkg on 3/26/13, 5:44 PM

  Rejecting more people is not the same as being more rigorous. They can be the same if your rejection criteria are well-chosen, but I don't have much faith in "the CEO glances at your resume." For all the problems that Yahoo! may have with recruiting talent, I have a hard time believing they can be solved by any filter process whose sole input is resumes.

• by jtchang on 3/26/13, 5:29 PM

  Of course she is going to get internal flak: she's basically saying the current management is incompetent and needs to raise the bar because she can't continue to blindly trust the hiring decisions that are being made on a day to day basis.

  Brutal but how else will you separate the wheat from the chaff?

• by mtoddh on 3/26/13, 5:34 PM

  Funny, from the title, I thought I'd read the article and end up wanting to defend all of Mayer's policy (the intent of which seems right), but then you see quotes like:

  Job applicants often go through the interview process, then "wait and wait," said one executive who recently left Yahoo. "One person we wanted waited eight weeks, then they inevitably got another offer."

  It seems like at this point, Yahoo would want to streamline their hiring process as much as possible to bring good engineers on as quickly (and painlessly) as possible. And have that be an asset in terms of recruiting. I've had friends complain about this "wait and no response" sort of thing when interviewing with Google, but they're more willing to put up with it, because hey, it's Google.

• by michaelpinto on 3/26/13, 5:32 PM

  "internal flak" = if you're hiring someone better than me that will cost me my job. i hate to say it but the more i hear about mayer the more i want to buy the stock...

• by wwkeyboard on 3/26/13, 5:43 PM

  At their level you're better passing over a few good applicants than letting in some bad ones.

  If you don't like it thats something we need to talk about changing in our industry, not just shooting ire at a single company. Mentorship is not common, and we consider 5 years of experience sufficient for a 'senior' position. Until that changes they are going to have to find some way to limit their hiring. (note: I don't 100% agree with these new practices, but I do understand where Mayer and Yahoo! are coming from)

• by smurph on 3/26/13, 6:17 PM

  So her response to the criticism regarding missing out on good people because they did not have degrees from top universities is to say "Why can't we just be good at hiring"? Seriously? Your employees are trying to tell you how to improve your decisions and be more flexible, and your response is to tell them "No, actually you just need to do as I say, but do a better job at it."

  Did Mayer spend 25 years as a military officer? That seems to be her management style.

• by reso on 3/26/13, 5:19 PM

  Good for her. I look forward to a day when "I work for Yahoo" will again be a phrase that can be said with meaning.

• by dvt on 3/26/13, 7:31 PM

  To me this whole "new Yahoo!" thing is all backwards.

  1. Yahoo! is in trouble. We need someone to take us out of this rut? But who? Enter Marissa Meyer: an executive with little top-level leadership experience and even less experience making desperate companies like Yahoo! relevant.

  2. We need more productivity and creativity. Umm, lets get rid of work-from-home. That should do it. But we'll give out free food in company cafeterias. It's what Facebook does, right?

  3. Our HR department sucks at hiring. Should we fix it? Nope. Just contrive some draconic hiring practices -- we're only going to look at people from engineering programs at UC Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, Caltech, MIT, Harvey Mudd, and, of course, all the ivies. This kid went to CMU and has had already had a couple of floundering start-ups? Nope, don't even consider him. This is what Google does, isn't it?

  So, in short, every single strategy is backwards. Instead of fixing the ACTUAL problems (leadership, HR, productivity, creativity), Yahoo! constantly misfires. Productivity is a side-effect of an already-positive company image. Good hires are a side-effect of an already-healthy corporate image.

• by spikels on 3/26/13, 5:40 PM

  First no remote working and now hiring based on credentials. Is Meyer moving Yahoo into the future or the past?

• by timo614 on 3/26/13, 5:53 PM

  Her lack of trust with their HR department worries me more than any silly restriction on the candidates they hire. I mean if she's going to sit around and personally review every single person that comes to apply at Yahoo then, yeah, she better restrict the number of recruits reaching her. By forcing this restriction she's upping the average quality of the people reaching her and lowering the number of candidates she needs to toss out.

  I'd imagine once she felt the HR department was capable of hiring the type of employee she personally finds to be exceeding she'll likely consider removing this restriction in favor of having those candidates take an active part in the hiring process. Also with her HR department trained on what candidates she considers good it'll make it harder for them going forward to settle on someone who fits the position but doesn't fit into Mayer's vision.

