Let’s just say he isn’t inclined to fall for Ramaswampy’s self-servingly nepotistic nonsense on the basis of 11 years as a hiring manager at Apple:
During my ~11 years as a hiring manager, I personally hired maybe 20 fulltime & intern employees. Filling empty reqs was a huge source of pressure, both due to workload being down a man and the risk of corporate operational changes yanking an empty req (which did happen). HR handled 100% of sourcing resumes for me, performing a first pass to exclude obvious mismatches. HR turnover was worse than mine, so I quickly told them to just send me everything remotely relevant and I’d filter them myself. “Everything” turned out to be quite a lot.
I never saved any firm stats, but on average I probably looked at 500-2000 resumes for every person hired. When I was inexperienced, this took several minutes per resume, carefully pondering & weighing each detail, and extrapolating to some hypothetical future on my new team. After a few years of experience, I would discard a resume within ten seconds. After a while, you’ve simply seen the same exact sort of person hundreds & hundreds of times. Once you know what’s not the right fit, there’s zero point in hemming & hawing.
I would speak to maybe 2-4% of the candidates I reviewed. Probably 90%+ were filtered out after the first call. Someone credible would talk to another guy on my team, and on or two more if things went well. Someone promising came in for a day with the whole org, two at a time. And this was just my own team. I also far more regularly interviewed on behalf of other teams in my org, & even other orgs, as other managers grew to appreciate my feedback & opinion. All told, I talked to probably over a thousand candidates from tens of thousands of resumes.
Lessons learned: it’s all about which schools’ programs produce the right minds for which specific tasks. Plenty of bright, capable candidates went to schools that simply taught them nothing relevant for an OS platform vendor. We’re not talking databases & web dev for this. Over the years, HR evolved its own prospecting strategies to prioritize schools that produced a high hit rate, plus serving executive bias. Tim went to Duke so after a while all of finance went to Duke. Virtually nobody in SWE came from Duke; different domain entirely.
Over ~2004-2014, the volume of resumes from Indian schools skyrocketed, virtually all the “superstar” IITs. I was always unbiased about the protected categories. Looking back, my all-male team was quite “diverse” although everyone was probably INTJ, now that I think about it. I talked at many dozens of Indians, and quickly learned a few things that are invariant: they are helpfully accommodating to the point of obsequiousness, and this holds regardless of whether they have any clue what they’re talking about. This is crucial to understand.
When you are speaking with an Indian, you are not communicating. You are engaging in a choreographed dance where they are exclusively tasked with mirroring your moves, and leaving you to walk away thinking that your needs will be satisfied. And that is all that has happened. If you don’t know which follow-up questions to ask, you’ll have no idea that you’ve just been handled by an entity that understands how to “close,” but not how to deliver anything promised. The idea of the latter is never even part of the equation. Utterly alien minds to us.
One of Britain’s greatest crimes was teaching them to speak with that hackneyed, goobledygook accent, because it simply fries the brains of most Americans. It is scamouflage for the fact that they will lie, lie, lie as easily as you or I draw breath. It’s indescribable. Thankfully, I became good enough at technical interviewing that a couple simple questions would break their lies wide open, & I could simply nope out in good conscience. After a while, a glance at such resumes told me how the conversations would go, optimizing away the rest.
During this time, in other parts of SWE & IS&T, I watched as a couple Indian hires within 18 months turned into an almost wholesale replacement of any other race in the blighted departments. The degree of their apparently illegal hiring practices cannot be overstated. But of course, who is going to complain, and to whom? One of my last cross-functional meetings at the company, myself & one or two other guys from our org met with one of the terraformed orgs. There were 25 of them packed into a room for a meeting that required 5 people tops.
Regardless of context, every American needs to understand that they will lie under any circumstances for any reason or no apparent reason whatsoever. It is “cultural,” so get over your Christendom-centric notions of morality; those exist nowhere else on Earth.
If you don’t hire and protect your own, you will soon be swamped by those who do. Unlike the tango, it doesn’t require two to play the nationalism game. And if you’re not playing, you’re losing.
