HR people are valuable in a company. But their role is to get resumes in front of the real decision makers, and to take care of all the stuff like W-2 forms and whatnot nobody wants to deal with, not make decisions about who to hire.
It seems weird to me that so many tech companies have adopted this particular Big Corp characteristic, because it's certainly not a universal phenomenon. A tech company is not Wal-Mart. Its hiring process should not be structured like Wal-Mart. People are the lifeblood of a technical company. Tech companies should not therefore look to Big Corps who just hire large amounts of unskilled labor. They should look, instead, at how hiring is done at a consulting company or an investment bank, companies that are also reliant on skilled people as their most important asset. At those places, from your screening interview forward, you are only evaluated by someone on the business side of things. It might be a junior analyst or a senior managing director,[1] but it's someone who does the work that makes the business money. HR's job is to get good candidates in front of those people.
At least in my experience, start-ups and very small tech companies do this right, out of necessity. Where I used to work, interviews would involve talking with a few line engineers, then the VP of Engineering, then briefly the CEO (who was a technical person). I think as companies get bigger, they feel like they need to adopt the Big Corp model. But this start-up model of hiring scales just fine to companies of 500-1,000 technical people if you're willing to create a culture where everyone, especially the top technical leadership, is personally invested in hiring and devotes a reasonable amount of time to evaluating people.
[1] Anecdote: I once had a screening interview conducted by the managing partner of the D.C. office of a major law firm. He flew out to Chicago for a day every year to talk to prospective entry-level candidates.
I worked for a while for Company A, which was founded by a team that included senior engineers and senior management from larger company B, licensed technology from B, did critical contract work for B, and at one point was supposed to become the primary manufacturer of B's products.
Company A shut down. My resumé went into company B's HR department, never to be heard from again. Eventually I had to pull a string that led to B's senior management. Suddenly an interview process was setup.
I get there, and the first words out of the HR drone's mouth when we sat down, with a deeply confused look on her face, were "What's Company A?". She'd just suffered severe whiplash when a directive from on high had told her that she would be setting up an interview for a candidate she'd ignored. She wasn't new, she'd been there over two years.
Everyone involved in my hiring except her knew what A was, who I was, and why I was there. The interview process was little more than a check for whether I annoyed the hell out of the people I'd have to work with or not. I was being handed to B on a silver platter, a pre-vetted, pre-trained, instantly-productive candidate. The most senior technical person who interviewed me walked into the room, sat down, and said "I really don't have anything to ask you".
If you insist on using recruiters, do not put them in HR. Embed them with the departments they're hiring for, where they might actually learn something about the work the company does and what it needs.
But you did the right thing too, which is working around HR to get your name at the top of the stack. There isn't anything nefarious about doing this. You're creating your own referral, which is the best source of employees for a company.
For recruiting technical people, it is ideal that the recruiters has relevant technical background. The reality is mostly the opposite. So you never know how many good candidates are filtered out because their resumes are lack of flashy keywords.
If the recruiters don't feel hurt, I prefer to screen the resumes by myself. The worse scenario is that you are scheduled for a phone interview. When you look at the resume, it is full of flashy keywords while lack of experience in "serious" projects. I fully understand the candidates are eager to get a job. But after you spent dozens of hours to talk to these unqualified candidates with flashy resumes, it becomes a negative flag. Well, these flashy resumes are a result of the tech-recruiting industry.
And yet they often do. Consider that for a moment and wonder why it is so common, especially in technical companies.
What I have found over the years is that technical people hire people they think are great without regard to the HR "signals" and then one day they get screwed. Maybe they hire someone with anger management issues, maybe they hire someone whose antics expose the entire company to a crushing lawsuit. Or many they hire someone who, in short order, irritates all of the other employees such that there is a huge morale crash and exodus. Basically their hiring on technical merits and/or interview results in a very bad outcome. And then someone they know and respect says "Gee, an HR person would have spotted that right away, why didn't you listen to them?" or worse "Gee if my HR person had let that person through I would fire them on the spot."
You see in both cases something a bright technical person might be actually unable to see, could be the difference between a "good hire" and a "bad hire." And that is how HR people get into positions of power over hires and fires.
1) The hiring manager has someone else to fire (and blame) when a hire goes badly.
2) The hiring manager has some 'cover' over the things they don't readily see (like emotional issues).
Of course since the whole emotional/psychology thing is so opaque to some folks it is really hard to judge if the person they have providing that visibility is good or not. Sort of like someone who knows nothing about technology hiring a consultant, or someone who knows nothing about cars hiring an auto mechanic. One has to take things on faith a bit that the other person knows what they are doing and try to come up with ways to re-assure yourself that this is true.
Rayiner is absolutely 100% right about this. The real role of HR people is tax forms and health insurance, and little else.
I work with a guy who pounds on his desk daily, curses at code, has OCD, walks about aimlessly, is anti-authority, depressed, and is a self-described autistic. In other words, he's the type to score 1%. However, if you have any advanced math problem he can solve it in minutes, whereas most people would either take days or never get the right answer. For me at least, I have no problem interacting with the guy and joke around with him often. But I do notice that with other people things will usually end up standoffish or awkward.
Perhaps, HR would be better served by using the personality profile to train the other workers in how to interact with a new hire and get the most out of them. The idea that a company should have a singular culture built of singular personality types, not only sounds like a flawed plan, but one that in the end is impossible to achieve.
But, underpinning your story is the blame/cover angle which I completely understand, and would consider an antipattern itself. If a few people screen someone and decide to take a bit of a chance on them from a personality perspective and they don't work out, let them go, learn from it, and move on.
HR people are not necessarily better in identifying these "signals". They might emphasize on "signals" that are not a big issue for technical people. Some technical people could be a little quirky. As long as it is not serious, it is not a big deal.
That's because they're not sharing wins from stellar candidates but they take blame for bad ones.
I wonder why blame shifting seems so central to american way of thinking. You'll give talent away to avoid it.
Perhaps the bigger lesson here is to not do personality tests. With that said, obviously gauging team fit is super important - but you don't need (and should avoid) a test for that.
On a related note, it seems another lesson to be learned from here is to be cautious when searching a technical job at a non-technical company. We don't know whether this is the case in OP, but nevertheless the whole "BigCorp" caution you give is likely more applicable when you look at financial companies or otherwise "companies that don't focus on making software/etc."
But I have no idea why growing startups would model their HR after them. If they want to model their HR after a "Big Corp" then they might as well model it after a technical Big Corp. Let's not compare apples to oranges.
I'm an Amazon employee and I can confirm that I didn't have to take any kind of personality test when I applied here.
I was also encouraged to apply to IBM via a friend of a friend, and while I didn't have to take a personality test for them, I did have to fill out a questionnaire asking me about my years of experience in various topics. I was automatically rejected by their system for not having X years of experience in language/framework Y. I didn't find this quite as bizarre as rejecting a brilliant candidate due to some personality test, but I definitely found it a similarly poor experience. It was weird to run into an issue that seems to be brought up every time developers talk about poor interview/recruiting practices.