  Who knows though -- I think it's a dumb idea but I'm also not the CEO of Yahoo with whatever knowledge she has on hand to justify this as an area of concern.

• by simmons on 3/26/13, 6:07 PM

  I'm all about merit/talent-based hiring and working from home, but it's hard for me to be too judgmental of extreme measures taken in an effort to resurrect a declining company. Yahoo is the patient on the operating room table being defibrillated with 1000 volts -- a desperate act that would be absolutely crazy to perform on a healthy person just for good measure. As others have suggested, maybe Yahoo has some deeply embedded cultural faults that can only be worked around with these measures.

  Whether it will work or not, I couldn't say. I find it a little sad to see companies wait until they're past the point of no return before looking for a savior. (See: Palm and Jon Rubinstein).

• by HunterV on 3/26/13, 6:09 PM

  To me, it just sounds like Mayer is trying to implement Google's structure to Yahoo! without everyone calling it that.

  You'll see it mentioned in articles concerning the similarities between her new structure and Google. But they're quickly dismissed usually by flaky differences such as in this one where she's not implementing Google's independent work program, which I'm pretty sure isn't a thing at Google anymore.

  She's smart, she doesn't want to reinvent the wheel, she knows what Google is doing works. She just doesn't want to be known as the one who "Google-ized" Yahoo!.

• by greenyoda on 3/26/13, 8:11 PM

  I'm surprised that nobody has yet pointed out that an emphasis on what college a job candidate attended only makes sense when you're hiring kids fresh out of school who have no real accomplishments they can be judged by. Even if you're hiring someone with just five years of work experience, what they've accomplished during their years of employment is much more relevant to their success at your company than where they went to school and what grades they got. Is Yahoo hiring anyone over the age of 25?

• by greenyoda on 3/26/13, 7:42 PM

  "Mayer insists on personally reviewing every new recruit, a practice that supporters say brings needed discipline to the company."

  For a company the size of Yahoo (or any company that's bigger than a small business), having the CEO review every hire is the worst kind of micromanagement and sends the message to her managers that she doesn't trust them to do what they're paid to do. It also means that Mayer is spending less time doing the things that really are her job as CEO.

• by bcoates on 3/26/13, 6:22 PM

  Mayer's weird actions make more sense in if the later context the article provides is true: that Yahoo is in a de-facto hiring freeze. If Yahoo were trying to grow it would be madness, but they aren't.

  I think is her plan to limit managers ability to build empires by only allowing them to replace employees out of a tiny pool hand picked by Mayer. I wouldn't be surprised if it worked, but it's a stunning vote of no-confidence in the entire company structure...

• by pavs on 3/26/13, 6:07 PM

  I am really rooting for Mayer. I hope that she not only turns around Yahoo but also give Google a real run for their money in every way it can.

  There will be bumps along the road and ugly mistakes, but at the end of the day I have a feeling that She is really going to turn things around for yahoo.

• by cantastoria on 3/26/13, 5:51 PM

  It's funny whenever I hear someone say "We only hire people who went to X" I always just assume that person is insecure about their own abilities. Hiring based on credentials doesn't require you to be good at the job yourself.

• by HunterV on 3/26/13, 5:58 PM

  If I were to simplify the problem:

  Google: Search Facebook: Newsfeed Yahoo!: ???

• by Macsenour on 3/26/13, 5:52 PM

  All this makes sense to me. To change a culture you must make big turns. You can't change a company's future by adding a single web product or updating a website. She's putting the company in a positon to do something big that 700,000 people will see.

  Keep going!

• by alekseyk on 3/26/13, 6:00 PM

  Have fun getting top engineering talent while requiring a degree from a top university.

  To me this screams 'only hire engineers that are like me because they /must/ be the best engineers'.

  Sad thing is none of the EXPERIENCED engineers with those degrees will touch Yahoo! with a 10 foot pole.

  And I don't care where you graduated from, without experience and good guidance you will be producing mediocre shit and get out performed by a kid who has several years of experience under his belt without any degree.

• by camus on 3/26/13, 6:06 PM

  Blame it on low level employee , classic ... lol... but if you want "top level" university people and have requirements like in top financial institutions , you need to offer them a top level gig.

  Can Mayer afford that ? without a product or a strategy ? what yahoo is about ? a brand but what else ?