[HN Gopher] The computers rejecting job applications
___________________________________________________________________
The computers rejecting job applications
Author : mnw21cam
Score : 140 points
Date : 2021-02-08 12:20 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.co.uk)
| underseacables wrote:
| I know a number of people who have paid for someone to do the
| personality tests for them, but with video it's gotten harder.
| It's also gotten easier for companies to reject for tacit bias
| such as gender, race, and any other number of factors. There
| doesn't seem to be any safe guards for it; we didn't do it, the
| software did it.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> It's also gotten easier for companies to reject for tacit
| bias such as gender, race, and any other number of factors_
|
| In some European countries like Germany, Spain and Austria it's
| not even tacit as it's tradition to have your photo and
| birthday in your resume, especially for more traditional
| companies, to the point where it generated some scandals in
| Austria and Germany since in some companies, being black or
| having Slavic/Turkish/Arabic names got your CV rejected by
| default even though the CVs would fit the requirements.
|
| But it's ok, since they write in the footer of their career
| page that they don't discriminate on such things. /s
|
| Edit: There's even some German satire about the racism job
| applicants face over having photos in resumes:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih5k7g8vUmE
| byerobh wrote:
| Yeah, those footers are just for the "more equal" crowd.
| Anyone I know who actually wants to discriminate, still gets
| away with it. Those who don't don't. But at least now the
| average diversity idealist is appeased.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > they don't discriminate on these things.
|
| In the U.S. they explicitly do discriminate on these things
| (and are often required to do so by law), but only in one
| direction.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| AFAIK, photos and birthday are not allowed in US to prevent
| such discrimination so how would they do it then?
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| I am surprised that Germany hasn't been taken to the
| European court of human rights over this abuse.
|
| Maybe those German privacy activists going after google
| et all might want to look at this.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Because in Germany/Europe discrimination is officially
| illegal so it is assumed nobody does it, even though
| people know better, and because you cannot fully outlaw
| and police tribalism, human bias and cronyism that is
| evolutionary ingrained in us as a species since the dawn
| of man.
|
| Putting more legislative hoops in place means HR will
| just need to find more creative ways to formulate job
| requirements in order to exclude certain classes of
| people or more creative ways of justifying not taking you
| application further, but ultimately won't solve the core
| issue.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| There's also the Arbeitszeugnis thing (a summary of how
| they see you as an employee, given when you leave the
| company). If your boss doesn't like you, they can fuck up
| your future a bit by giving you a bad Zeugnis (future
| employers typically want to see those).
|
| It's effectively illegal to complain about employees in
| Zeugnis, but they can reorder words and skip some phrases
| to imply that you're a bad employee. If you're not German
| you might even think you got a good Zeugnis because it
| looks well on the surface, but there's the entire code
| you need to learn to read these.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Ah the "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown" defence.
|
| or maybe you ned some high profile sackings of HR
| directors at a few big German companies ala github.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Sackings? On what ground? Proving there's any kind of
| malice or bias in rejected applications is nearly
| impossible as the main job of HR is to protect the
| company from any hiring bias leaking out. That's why your
| rejection email is usually some generic copy-paste
| message and they usually refuse to give you any feedback
| upon request
| vincentmarle wrote:
| Except they straight up ask you for your racial etnicity,
| disabilities and gender.
| pc86 wrote:
| They're referring to diversity programs as
| discrimination.
| galfarragem wrote:
| There's an elephant in the room: hiring is by nature biased.
|
| I have yet to witness an hiring process that isn't biased. As
| an anecdote, in a past small business job, a colleage (that
| accumulated the hiring manager hat) used to choose people
| (always opposite sex) by photo and had even the literal
| approval of the company owner to do so. To corroborate this,
| I remember two persons "hired by photo" commenting that they
| never had any trouble getting job interviews. It may indicate
| that "hiring by photo" is rather common.
|
| We like to forget that most jobs don't allow 10X'ers.