The only time I can remember actually filling out any kind of personality test when applying for a job was when I applied to McDonalds as a kid, which echoes the GP's point.
It's possible that trivia question was the straw that broke the camel's back, but since she wasn't sure whether or not his additional information was correct and/or sufficient, he 'lost out'.
Don't forget enforcing dress codes and other such nonsense policies in the "employee handbook."
I personally don't have a problem with this. Someone has to be responsible for making sure that the office doesn't look like a sty / homeless shelter. When investors/customers/interviewers stop by, there's a certain level of professionalism that needs to be present. So if there's a rule that people need to wear a top, they should be the ones to enforce that, in my opinion.
They should not have final say over a candidate based on personality or communications skills. They should be a source of input (i.e. this guy is an asshole, because he was very rude to the guy who helped him scheduled his callback interview, or perhaps more importantly to inject some company-wide context into what can turn into a group-specific analysis) but it's the technical people who know what kind of communication goes on in a technical team, and thus it's the technical people who should evaluate a candidate on that characteristic. Yes, this requires trusting your technical people and investing them with a greater responsibility to understand the dynamics of their work group. That's a good thing.
You also see this happen with IT, Ops, and software development organizations, not just HR. E.g., feature X is the company's highest business priority, but the DBAs don't like it and they control all schema changes, so they just say no.
In my view, HR's job is to help hiring managers find the people they need, and then to support those people when they're there. If hiring managers need help with making hiring decisions, then by all means offer them help. And if HR,or anybody, spots something that concerns them, they should speak up. But I think giving HR a veto is a clear mistake. So no, I'd say that tests just make this an obvious problem, rather than a subtle one.
I can think of one. If they are responsible for doing a criminal background check, and have found serious criminal activity in the prospective employee's past.
That's not to say that some prospective hires can't be rehabilitated; but in certain cases, hiring someone with a criminal background is just too much of a risk, and it's not unreasonable for HR to have a final say on this.
Other than that, yeah, you're right.
This is definitely something I saw prevalent in the hiring world: if it isn't outright illegal, use it to prevent someone from being hired. In many cases we had clients that'd tiptoe the line and ask if certain reasons would be valid for rejecting a person, and some HR managers were upset when they learned it was against the law to disallow someone who had admitted their criminal history from being hired. So they found another reason.
There is still a massive amount of hiring discrimination. It's just not the "official" reason anymore since that'd be illegal. That job was soulbreaking.
Welcome to the world of Asian Bigcos, where HR not only has the final say on the candidate hire, they also have enormous influence on what department/team that candidate ends up in.
The rational: 1) HR is the manager of the human resource. 2) HR should determine and screen employees for possible risks. 3) HR is at fault if the screening is not achieved.
Relying on a test such as personality is pretty B.S. though. Most tech guys compared to the general populous will receive low scores for being social or extroverted. Which should directly translate into being a lesser productive team member (by being unable to communicated his/her ideas). In actuality, introverted individuals often can communicate well or in a manner which is suitable to completing a task such as the man who was not hired in this example.
What HR really needed to do was to just talk with him, clearly he didnt' seem like a threat and was capable of working with a team so it really shouldn't have mattered.
Smart HR Directors will get it right however I feel sorry for any company that uses the results of those tests to actually make a decision.
Properly validated psychometric tests are valid predictors of job performance (by which I mean objectively and factually correlated with actual work performance), and a properly constructed work-relevant test will be on the whole will be more valid than subjective judgments from most technical professionals. Of course there will be hits and misses, but the consistent application is the key to its use. If you don't consistently apply it, it becomes worthless.
But, let's throw that out of the window for a second because in this particular anecdote I don't think it's relevant. This test they were using seems more like a cultural fit, specifically a person-organization fit test. These tests are less about predicting job performance than they are about predicting organizational commitment and ultimately tenure [1]. Surely we can agree that those things are important too.
But, let's again say that this candidate's aptitude is so impressive that we don't mind an increased statistical chance that his or her tenure may short. The real issue is that legally you are obligated to apply the same set of criteria all of your employees for a given role (not necessarily the exact same position, but comparable positions). If the company is applying cognitive testing, personality testing, drug testing, person-org. fit testing, etc. to one group of applicants, you now cannot fail to adhere to that criteria because it is an invitation for legal liability, however seemingly-spurious.
Having said that, it's important that your selection processes have been validated previously, or at least are in the process of being validated (which provides some protection). I also have a big concern with the linked situation because: 1) it's a cultural-related test, which means the possibility to show cultural-related bias is high and 2) they were unwilling to make language accommodations, which seems unnecessarily rigid when native-level English skills are likely not a core component of the job. Point #1 can be accounted for in some shape or form (at a minimum through a low cutoff score), but Point #2 is more problematic.
Anyway, there is a reason companies adopt "Big Corp" characteristics as the scale. The primary reason is for legal compliance through standardization of process, and the other is that data is supportive of the validity of objective predictors of job success relative to subjective judgments.
I realize I may be opening myself up to some criticism and scorn from HN crowd for seemingly representing "Big Corporate" or acting like a Bob from Office Space, but so be it. Despite what it may seem, there are often smart people using evidenced-based processes driving seemingly asinine HR processes that drive you crazy. And sometimes there aren't, and it's just a big pain in the ass for poor reasons.
--
[1] PDF of meta-analytic findings about person-job/org fit: http://nreilly.asp.radford.edu/kristof-brown%20et%20al.pdf
So what you get by discouraging a broad diversity of personalities is a mix of people who actually have those specific characteristics and sociopaths. The latter group ends up running the company, and of course they issue utterly sociopathic "psychometric evaluations", which are basically just encoded discrimination against entire classes of people, regardless of job fitness, because the people up top are such incompetent leaders that they need subservient workers to obey their crazy orders without question.
Do you have any support for this where the employees are both technical and creative? I'm obviously thinking about software development, but it should apply to any kind of engineering or technical job where the employees need to have a deep technical knowledge, know how to apply that knowledge practically, and have to use that knowledge to create new solutions to new problems.
Why?
Having read Thinking Fast and Slow and been convinced by this book's many useful views, I would agree that a simple questionnaire-based ranking is actually better than any subjective assessment of candidates. And it should be as neutral as possible, ie not letting one's "first impression" influence the ranking (because it is almost always based on irrelevant physical features).
But even then, there is no reason for this neutral evaluation to become worthless if not 100% consistently applied. There is the broken leg case: If you want to evaluate the probability of someone going to see a movie tonight, you just base yourself on simple statistical facts (how frequently people go to the movie in this country), and should not try to infer more from subjective context, except if the guy in question broke his leg this morning.
These tests and evaluations help much in reducing system bias due to halo fallacy, framing effect, and even time of the day for the evaluator (it has been proven juges are more lenient after lunch!), but they still are only helpers, they do not need to be decision-blocking.
