Someone who doesn’t care about your company: that’s a candidate you want

One of the first things a candidate learn is to be hyped about the company and research every bit and piece before applying,

Meanwhile, an HR recruiter is trained to recognize and pick candidates that show more of that hype toward the company.

It doesn’t matter who you work for

In business school, one of the things I’ve learned and still remember is that it shouldn’t matter whom I work for, or what sector or niche they are in. The work will be the same.

Sure, there are specificities to each company, sector, and niche… but those have to be learned one way or another.

It holds especially true for developers

Few places would actually matter where you work, and for programmers, even the programming language or frameworks shouldn’t matter.

But since we already filter positions by language, then by front, back, DevOps, ML, embedded…

The CRUD will still be a CRUD and the div will have to be centered regardless of where a person is working, all that changes are the business rules, which are different for each new thing anyway.

This is why StackOverflow is something so big in the community: programming is (or should be) like math in the sense that the same input generates the same outcome.

The advantages

Someone new will always bring something to the table, someone without the hype will be seeing all the bad practices that someone with hype might ignore and will have a more objective view of the team, platform, product, and company… not everyone will be vocal about it, so it’s your job to pick everything you can from them.

Exceptions?

I’m not saying to pick someone outright hostile to the company or product.

Someone with rose-tinted glasses will see nothing wrong, but at least will bring everyone’s spirits up, but someone hostile will see everything wrong and be a bother every step of the way.

The cherry on top

That’s why you want someone “in the middle”, not hyped but definitely not hostile.
If they see something as a good idea, that’s a bonus point for it.
If they have concerns, so will your potential clients.

And that’s how it starts, they don’t care where they work.

Afterward… that’s on you!

If you can’t make your employee hyped with your company… then how do you expect to make customers hyped with it?

A customer will see the company and the defects, they will have doubts or complaints… but will just leave.
Meanwhile, you have an employee with all of those, one who wants to help the company grow!

Cover Photo by Piret Ilver on Unsplash