Time to rethink the way we hire tech talent

Time to rethink the way we hire tech talent

In just two evenings, the Harvard research team of three — from the J.D. program in computer science (which brings together scientific and applied mathematics students from all over the world) and from the MIT Lab — will answer the same question: What do we need to make sure our tech will be more welcoming to people who want to learn to code? If we’re going to apply our skills for the jobs of the future, then we need to increase our abilities.

The difference between my research group and the MIT group is that MIT researchers have one real advantage: They didn’t get hired before. It eventually became clear that there were a lot of barriers to hiring tech talent. So our team decided to move to a different city and start our own firm. The next year, we moved to Boston, which cemented my point about building a thriving startup ecosystem.

Jurassic Park: Lost in Time

At the same time as our lab was moving in, we were on the verge of announcing that the only way we could’t bring in more tech talent was to hire a bunch of best-looking people. It was a big deal.

They said, “How can we guarantee that our lab can keep pace with these things we need to do?” As soon as we learned that Harvard had chosen to not hire the best of our team, we signed the paper—an easy decision. We had the right people on board (and we were already doing great things with them).

The other thing that drove us was that the team had multiple openings. People wanted to work on projects that were more serious, and we thought we could save our entire team a lot of time. Luckily, we had three of our little overall colleagues in the area who took us on. We were working on a non-linear challenge, and they had a really good grasp of physics and AI.

So at this point, I reached out to one of our colleagues — a man named Richard Leakey. He was a junior at Fine Arts College in Brooklyn. He had been teaching physics at Harvard since 1999 and had been actively involved in the physics community there. He told me, “I want to bring in some talented people to help us run the lab, but first we just need to hire more people.”

He was a bit shocked to learn where we were going with our hiring criteria. He said, “I know that this is a really difficult decision but I think we should just go without hiring anyone because I think it was the right decision.”

With my initial call to Harvard, it seemed as if we were going to go without hiring anyone for over a year and then move on to a more senior position. That didn’t happen.

Just like the team—now filled with the same kids at close to 60 years old—we’ve found a hiring process that works for us. And the more talented we have, the better.

Jurassic Park: Lost in Time is available this fall. Read on to learn how you can take advantage of the new hiring process.

Payoffs

One of our largest challenges at Harvard was finding the right people to help us start down this path. As we learned, our lab is very adept at finding its collaborative approach to hiring. We’ve listed the different ways that we can help our team approach hiring, as well as a list of other potential methods that we feel are more likely to work on our project.

Employment Guidelines

Harvard makes it very clear that it can’t hire everyone. It has no specific guidelines or definitions for how to count as an employee.

We’ve written on the hiring process in more depth, but the basic rules of hiring are:

You have to have a good idea, know what your strengths are, and have a good roadmap.

You have to come up with a list of overt hiring features, training, techniques, and ways to pick people who can

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Read more about how it’s done here.