| Choosing "the best" is normally just a form of "early
| optimization". My take on this (but I might be biased) is
| trial most and only hire who adds enough value.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Like I said below, you cannot fully outlaw and police
| tribalism, human bias and cronyism that is evolutionary
| ingrained in us as a species since the dawn of man.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| It is also the practice in some Asian countries. I applied
| for a job at a Japanese university and they wanted a photo.
| nicbou wrote:
| I interviewed for my first employee a few weeks ago. I just
| opted for an audio call. I didn't want to judge candidates
| based on their coronavirus nest, coronavirus haircut, or
| anything that didn't influence their performance in a strictly
| remote job. I also didn't want to dress up.
|
| That being said, German culture dictates that resumes have
| pictures, so it's sort of moot.
| toyg wrote:
| Disappointing that a BBC piece does not cover any UK-based
| business in this sector, like Arctic Shores
| (https://www.arcticshores.com/). The journalist lives in NYC but
| these days that shouldn't really matter...
| throwitaway798 wrote:
| I'm not certain you can quantify the qualitative - it's too much.
| How would you properly set up what you are looking for concerning
| the specifics in your company's culture? It would be great to
| have follow ups - like did this person who passed all these tests
| and get hired really turn out to be amazing..? How do they factor
| Ig they get another job offer and leave shortly after the hire?
| When humans can't even read humans how are they going to program
| something that will?
| HenryBemis wrote:
| I assume that not all roles go through this process. If you are
| hiring for a sensitive position (CEO, other C-suite, any type of
| Compliance and Internal Audit), the process is different.
|
| I will also assume that the "AI" does only the first clean-up.
| Basically moving them from the 'pile on the floor' to the
| 'table', pick the 'top 100' for a role.
|
| Fun story: When working for a US tech company some years back, we
| were looking for IT Auditors. Someone saw the word "audit" on an
| ad and applied. The guy was a "night auditor" (hotels). He didn't
| bother reading the ad, he just applied. HR didn't review his CV
| at all, they set up the meeting. We laughed, apologized, got him
| a coffee, we exchnaged funny/horror stories, and he went his
| merry way.
|
| An AI system would have picked that up in 1ms. A lazy/overwhelmed
| HR employee did not.
| MikeDelta wrote:
| Maybe they should use more AI to hire CEOs and upper management
| from a very large pool. We might get positively surprised.
|
| (Or not, in which case I'd be surprised.)
| mark254 wrote:
| Even just a random process might give better results -
| sometimes.
|
| From THHGTTG:
|
| > To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who
| must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited
| to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of
| getting themselves made President should on no account be
| allowed to do the job."
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| While there is a natural "that's not fair!" reaction to this, and
| also I think that a lot of these companies are selling snake oil,
| I also have to wonder if it can be much worse than the _human_
| screening most applicants go through for these kinds of jobs.
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of this is probably mostly BS-y stuff like personality
| tests and so forth. But if there's a stack of 100 resumes
| applying for some job, there's going to be a lot of
| arbitrariness in any heuristics used to cull pile down to a
| reasonable size even once "obviously" unqualified candidates
| are filtered out (and even that filtering can be a bit
| arbitrary).
| sfg wrote:
| "AI can help evaluate all those candidates in a very consistent
| way," he says."
|
| Which, if applied across an industry, means someone will be
| consistently rejected; where as now they might have a chance of
| finding a position somewhere, as the intellects in each hiring
| process are different.
| cullinap wrote:
| This reminds me of the nfl combine but for jobs. There are plenty
| of examples of players that do well in the combine but fail in
| the nfl. Your test just selects for individuals who are good at
| testing and not necessarily good at their potential job.
| lyptt wrote:
| There's no way in hell I'd do an AI-based interview. It speaks a
| lot about the way a company treats its employees if they can't
| even be bothered to speak to you until the second round.
| rammy1234 wrote:
| are resumes valid anymore ?
| samastur wrote:
| Yes, just not everywhere. We use them to filter our candidates.