I can't speak to your second point, but as to your first point, I should note that law firms themselves definitely do not use such HR-driven hiring processes.
Let's assume for a moment that when a person is told to do something, and they disagree, 90% of all employees are typically wrong when they disagree and 10% of all employees are typically right when they disagree.
We are considering now just engineering type jobs (since that's what the article is about).
Now consider anti-authoritarianism: 90% of the people who are anti-authoritarianism will perform terribly worse than the typical population (since they will tend to go with their mistaken belief of what is right, or be obstructionist when poeple want to do it differently, etc). They will be your least valuable employees.
The remaining 10% of those scoring high on anti-authoritarianism are among the most valuable of your employees, as they won't allow their teammates to go down a dead-end.
So anti-authoritarianism is highly correlated with poor performance (even trouble-makers) but rejecting all applicants based on this will keep you from getting some of the most valuable employees.
Here I have a problem - which job performance? Different jobs are obviously demanding different qualities - highly creative but impatient person may be an asset in job requiring instant creativity but a liability in a job requiring steady repetitive tasks and constant attention. So the test has to be matched to a position. But in the original article not only HR gave the same test to everybody, people who decide on positions don't even seem to have information or input on any correlation between position and test results. Given this, I highly doubt such application of testing can have any meaningful correlation with job performance.
I don't know anything about the details of the test in the article, but I can imagine someone doing well in their technical interviews, but failing miserably on company fit. Maybe he (settling on a 'he' in this case) is a brilliant programmer but showed serious misogynistic tendencies when interviewing with a female HR person. Maybe something came out of his HR interview that revealed him to be a borderline psycho who could code well but was a troublemaker. Considering that it is HR that will have to deal with this person in the future if there are complaints against him, I think it is only fair that they set some baseline level of acceptability for candidates.
#1 - Only give personality tests in their native language.
This is unacceptable, a personality test is NOT a language aptitude test.
Personality tests will have questions like this:
True or False I am happy when others are taking advantage of me.
Some of these personality tests are even written for English / UK-English because of the nuances involved.
I have no idea what sort of company hires only people who answer, "I would be perfectly happy if my boss took advantage of me, but it sounds like an extremely insipid place full of yes-men that I would not want to work at.
joelfriedly@gmail.com
Thanks!
I've never encountered one of these personally, but my then-girlfriend who was a recent nursing school graduate looking for her first job ran into them and failed the first few of them. After reading about them online I'm convinced the only way for you to "pass" these tests is to be slightly psychopathic or to simply know the very flawed theory behind the tests and train yourself to take them in which case they of course test nothing but how good you are at adapting to flawed tests.
The specific test she kept running into was the "Unicru" one:
http://melbel.hubpages.com/hub/Unicru
I highly recommend anyone running into this problem with HR in their tech companies do what they can to FIRE HR. This kind of bullshit needs to be nipped in the bud if it threatens to take hold in our industry.
My suspicion (never having seen one of these tests) is that it's being used in these situations. I doubt Apple or Google are going to start using them any time soon. My guess is your advice is pretty bad for the people facing a personality test.
I remember to fail one such test somewhere around 2001, the reason being: "... lack of a status-driven momentum ..." and " ... lack of aggressivity in pursuing career goals ... " or something to that effect.
Not that I walked out smiling, but they explained me in two sentences why I would not have liked to work there. So, addressing your quote above, I'm astonished that these tests are still around. Basically this company (and others) are putting their culture into the hands of an external service (Mercury Urval if I remember correctly in this case) and they can lose big by handing off influence on the choice.
I never got such a test, but if I did, I would try really hard to score 0% just because fuck you. Funny thing is that the capable guy being exemplified in this article probably did just that, after all, if you answer randomly the score will be higher than 1%.
"It is maddening when the court lets guilty criminals go free >> SA"
Yeah, what is the point of having a court of law anyway, because the test taker knows all.
"When you are annoyed with something, you say so"
"When people make mistakes, you correct them"
"You are not afraid to tell someone off"
"Any trouble you have is your own fault"
"You avoid arguments as much as possible"
"You finish your work no matter what"
On the other hand, this test as a whole seems to be selecting for someone who is pliant and believes whatever he is told to believe, the sort of person who actually believes the HR indoctrination and the like. In this regard, I think the question is very revealing - someone who would answer "Disagree" to this question reveals that he understands that our judicial system is not perfect and reacts with skepticism whenever he is told by the media not to value human rights. Such a person would be more likely to stand up for himself in the workplace when his rights or the rights of others are violated.
It's actually rather clever if you're looking at it through the eyes of an asshole.
By the way, your username cracks me up.
The courts are designed to let some portion of the guilty go free: E.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation
For example, in any case where the evidence was obtained illegally, a person who is provably guilty may not be convicted: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree
just saying ...
http://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2013/mar/1...
It would be one way to sanity-check that the process is selecting for the things you want from those coming from outside. As a company grows, the non-technical systems and policies also need to adapt but without feedback things might get weird (like the OP's example). If an existing high-performer does badly with your interviews/tests at some point then you really, really need to fix something.
She also told me that if I was re-interviewing at the company then I likely wouldn't get the job based on my psychometric profile, which was actually ironic since I was highly respected in my role and was one of only a handful of people that could convincingly debate technical alternatives with Senior Management.
On a very positive note, our HR director was someone who had removed psychometric tests at a number of organizations before he came to us.
Yup ...
There is going to be a real big shift in the next twenty years. We look at things like Developer Anarchy and say "what let the programmers run the company?" - but that's the wrong idea. It's let those with software literacy run the company - just as 500 years ago those who were literate took over running companies
For a while we shall see parallel organisations within one company - the illiterate traditional management model, and a more productive, clearly vital org that consists of all those who "get it" - whatever their job title
I wasted too many years trying to join the well renumerated traditional side - and regret the half attention I found I could pay to programming. But I have seen the light
Stop working for companies that are not dedicated to software literacy. Schumpter will be round soon enough to have a word with them.
I would love to work for a shop, even in an underling capacity, that really gets software dev right. It would be worth delaying my startup dreams just so I can do it right at scale.
It's not saying its important - everyone in Hollywood says the story is the thing - but only Pixar seems to live by it. See any talk by Ed Catmull
You wish. Once a company is a certain size, it can ignore market pressure by colluding with government (the company I work for should have been obliterated long ago, but there are artificial barriers to entry).
This is about the same kind of shitty thinking that results in surveillance states.
"We can't employ/feed you/let you travel/let you have a mortgage/let you open a bank account, you are Invalid."
"Invalid, what do you mean?"
"We are not allowed to tell invalids why they are invalid. Report for reprocessing."
Edit: Oh, and psych tests are bull. It's pretty obvious what the "right" answers are - so all you actually succeed in doing is filtering the psychopaths in.
* Get rid of HR people.
* Profit.
But as you mention, if developers were to handle everything related to hiring, firing, sick reports, vacation, benefits, contracts, compliance etc. that HR does, I doubt there would be any profit.
