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.
Not sure how the focus on prestigious degrees squares with the seven figure acqui-hire of a seventeen year old that hasn't finished his high school qualifications yet...
I'm willing to believe that people with prestigious qualifications not seeking work at more prestigious companies and startup wunderkinds are probably the worst talent pools for Yahoo to be trying to dredge, especially considering the wealth of smart developers who don't fit into those brackets are probably more likely to stick around.
Yahoo's problems were almost entirely at the top. The products are bland and useless and there is no strategic vision. Refusing to hire from outside of top-twenty programs is a smokescreen, not a solution. Call me when Mayer is able to articulate what exactly it is Yahoo is selling.
Top universities, personally reviewing hires, etc. is straight out of the Google playbook. I imagine product is secondary to her establishing her authority right now, and really, it's not like Google is all that great at capital-p Product.
You're jumping ahead. All I'm saying is that Yahoo has many things whose foregrounding is secondary to establishing Mayer's authority over the entire enchilada.
Is requiring a top university really a new thing at Yahoo?
I remember 5-6 years ago when I was applying for internships I couldn't even finish my application as it required you to pick from a list of universities (no option of "Other") which also happened to be the top 20.
Sounds like recruiting people like me which is never a good idea - could lead to problems with accusations of discrimination.
And it all depends on interpretation as what is a top university I worked on campus at Cranfield University in the Uk.
There was a joke on the CIT campus was they looked down on lesser institutions such as Oxford, Cambridge Harvard etc as "they offered BSc's as well as Masters and Phd programs"
Regardless of whether her premise is sound, if reports of a hire taking 8 weeks are accurate, she really needs to get that time down. I know 4chan/reddit style memes aren't popular here, but "Ain't nobody (worth hiring) got time for that (waiting for Yahoo to finally make an offer)".
I don't think the strategy she appears to be employing is 100% bad, but I think it is greatly hampered by the fact that Yahoo is not an inherently desirable place to work. They need to do a far better job of making a public display of why you would want to work for Yahoo, because I know a lot of very good software engineers and none of them , to my knowledge, view Yahoo as a desirable place to work and you'd have to be an absolute dream job to have the ability to make people wait months.
This approach worked at Google. However, as you point out, it does seem like there is a fundamental problem. Yahoo! is not pre-IPO Google. Or post IPO Google. It's not even pre-IPO Yahoo! What skilled programmer with good grades from a top university is even considering employment at Yahoo! ?
If she doesn't trust her HR department, instead of trying to personal do/correct their job, she should invest enough time upfront to hire people she can trust in HR and then let them do their job.
If she is really personally reviewing each new hire, she's not only slowing down the hiring process, but she's also demotivating her HR people.
Is her hiring "policy" to hire just from prestigious universities? That's what anonymous internal sources are saying to this reporter - but whether that is actually the case seems up in the air to me.
According to the article, she is personally reviewing all hires, so sounds more ad-hoc based on her judgement than formalized policy.
"I think this reflects well on Mayer's distrust of yahoo's HR department."
I'm confused by this statement. In a highly technical company like Yahoo, aren't the hiring decisions made primarily by the managers of the groups that have the open positions? It doesn't seem that an HR department would have the ability to figure out whether a software developer is even minimally competent.
But HR is the first gate. If they only let through mediocre people, then the true hiring managers are stuck with taking the best of the ones that get through. The only way to change that is to change how HR gates candidates.
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".
People like you are a minority. Most internet users are not tech savvy enough to go to Reddit and HN for news.
You are not the type of web users Yahoo is looking for (at least for now), which is a good thing for yahoo because people like you or me are in the minority. Probably less than 1-2% of the internet users.
The really sad part is that the F-35 is such a problem, they might restart production on the F-22 to supplement the fleet of uprated older planes to make up for the F-35.
People don't need morning news shows either, but they are still very popular. Conveniently packaging stuff for the mass market is a reasonable use case.
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.
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 looking at their code? Testing? Hiring based on their university instead of their chops is pretty narrow minded. I would be livid if I found a great candidate but was refused the approval to hire them just because they didn't graduate from MIT or Stanford.
Google's company-defining products are (in my opinion):
Search - not relevant to hiring practices, Search came before the company
Gmail - initial version made by Paul Buchheit -
Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
Adsense - created by Oingo and acquired by Google
Android - created by Danger and acquired by Google
(Andy Rubin - Utica College, Utica, New York)
Chrome - basically Webkit, created by KHTML project and Apple
As far as I can tell, the breakthroughs Google has had are completely unrelated to any Ivy League hiring practices.
In addition to having a few key products, a company also needs hordes of smart, hardworking and reliable people to keep things running and add incremental improvements. Top grades from a good university is a pretty good filter for "smart, hardworking and reliable."
Agreed -- it's a good filter for a higher probability of better talent (note: I say "probability" and not "guarantee") and their stock price and potential for growth speak for their human resources strategy.
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.
I suspect your reading comprehension is broken.
Just because the person in question didn't take another job after 8 weeks doesn't mean he didn't have offers waiting.
"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...
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)
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.
For non-open source stuff, those pesky NDAs say "You shall not pass !!!". I think it's a very good idea, still.
My two cent is, the reverse can be applied by showing the interviewee some source codes/designs/product.Good programmers definitely cringe at the sight of bad code and excite at sight of good stuff. Same can be said for designers with...well, designs. Rather low cost consulting too for the company who does that. Win-win situation.
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.
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.
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).
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!.
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?
"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.
Micromanagment is not always a bad thing, and Steve Jobs is one shining example of this. Of course not everyone is good at it, but time will tell how this ends up.
My guess is that current management have become stale, comfortable and somewhat corrupted. Recruiting favors those with connections within the company, not the ones with experience, knowledge or brilliance.
She could of course outright fire managers, but that could lead to worse consequences than micromanagment would.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.