| swalsh wrote:
| 10 years ago I was so excited and optimistic about the future
| technology was going to bring us. As that future comes closer
| it's quickly becoming quite clear that this entire industry is
| bringing us a giant dystopian future. Tech companies have more
| power then governments, individual privacy is gone. Corporations,
| already pretty impersonal, have completed the transition to
| treating people as "resources", completely dropping the word
| "human".
|
| We all need to think about the future we're building here.
| joshuahughes wrote:
| I wish it wasn't true, but the path we're headed down is pretty
| much set now.
|
| I can't help feeling that the habit of removing identifying
| markers (names, ages, etc) from resumes to try to ensure
| equality in hiring is also part of the same ill-fated
| direction.
|
| I dearly wish that the world I was leaving my kids wasn't so
| dehumanised.
| woeirua wrote:
| > I can't help feeling that the habit of removing identifying
| markers (names, ages, etc) from resumes to try to ensure
| equality in hiring is also part of the same ill-fated
| direction.
|
| What? There is well documented and clear evidence that these
| indicators actually lead to highly biased decisions regarding
| who gets interviewed. Removing them is the _right_ thing to
| do.
| joshuahughes wrote:
| There are positives, and there are also negatives. Both
| have been well-documented.
|
| My point was a more general one, that we are being sucked
| into a strangely anti-human world where those in power
| would like nothing more than to reduce us to a mere
| employee number. Just data in a spreadsheet. It's so much
| less messy that way, right?
| swalsh wrote:
| It goes beyond resumes. Our criminal justice system also uses
| AI to make judgement decisions. I understand the need to
| eliminate bias from systems (though I question how much bias
| is actually being eliminated via these systems) but the need
| to humanize people when they are most vulnerable is
| important.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Sounds a bit Black Mirror Complex. People were complaining
| about being treated as resources since the industrial
| revolution - and before then serfs knew that they were
| resources! More power than governments, seriously? The only
| time I have seen that rhetoric come up is complete fucking
| morons complaining about encryption and wanting to outlaw math.
| [deleted]
| totorovirus wrote:
| I don't think this is bad at all. If there are so many job
| application that human can't scale enough to process all of them,
| it should be a big firm with reputation and those companies are
| spammed by job application from all ranges of candidates. It is
| just a spam mail detector with job application flavor.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| Yeah it sucks computers do this but its important to remember
| people can be equally cruel. Big tech companies who need talent
| arbitrarily accept/reject candidates based on resume buzzwords
| and whether they can leetcode. But the long tail of small
| companies, often run by idiots or frat bros of some kind will
| reject you for reasons stupider still - dont like hair, not hot
| enough, can only drink 2 beers?, only knows Java LMAO.
|
| In other industries, psychometrics are common and even effective.
| I remember one dull self help author talking about how insurance
| companies screen for optimism because lol you're gonna need it to
| consistently make 100 calls a day, knowing only 5 people will
| buy. Meaning forget merit, EVEN IF you make it past the
| randomness filter, your interview & job performance is determined
| based on largely immoveable parts of your personality. Don't
| forget, the corporate world outside of the rarefied space of tech
| is an absolute shit show.
|
| Whenever i feel like ranting against how shitty AI is, remember
| folks, i remember the majority of humans suck too. It gives me a
| warm, cozy feeling like I'm a turkey the day before thanksgiving.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I wonder if it's possible to get the job applicants to evaluate
| each other?
|
| That way you have a process that automatically scales to the
| number of applicants you have.
|
| Exactly how to structure it so it can't be gamed/subverted is
| tricky, but you might imagine some team activity where the team
| does a task together, and then each person in the team is asked
| to so some kind of review of the other people in the team.
|
| If you make the team activity be a small nugget of the actual
| work you need done, and you pay all the interviewees generously
| for their time, I can't imagine interviewees walking away unhappy
| at the end, even if they don't get the job.