From what I have seen the only useful function for HR in the highering process is a background verification check. Aka did John Smith work at your company from 2000-2004. Anything else is risky.
HR is ideally the former and not the latter.
The job, and the working environment in particular, was horrible and I didn't stay after my probation period.
On the other hand, I was put on a dead end project and the company, despite being a rather small one, was like a big corporation where you can hide without doing anything and still get paid.
I actually read a few thousand pages of Intel programming manuals and wrote not one but two toy operating system projects and got paid for it!
At the time I thought it was a hoax, after your story I'm not so sure.
Now, I'm just a software engineer, but I can't really get my head around the idea a software company hiring lots of supposedly smart people, subjecting them to this sort of nonsense, and then make it obligatory to take it seriously. To me, that sounds like a recipe for trouble.
You are correct. It is demonstrably going to lead to bad outcomes:
Is the CEO supposed to be up on all the HR rules? Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day? Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs? Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens? Chase down background checks?
If HR is an issue, it's because they're being asked to do the wrong thing, or the individual is incompetent. Saying "We don't need HR because they are poor technical interviewers" is like saying "We don't need accountants because I don't like the expense report form." You still need accountants, and you still need HR.
> "Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day?"
No, but neither should this be a HR responsibility. HR has no fucking idea how well someone is doing, nor can they be reasonably expected to since they neither work with these employees daily, nor do they have domain knowledge of what they do. Raises and promotions need to be handled by someone with the correct background - CTO for small companies, VPs for larger ones.
HR should not be handling raises.
> "Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs?"
YES. Emphatically yes. He/she's the Chief Executive Officer, the structure of the company is entirely their business. HR has no substantial insight into the specific needs of the business structure, if they did, shit, fire the CEO and make HR the boss.
The CEO is a manager first and foremost, and organizational design is one of the most fundamentally important parts of the position. Letting HR do this is abdicating a primary responsibility of the role.
> "Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens?"
Yes, for small companies. No, for larger companies, but neither should it be HR. Again, HR has no idea how the team dynamics in your company works. Who do you think is a better judge of culture fit - the CTO/VP who's interacting with the team daily, or the HR person who rarely speaks to any of the engineers? Once again this is very much a CTO/VP role.
> " Chase down background checks?"
This is pretty much the only thing in your list that I'd say firmly belongs to HR. HR administrates benefits, HR mediates disputes, HR performs the clerical duties in hiring - including background checks. HR is not a decision maker any more than you'd let your accountant make strategy decisions for your company.
> Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day?
HR should not be setting compensation. That's a business question and something the business people need to understand and deal with.
> Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs?
Organizational structure is also a business question. It goes directly to what sorts of team structures, etc, are most effective in delivering the company's product.
> Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens?
Not necessarily the CEO, but some technical person should do the initial fit screens.
> Chase down background checks?
This is the sort of thing HR should do.
Optimal for what? I do think the CEO or someone similar needs to figure out what you want from the organization and design it. HR may have input but it is just input.
HR can do the market calibration research. That's a good role for them. Initial fit? That should be the team or team manager. Background checks? Either HR or an administrative assistant somewhere.
Without HR, that work should fall upon the team manager and maybe some assistance somewhere. It can be done though.
Bottom line, yes, there is a role for HR, I think. No, I don't think it is a big role.
Dunno what HR does in the US, but here in the UK I know a lot of cases where a decent HR person would have saved companies millions in payouts to now ex-employees who sued them. In several cases, the business was made bankrupt, jobs lost.
Keep HR people
Keep business
Edit: Format.
First, personal interviews can be poor predictors of future hire performance. People will often hire someone who resonates on a personal level, or who is otherwise charismatic, rather than for the right skillset. Standardized tests, administered correctly, are one way of reducing the variability.
And variability is pain. Your HR and hiring people are likely being judged just the way everyone else is. Hiring, or forcing dev teams to interview, a lot of low-quality candidates without an effective screen is a good way to find yourself being replaced.
The second is that, as people are fond of saying, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. This is the source of a lot of foolish "musts"––candidates must have a certain GPA, or only go to a certain school, or they have to hit a certain percentage on some tests. Having standards is all well and good until you find a case that doesn't fit your profile and you either get flexible or look foolish.
Being flexible means that other hires complain that you're lowering your standards, and no one likes hearing that either.
The test in this case wasn't correctly administered, as columbo pointed out elsewhere, and I agree that hiring managers shouldn't have a veto over technical hires. But this is the sort of human-dynamics problem that can't be solved by firing entire departments. If you don't address the problem head-on it'll just come back next year in a different form.
In my limted experience this is much more of a problem in big companies than small. In small companies, employees know each other as fellow human beings from the owner to the interns. In big companies, the humans are numbers in a computer to be ranked, graded, and filed yearly.
They had their nose pretty deep in payroll operations; we were always paid correctly and on time. Insurance problems? They'd help. They were frankly pretty decent service providers for us.
Unfortunately this is extremely rare in corporate life.
Most HR people are at least somewhat competent and help the company, and good HR people are worth their weight in silver. When Human Resources actually understands the needs of the employees and is able to enact policies that make them happier, that's extraordinarily useful.
But yes, at my last job interview, I succeeded at the technical interview but failed at the 'personality' one. It's a loss for them, not for me.
What makes you think HR people are any better than we in hiring those ones? (Hiring other HR personal excluded, they are probably good on that, the same way that we are good on hiring techies.)
I don't have an answer to your question, but I'm quite confident that it isn't "you ask a psychologist".
Step 4: Lose a trivial discrimination / disability / wrongful termination suit because you didn't keep the right paperwork.
I wish my startup could afford to have an HR person to administer health benefits, run payroll, track receipts, and so on.
If they needlessly block good hires, that's a bad thing, but I'd rather not be responsible for dealing with administering my own pension or benefits.
If a particular candidate, who happens to fail part of the interview, still seems like a good choice, by all means look for additional means of evaluation.
I once had an interview, where I spoke with a few people very positively for about 3 hours, it was going great. There was no sign of a technical test, so I had assumed by this point that they either didn't do them, or they'd be in a second round of interviews. Then they realised they'd forgotten to give me the technical test, which they then gave me and I screwed up for whatever reasons. Upon learning that I'd aced every part of the interview except the programming test, I mentioned they had an employee who'd worked with me on previous projects and could vouch for my coding ability. But they said they couldn't use that information because it would be unfair to other candidates.
This was a long time ago, and I didn't really lose much by not getting the job, but it always felt like the approach they took was wrong.
I won't disagree, but I would like to restate that a little more carefully:
"The job of a recruiter is to measure which candidate is best for this job, fairly and without bias."
As you point out, there are quite a few reasons that people try to weedle out of actually hiring the best person, some of them not so savory (subconscious preference for white, male people - but it depends on the company, and the culture). It should be hard, but not impossible, to override the default procedure - and for exceptional cases only.
