I used to make short films with an all-volunteer cast and crew, and I really use exactly the same mindset when managing employees. The truth is, in this market, in this industry, all employees are pretty much volunteers — they don’t NEED the job because they can walk out the door and get a new job that pays just as much. Acting as though you can impose your will on people is crazy.

So I don’t know how employers can get away with arrogance — I certainly can’t imagine being able to hire great people that way. I’m not saying such employers don’t exist, mind you, just I can’t fathom such an attitude. It seems self-destructive.

But I do believe there is still life in the employer/employee model — just not in the old-school Industrial Revolution sense where the employer extracts value from the employee and then returns slightly less, thus exploiting the workers and preparing the world for a proletariat revolution. THAT model doesn’t seem to have worked out so well.

But a model where both employer and employee are receiving value (albeit perhaps in different “currencies”, if you will) is still going strong.

@Ben: missed you last time around — I guess I’ll just say that if you want to know more about the culture or technology at FreshBooks, the information is available to those who look around a bit, and designing our hiring process to select for those who are actually interested in this company seems to work pretty well for us.

And lastly, @Robert — haven’t taken the test but thanks for the links!

Employers have become fantastically arrogant. They waste applicants time with pointlessly tedious procedures. HR departments are completely dehumanized, and worse understand NOTHING about the business they’re hiring for, IT, or worse what motivates high-caliber employees.

This process is finely tuned for the drone-population… the mass collection of barely functional mug-holders, clock-watchers, and paycheck collectors that fill up oversized and underly productive corporations.

The misfit is obvious and predictable.

If you want a personalized response from applicants, make a personalized effort to find them. You may think that being in an “employers market” would make things easier, but as Cory has seen it does not… especially in the current H1-B crisis where resumes are copied wantonly, experience completely fabricated, interviews taken by surrogates, and so on.

If you want to filter the seed from chaff, thumbing a giant stack of paperwork is not going to do it.

Neither is the tired old HR rhetoric that anyone who is someone has already grown jaded to.

“XXX Corp needs highly skilled and talented paper-pushers to work in an exciting and innovative environment.”

blah blah blah. When I get a call from someone talking like this, I politely find an excuse to hang up.

Scoring – from the assessment add your scores from each group of questions

A Questions = Clan
B Questions = Adhocracy
C Questions = Market Driven
D Questions = Hierarchy

Here’s a description of the organizational types.
http://bit.ly/ThS8S

I’m guessing FreshBooks’ culture is predominantly a Clan.

On another topic; the job advertisement for Software Developers still contains a reprimand

Whether these recommendations are accurate or not is irrelevant. The point is, at the end of the day, there is no guideline, no principle and no rule that applies in all scenarios. I hope neither you nor your readers assume that your post is reflective of what “employers like yourself” might be looking for — it may or may not be. All IMHO, of course.

I’m glad you’ve provided what works for you, and hopefully future job candidates will take notice. Good luck with your search.

-Milan

I think your attitude toward technical requirements (”we ask our programmers to be generalists”) is bang-on. If you’re investing in full-time employees for the long haul, there’s no way you want someone who thinks “I’m a PHP coder and everything else frightens me”. (insert language of choice there; I picked on PHP because that’s what I use most right now)

I guess I was thinking less in terms of requirements than of disclosure; some good candidates might like just a tiny peek under the hood.

Seems to me that “corporate culture” has different facets. There’s office hours, dress code, parties, high ceilings, huge donuts, etc. — what you might call ambiance.

And then there’s the technical culture — do you live and die by version control; if so what kind? What do you think about unit-testing? Since you’re a hosted app, do developers and sysadmins ever mix up responsibilities? Is all your data relational or is some/any/all document-oriented?

I guess I’m thinking of things along the lines of the Joel Test, but perhaps with a touch of spec-mongering.

BTW I’m not actually asking these questions here, just giving examples of the kinds of details that might enhance the listings a bit. Then again maybe that kind of thing is better left to the interview.