Certainly, in the Article, the flawed psychometric test should not have been grounds to reject the best-performing candidate in the room. But similarly, personality (or appearance) should also not be a reason to promote someone over their ability to do the job.
For example, many people have racist tendencies but rationalize them as something else.
"There is a big group of male magentas dressed the same over there, I should avoid them because they are almost certainly a gang"
is rationalized as:
"I don't avoid the group of male magentas dressed the same because I'm racist and assume that most magentas are in a gang, but because I've been taught common sense. Common sense dictates people that look like that must be gangsters."
Perhaps if we interviewed people without being able to see them, their name, or anything about them and using voice obfuscation we could eliminate a lot of bias?
Another employee vouching for you isn't quite the same thing.
I'm told that this Hacker News community disfavors repeated posting of FAQ posts as comments, but this is a Frequently Asked Question (what's really the best way to hire good workers) and over the last year or two here on Hacker News I've put together a post with a lot of references to the best research. A recent posting of that here on HN
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923
could help companies cure their idiotic hiring procedures. Read the FAQ if you haven't read it before. (Please let me know what you think of it, as I have been doing more research so that I can refine the FAQ and post it on my personal website.) There is no good reason for companies to do anything less than the best when setting up hiring procedures. Protect yourself by knowing what effective hiring procedures look like and how to find companies that use them.
What does the algorithmic whiteboard coding tech interview count as? Does it qualify as work sample and brain teaser combined with interview? I suspect it's too far removed from what software engineering is actually like to be a good work sample, and the prior knowledge required to solve algorithm problems doesn't make it a great brain teaser either.
Oh? I hadn't heard about that.
20 years ago I took the Meyers-Briggs test multiple times (well, once a year for 3 years). My numbers changed a little bit each time - I was fairly strong I and N, but very weak 'T' and 'J', to the point where sometimes they were 'F' and/or 'P'. I took a similar test again a few weeks ago and 'I' and 'N' were strong, the others were still weak.
I had a couple people tell me though that "it never changes". Which is ridiculous because it's obviously not true, and depends totally on how you interpret the questions, and that's based on how you're feeling when you take it. I don't think people administering tests or interpreting the results always understand what they're actually looking at (which probably makes me a stronger J).
The official MB position is that your type itself doesn't change, even if your answers do. Your perception of yourself and of the questions can change, but your type itself does not.
Frankly, I don't buy that, I don't see any strong evidence, from theory or practice, to suggest that it must be that way. However, IMO, it's a pointless subject. Whether you change or not really has no impact on anything. Just use the typing system and take the most accurate results you get. If your score changes, whatever.
Note: I'm a very strong MB enthusiast and I think it's a fantastic personality typing system. Oddly, I've never taking the actual MBTI (that is, the actual test), though.
This is in the UK; a found a lot of weirdness goes on there that wouldn't be tolerated anywhere else. Its the anti-authority types who are most likely to think out of the box, and are actually praised for by many American companies (at least vocally, implicitly they might not like them so much, of course).
If a recruiting company is so incompetent as to require personality profiling, and worse, enforce it so rigidly, it would explain why Europe lags so far behind the US in tech startups, despite having at least as many (if not substantially more) brilliant developers per capita.
If it's an operating company, then it maybe explains why European companies use recruiting agencies so much. Still seems like a huge tax on companies -- having decent internal HR would go a long way.
The primary reason Europe lags behind is the substantial lack of investors & VC's.
The case highlighted by the author is typical of large corporates but if you look at any decent tech company in London for example, this case would sound ridiculous and extreme.
That was in the spring and they expected to have picked out some people by the end of summer.
I didn't apply, mostly because I am happy where I am, but also because a 3-5 month interview process is completely ridiculous.
The entire process just put me off from applying. If they can't talk to me once or twice and look at my resume/past projects then I do not know if I want to work there. I understand the need to find the right people, but there are limits to how many hoops I care to jump through to get the honour of working in their company.
Is this a common practice?
I can understand if you have another job and end up interviewing somewhere else while working, but if I was without a job I probably wouldn't be able to wait 5 months for someone to decide I've passed their tests.
My friend ended up applying and he was also one of the few that got hired, which is why I've heard a bit more about their process than I think I normally would.
I think using a recruiting company is more common around here. Where I work now, quite a few of us have started out working part time (as I am now) through a recruiting process, and occasionally those who work full time get picked up by our company to work directly.
My boss worked the same position I work in now, back when he was in university.
These wacko interviewing processes are just another symptom of this. Don't think any comptetent business leader actually believe these scores matter at all. In the end it's just another safeguard against (gasp!) taking a risk.
If he got hired, but would have his pay stuck because HR and higher management would not understand his value(e.g. not boasting his accomplishments everywhere, prioritizing business relevant issues over internal political issues etc), he would end up rage quitting and "wasting" years he could have spent at some more open company.
The rules are simple: Take Carl out of the sentence. Would you say "Me made myself available"? No. Then why "Carl and me made ourselves available"?
Would you say "score extra points with I"? No. Then why "score extra points with Carl and I"?
If you are in the subject of the sentence, then use I: "Carl and I went to the movies."
If you are in the predicate, or are the object of an action, use me: "The students handed their completed tests to Carl and me."
To add something constructive to the discussion:
I've hired tens of developers over the years. Recruiting is by far the most black art I've ever suffered in the IT industry. I've terminated interviews with the most technically-adept people because their attitude was so risible there was no way they could be part of the company; I've begged interviewees who would barely speak to open up because I had a hunch they were brilliant (I was right); and I've hired promising and smart junior staff over proven yet jaded senior staff.
Trying to encompass the delightful diversity which is presented to an interviewer in a few rules is usually folly to appease the suits. You will miss great hires that way.
Does that matter? Well, it depends. I spoke to or interviewed one person for every 20 resumes, and hired one in every 20 interviewees. So, miss one through a bunch of dumb rules and think about the 400 resumes you will have to wade through......
The bottom line is that people are diverse and weird- especially engineers!- and a good interviewer with a developed spidey sense will do better for the company by ignoring daft rules regarding recruitment.
TL:DR
Recruiting is really hard and difficult to define. You will lose good hires by implementing made-up rules.
Additionally, it's hypocritical to comment on ones grammar and then use bad grammar yourself.
Maybe you should consider Google's old screening logic test. While being completely ridiculous and ineffectual in finding intelligent engineers, they still do a decent job at deterring the anti=authoritarians quite effectively while saving you money and time on HR.
Personally, I like the old maniac hiring. You take a complete loon and put him in-charge of the process. Have him do tarot card readings, crystal energy vibes tests, skull measurements... But instruct him to pass any person who keeps his mouth shut during all of this.
100% team player guaranteed!
Um, thats exactly what the original post is doing... well slightly different technique and different carnival barker vocabulary, but...
- Did they hire you? - No, mom, I bombed the psycho exam. - But the developers, the liked you? - Oh, yeah, the technical team was ecstatic with me. They even told me that I was their favorite candidate. -So what happened? Did they change their mind? - Oh no, mom. The HR person disagreed with them, so they accepted the judgment of the HR person and dropped me. - And the developers, your supposed team, stayed silent through all this? - Well, they asked HR if I could do the psycho exam once more. And that was that. - Son, you don’t want to work in a place where they keep quiet and silent on things that matter to them. You are better off anywhere else.
You would be right. It took me a while but I began to notice that a high percentage of key hires in other areas of the business were notably failing to make the sort of contributions expected of them. They must all have done "well" on the psychometric test of course but was it possible that this was over influencing the selection process and eliminating better candidates - of course we could just have been attracting the wrong applicants.
My recruiting was able to balance any psychometric testing bias by only short listing people we thought were likely up to the job technically and who would fit in with the team. Other areas probably did not have the luxury of having the capacity to "test" that someone could probably do the job as well as pass the more dubious psychometric test.
After I left that company I was pretty sure that I would avoid businesses that used psychometric testing - in the same way as I would refuse to interview for any business that used something like graphology - more obviously bogus science?
I was doing fleet management software at the time which meant I was also bundled with actually handing cars out to new hires when they arrived. What can I say, they were cheap-asses and I was young enough to enjoy goofing around in cars.
Anyway, almost immediately one of the hires was sent to me and I had instructions to give him a car. He had no idea why he was to come to me so introduced himself and the usual stuff before I told him he could choose from a couple of cars I had available. The blood drained from his face and it was obvious there was something wrong.
After a few awkward seconds he looked around to make sure no-one else was around and explained he was banned from driving due to multiple drink drive (DUI/DWI in North American) convictions. A car was out the question and I now had a problem I had to go back to HR with.
When I spoke to HR, they were indignant and stressed their psychometric tests had guaranteed he was excellent for an on-the-road salesman and there was no problem giving him a car. I then had to point out it would be a criminal offence for me to give him a car so that was not going to happen. I left them still saying, 'but the test is very clear, he is an ideal candidate'.
I've never believed in them after that and anytime I see them I know the sort of brain dead thinking which goes along with them is a red flag not to join any organization using them.
Sure, the test says give the DUI guy a car - what could possibly go wrong ?
Metric obsession when applied to people is not good, because unlike your conversion rate, people can't be defined by metrics.
Might not catch everyone who tries to cheat, but will help.
At my company, we ask people to submit some choice prior work if possible. Then we look at that, and try to have a conversation about the tech. The bonus is that it respects the candidates time, and it is easier to get them talking when it's their own projects. The downside is that very few candidates have recent prior work publicly available.
They are "risk averse" insofar as they would rather hire a safe and comfortable person who meets their personality metrics rather than take a chance on someone outside of that who is technically sharper.
I think a real problem arises when people don't realise that their job is a bullshit job, or worse - they start drinking the kool-aid. I'm sure most homeopaths believe strongly in the methods they use and feel they are doing good. Maybe most of the time that's harmless and can be humoured. But on the odd occasion when they believe so strongly that they reject scientific treatments to the patient's detriment, it is actively harmful.
Here an HR rep who was given psychometric tests to play with forgot that he was just playing and fucked over a competent job applicant, as well as his own company.
This test is probably not even graded and it's unlikely that it is accepted in psychology, or even heard of.
What is happening is the new hire was the wrong race, so he got "1%". Because he questioned the system, the author then was forced to retake the test and told he failed based on some mysterious new "antiauthoritarian" aspect of this single-dimensioned 0-100 metric not because the test showed that, but because HR is using the test as a prop to make sure the wrong races, looks, and attitudes don't show up on the payroll.
A discrimination lawsuit subpoenaing HR's test and information about its validity and scoring will be extremely instructive in ferreting out what is really going on here.
Interesting article, but you make a bad impression when you write with high school level grammar.
"Me" is a sentence object; "I" is the subject. You did it three times, which is more than just a slip.
I didn't get the job, although I had several references that I was one of the best and also most social and motivated developers they had ever worked with.
One of the references also stated that I was really good at thinking 'out of the box', finding a solution while everyone was blindly staring at the problem. That is abstract thinking, no?
I'm CEO now... And it might be me, but I've worked with some abstract thinkers and whatever they cook up hasn't resulted in anything concrete yet. (except for a huge consultancy bill on occasion)
Thinking "out of the box" is creativity. This isn't the same as abstract thinking, though you can "fake" being creative by seeing things are the same and proposing a solution that worked for the other problem.
It is my experience that purely abstract things are not usable in the real world by real people. They simply won't get it or making it do things is way too hard (inner platform effect). A good piece of software has a abstract core and a very concrete interface.
"The psychometric test was supposed to produce a "true" reflection of how someone saw themselves, and I was told it couldn't change over time - i.e. whatever it determined was fixed, immutable and infallible."
Any HR person that believes humans are immutable, fixed objects should be fired on the spot. Humans beings are adaptable organisms capable of far more than we can ever imagine. Any person who has the power to hire and fire other people who fails to understand this is not qualified for the job they have been asked to do.
Unlike the OP it's at the hirer's discretion how much weight they put in the score and it's made clear to us there's a definite pattern that more nervous candidates & those without English as a natural language score less well. We ask them to come into the office, only in rare occasions does someone do it remotely.
Most of my candidates in software positions score 40-70% and have done well in the company, I've had a number in the 0-20% bracket of whom I took 1 based on his good performance in other aspects of the interview - he's not turned out to be a great hire relative to the others. A handful in the company get the 95%+ scores and they've all done well - I think many are among the best performers in our department suggesting some kind of particular capability.
The output of the test is a % score with breakdown in a few catagories plus a 2-3 page personality profile. I showed mine to a few ex colleagues, it said probably 8 things like "will have days where he's uncommunicative or seems unfriendly and days he's warmer" which everyone pointed out as eerily true about me (and the negative aspects I can therefore work on!) but it read a little like a horoscope in that you can probably find truth in it and it's up to you to what extent you forgive the paragraphs that are very untrue, although presented in a scientific way.
Honestly, I think it's pretty helpful as accompanying information and would use it again at another job
I don't know if the results matter.
Maybe she did some kind of averaging, or maybe she was told by management to invent a reason to reject him... since about 96% of the company was of British White origin - I shouldn't speculate though.
"Often what would happen is the first ten minutes or so would be socially awkward for the candidates since they would soon realise that they're technically all working against each other, but they also had to work together."
is quite as bad as this:
"As a young man, in the late 1920s or early 1930s, the narrator lived in the South. Because he is a gifted public speaker, he is invited to give a speech to a group of important white men in his town. The men reward him with a briefcase containing a scholarship to a prestigious black college, but only after humiliating him by forcing him to fight in a “battle royal” in which he is pitted against other young black men, all blindfolded, in a boxing ring." [1]
But it's getting "up there". The complex technical interview and the "do stuff for us for free" thing is bad enough but "start cooperating with your opponents in a 'there no right answers but we'll be failing you for some answers' situation is pretty despicable just to start.
Part of me hope they wind only with only really bad candidates, serves them right for putting on such a circus.
Turns out I had stuffed up a few of the dates for a former job and it looked like I working for another company!
I was curious as to what he thought I was doing all day in the office. Even more curious - why the hell was he tracking me on LinkedIn? I suppose I shouldn't have been that surprised.
These psychometric tests seem to go against that advice by only selecting people with very similar personalities and thought patterns, thus stinting the company.
I figured now that I've got some experience under my belt and I have references from within I'd be a shoe-in. So I answered truthfully this time and was rejected. I asked my references about what happened and HR told them I didn't pass the personality test.
When money is on the line people are quite flexible about their views. If you like ObjC, I like ObjC. If you like Starbucks, I like Starbucks.
2. Naming and shaming the company - better
3. Quitting your job and letting them know about it - even better
Also, I formally let them know I disagreed with the psychometric testing.
Double also... I used to apologise to new hires for the psychometric testing, and tell them "this is not how the real-world works, this is a micro-community"
I admit that most HR managers are just paper pushers who are simply not knowledgeable enough to make hiring decisions. And shame on the manager who allowed such a useless position and department to persist. If these people are not qualified to help make hiring decisions, why would you even trust them to find and filter candidates?
I've worked places where the HR personnel understand the business, know the team, and were aware of heaps of research on hiring and keeping people happy. Their feedback on hiring processes was extremely valuable, and they made contributions to the culture and environment. They were the first to attack "corporate bullshit" as it sprung up. In short, they knew how to build and foster a productive, creative environment better than anyone, and we listened. That, in my opinion, is what HR should do.
1. Are you certain that all technically qualified candidates will fit in with every company? Do you have data that supports this opinion?
2. Assuming there are some "poor fits", are you certain that the HR department and its tests are unable to accurately detect poor fits? Do you know what the sensitivity and specificity of the tests are?
3. Given that there will be some false positives (incorrectly labeled as "poor fit"), are you certain that losing these false positives harms the company more than hiring the true positives would (because you don't detect them)? Do you have data that supports this opinion, for various objective measures of harm or success?
Consider that these programs may be data-driven, which your anecdote is not, and therefore a) this person might actually be a technically qualified yet poor fit for the company and you just can't tell and b) this person could be an acceptable false positive, and that judging a program due to a specific instance is vacuous. My gut reaction is that, probably, the best hiring program allows several people and departments with various expertise should each have veto power.
Finally, hackers are traditionally anti-authoritarian, and that is both good and bad. Failure to realize that, and to admit that authority may have some value that even you, brilliant computer programmer, can't personally vouch for, is one of the aspects of our community that I would love to see change.
2) I expect that the HR process is evidence towards whether a candidate is a good fit, but not as good evidence evidence as the estimation of future coworkers regarding if they would be a good fit. I expect that written tests by HR regarding personality would be approximately useless, and that the people who created them haven't measured their sensitivity and specificity.
3) I expect that would vary wildly case by case.
EDIT: To unpack 2 a bit more, I'm sure there are personality tests that would be fairly useful in these cases, but I also expect that actual researchers who are doing things scientifically and only promise what they can deliver would be at such a huge disadvantage selling to HR departments that I wouldn't expect any uptake even without competition from unscrupulous types who think they've got everything figured out and don't feel the need to scientifically test their methods.
I wonder how many times technical staff have had hiring lumped on them, and got it horribly wrong?
And this is coming from someone who is from US and natively speaks English. Social awkwardness is in a sense showing intelligence, however it is hard to convey speech articulate for some people. Some people are much more wrapped in the news of now and what is going on the world than others. And people all have different ways of jumbling facts in their head and through speech, so it's not exactly fair to say one person is smarter based on them using cleaner and more syntactic language.
But generally companies do need to hire people that they can at least get along with. That I can understand, because if you can't stand a person who is there by your side for 6 hours or more then you can't really work with them.
Companies that are looking to hire people based off of speech and writing are looking at it as a communication issue. This could be good or it could be much worse. They need to realize the trade-off between communication and talent being there.
We had to fill out a test and hand a second form to someone who knew us well enough to judge our social behaviour.
The goal of this was to validate that the test.
When asked what would happen if the test was not valid, the company representative answered:
"There are 2 ways to handle such a proiblem: we can change the test or we can try again with another sample group. We prefer to change the sample group."
Not surprisingly, my company has hired several people from them and absolutely no one has a good thing to say about working there.
It is 100% legitimate to not hire someone because they don't fit in with your team. They might be really smart and ace your interviews, but if they simply don't fit in then they don't fit in. This advice is given countless times in basically every single "how to give interviews" post I've read, and they come up on HN quite often. Remember the one a few days ago about how Stripe (?) uses "the Sunday test" on candidates? I thought that was pretty brilliant.
So, while the company in this story did something most of us agree is bad, they at least had good intentions. I'm not defending them, just reiterating that it's valid to reject someone based on how they fit in with your team. Just try to not do that by using a test...
[edit] also, the "fits in with team" decision should obviously be made by the team itself and not by HR. But I'm definitely not in the "abolish HR" camp, lol.
Road, hell, paved... you know the rest. If I were ever subject to such a test I'd walk out of that interview pronto. If I were ever in the hiring manager's role I'd raise this to the CEO and fight like hell to get the situation changed or the HRbot repaired.
I've worked for a lot of software corporations (either as an employee or contractor/consultant) and I've never heard of anything like a psychometric evaluation.
Please tell me this isn't becoming popular.
They told me in my next interview I was one of the most consistent people that took test. I got a 95%, whatever that means. In reality I just noticed the pattern and gave my answers with that information
Firstly: You had to write a personal statement, something to describe yourself
Test 1: Involved ticking (agreeing) with a list of statements from two perspectives. The first perspective was how you see yourself. The second perspective was how (you think) others see you
Test 2: Involved rotating the letter R many times in a fixed time period. I was given a grid of about 100 R's all at different angles and had to count the number of clock wise rotations for it to be normal.
The end-result was basically a bunch of weightings that gave personality traits. Followed by a really well written auto-generated description of that individuals traits.
Typically when people had the chance to read their results, they'd say "ooh, actually I agree". But of all the things it said - there was a hell-of-a-lot that it didn't say.
My math skills (without calculator) were pretty bad, but I was reassured that it didn't matter, I was applying as a software developer not an accountant.
I got the job, and in my time there I also heard about people that "failed" the test.
The personality type the Unicru test selects for is bizarre and paradoxical; I doubt any living human could have these characteristics without wearing a cap (from The Tripods). You have to be a self-starter but have no mind of your own; you have to take initiative but only on things of which the company approves.
Nice to see this practice trickling into tech. I'd say "welcome to fucking America" except apparently this is in the UK.
And even when there isn't, there is to the person reading it - if your "type" rejects their values, you must be broken somehow.
And who isn't aware that psychologists have recently been forced to abandon the Asperger Syndrome diagnosis, after an epidemic of phony diagnoses of people who are often very successful in spite of the diagnosis, people like Bill Gates, Nicola Tesla and Albert Einstein?
The big picture is that society is in the midst of a re-assessment of the role and meaning of psychology, and the future doesn't look very bright for psychiatrists and psychologists. More here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/side-effects/201305/the-...
"Thank you for your interest in the ! Your resume appears to have many of the relevant skills we are looking for in our open * position. Please tell us more information about yourself and attach your resume. We look forward to scheduling an interview."
I reply back and this is what I get:
"...We have had an impressive response to our ad for our open position. At this time, candidates with backgrounds closer matching our job description are being considered."
So, got approved by one HR rep, then rejected by the next. It really frustrates me knowing that I have the qualifications and yet, for whatever "undisclosed" reason, I can't even just get an interview. The world of getting hired....
Edit - blanked out company name so that is why it reads odd.
I wondered about this when I see test scores inconsistent with actual ability. The truth does come out.
In general tests (or interviews) for new hires should be tougher than for existing employees. You want each new hire to bring something new to the table.
The OP suggests that you can't beat interviews. I believe that even better is seeing someone in action (which they did) and getting references from someone you trust. This is why employee referral programs are so good.
Once HR gets into the mix of "Fairness to the candidates" as opposed to "Fairness to the company" it gets a little strange.
This started as a piece of Interplay corporate lore. It was well known that producers (a game industry position, roughly equivalent to PMs) had to make a change to everything that was done. The assumption was that subconsciously they felt that if they didn’t, they weren’t adding value.
The artist working on the queen animations for Battle Chess was aware of this tendency, and came up with an innovative solution. He did the animations for the queen the way that he felt would be best, with one addition: he gave the queen a pet duck. He animated this duck through all of the queen’s animations, had it flapping around the corners. He also took great care to make sure that it never overlapped the “actual” animation.
Eventually, it came time for the producer to review the animation set for the queen. The producer sat down and watched all of the animations. When they were done, he turned to the artist and said, “That looks great. Just one thing—get rid of the duck.”
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/new-programming-jar...
And (but not related to the article) I was amazed to find out that Milgram is the same researcher who created the first "six degrees of separation" experiments, that lead to the creation of the first global-scale social networks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_world_experiment
In this instance a reasonable compromise would seem to be to have the HR manager state what the specific issues they felt might exist were and call the candidate back to talk through them and see if they could be substantiated. If someone was that bad a fit then I doubt very much it would be hard to surface supporting evidence in a face to face discussion.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/01/...
I know it's a bit demanding to ask what are usually a bunch of unskilled supporting staffers to become proficient in analytics, but you can't expect to solve a problem without putting in some work.
Pretty much sums up everthing that is wrong with Corporate America, American government and American society in a nutshell. Your betters (aka "leaders") want solders, not moral people. This is social Darwinism in action, and it's not going to lead to a good place.
One of the funniest things, to me, is that the military is having a lot of problems shifting mentalities. The "Shut the fuck up and do what you're told" model works for a draftee military, but it's complete garbage for a professional military. Today's soldiers are faced with circumstances that require improvisation, creativity, and original thought. Literature on the subject focuses on the "strategic corporal," the squad or even fireteam leader who is forced to make autonomous decisions.
Unfortunately, things are pretty slow to change in the military, so basic training is all about the STFUDWYT Model.
Then, when it actually comes to promotion time, they have to find the people who haven't been completely brainwashed. It's awesome to find that the kids who were seen as shitbags in boot camp tend to end up doing far better than the kids who wholeheartedly drank the Kool-Aid.
I have both in my shop right now. I can use the brainwashed kids, but I can't make them leaders because they have no capacity for original thought. They'll be minions forever.
That being said, I also have a kid in my shop who is certainly not brainwashed and is also completely intolerable to work with.
[hr_score, tech_score]
[tech_score, hr_score]For example, if you're interviewing candidates with "true objective fit optimalities" of 31%, 52%, 84%, 91%, 94%, 96% - then your process must ensure that there is no way that the bad candidates get hired because they got lucky, even if it means that sometimes the top one gets thrown out by the filter. The delta between best and second best candidates is likely to be narrow (certainly much smaller than any margin of error of your interviewing/'measurement' process), and insignificant compared to the delta between a good candidate and a shiny-looking bad apple - except if your job market is starving and almost noone good applies.
In general, it's a mistake to substitute technical knowledge for ability to perform. You might be a freaking genius, but one that nobody can get along with. So how well this guy did during his technical evaluation is besides the point. Don't hire people that can't construct normalized data models. End of story.
A much more interesting part of the technical evaluation exercise was seeing how people worked in ad hoc teams. Is being mostly quiet, having difficultly with the language, and prompting other people to ask questions a good thing? Probably not. Is it bad enough to disqualify somebody? Probably not.
The dirty secret about hiring is that there are no right answers. There is no magic thing that once you have it, you automatically are perfect for a job. It's technical chops, it's personality, it's social skills, it's communication skills, and so on.
The best part in the comments looks like more of the membership theory: only hire people that you want on a team, and ignore everything else. Probably works great for small teams. I wonder how that would scale, though.
So I didn't get a lot from this. Wish there was more in it.
That's the idea at least. In practice, I haven't been impressed by them at all.
Ugh.... I have some bad news about the world you live in.
Company in question: Kaonix - http://www.kaonix.com/
Can we please blackball this company into oblivion from ever hiring any smart, capable, or talented developers?
For the record, my interview at Kaonix was probably the best conducted interview I've ever had. Me and the CTO sat down and basically just chatted about technology - he had some technical questions but soon gave up on them when he realised they were a peice of cake for me. Kaonix should be praised for their approach - the other company, not so much.
Perhaps that could be the problem, HR used test as an excuse.
Those on the other end fail these wonderful HR tests because they all too often have to around the title hounds to keep the business they work in up and running.
This post sums it up well: http://melbel.hubpages.com/hub/Unicru
Now I'm depressed for the morning.
I hope he ended up working for their competition and cost them money.
Hiring HR people because "that's what a serious, large company does" and having a certain amount of mid-tier bosses because "we [the top] need better control over what's happening down at the bottom" (read: "we need detailed control of people that have been self-sufficient and productive on their own for several years"), is an excellent time to start looking for other work.
There's an argument to be made that HR and Middle Management should be supportive functions in tech companies and thus shouldn't have the last call, but I'd be really really careful with calling them "unproductive". I for myself am glad that the paper-shuffling tasks get managed by a dedicated employee rather than myself. I'd go bonkers in a week if they'd pile up on my desk.
RE: Nuremberg Defence.
Do you really think it would have been smart for the Germans to hire people who wouldn't have followed their orders?
But in a profession environment, yep I'd agree you don't want all people who just follow orders, quite different to work environments where you want people to act more like machines aka call centres, sweat shops, army etc.