|
| You then interview the top 2 people from each team.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| > Exactly how to structure it so it can't be gamed/subverted is
| tricky
|
| Most companies pay a commission to the recruiter or a referral
| bonus. You could distribute that to those candidates who
| contribute to the recommendation of the winning candidate.
| You're incentivized to recommend the best person, because you
| can still make money even if you don't get the job.
|
| Also you could always hire for a batch of positions, or at
| least more than one person at a time. That way, just because
| someone else gets the job doesn't preclude you from also
| getting it.
| wccrawford wrote:
| Any time people are asked to review their peers, there's at
| least some compulsion to rate others poorly because it'll make
| you look better.
|
| IME, the only times that it can go well is with people who
| don't think the results will matter. And in which case, why do
| it?
|
| The one exception is someone who is already somewhat of a
| leader and isn't looking for a promotion, and so they don't
| have much desire to make themselves look better.
| acd wrote:
| In Europe Automatic performance reviews are probbly not legal in
| EU according to GDPR section 22.
|
| "The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a
| decision based solely on automated processing"
|
| https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/
| ghaff wrote:
| >"solely"
|
| Which presumably means that they can be used as a filter so
| long as a human is making the final selection.
| trynton wrote:
| It is a truth universally acknowledged that you are more likely
| to be hired on, if your parents are friends with the owner of the
| company. As for a video interview, I would totally clam-up. If
| you do want your application to make it to the top of the pile,
| then what you do is this. Fill the page with white-on-white very
| tiny words that are designed to hit the AI buzz word detector.
| You can extract these from the company "Mission Statement" :s
|
| https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-09-01
| jakub_g wrote:
| FWIW (at least in tech industry), apparently the automated
| filtering systems are a myth spread by companies who make money
| on the promise to optimize your resume to get past the filter.
|
| https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1292909844886945792
|
| (The OP of the tweet was an engineering manager in several big
| tech companies, wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook last
| year, and talked with many recruiters in the process)
| asdf123qwer wrote:
| >(at least in tech industry), apparently the automated
| filtering systems are a myth
|
| Sounds like horseshit. There's no shortage of graduates in
| tech, on top of graduates of various "bootcamps", as everyone
| and their dog has been telling young people they just need to
| "learn to code!" and they'll have a luxurious, joyous future.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I don't know if there are automated filtering systems that will
| send a rejection email in place but I know as a manager who
| used LinkedIn job posts I had what was basically a, "qualified"
| and then a "not qualified/spam" folder for applications. New
| applications were auto sorted into one or the other depending
| on their resume/linkedin profile/some other factors I was not
| aware of.
|
| I could still find those profiles but it was auto filtering the
| candidates it thought were relevant and those that were not. To
| at least some extend these types of automated filtering systems
| do exists. I don't know why recruiters/manager say they do not.
| SharpeDidntFoul wrote:
| I paid someone $250 to get my resume past ATS systems, it
| worked.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| Care to share the service/company?
| aspaceman wrote:
| Huh? This directly disagrees with my experience. I believe this
| person is mistaken. Resumes are always filtered before they hit
| my desk, I just never even knew the filter happened. Apparently
| they toss out a huge amount.
|
| Reading this tweet in depth disagrees with a lot of my
| experience in Fortune 500 tech companies. Can't figure out the
| misunderstanding.
| twic wrote:
| jakub_g refers to the claim that " _automated_ filtering
| systems are a myth ". That doesn't mean that HR aren't
| filtering them manually.
| zippergz wrote:
| If you never knew it happened, how do you... know it
| happened?
|
| I can't conclusively say one way or the other. I have been a
| hiring manager at a F500 tech company and have never seen
| direct evidence of any automatic filtering or rejections.
|
| Anyone speaking with complete confidence in either direction
| needs to bring actual evidence...
| aspaceman wrote:
| As in, my managers always talked about their piles being
| "presorted by HR" which was just code for a computer did
| it. I never thought some well paid HR person was actually
| sorting through those, but maybe I guess.
|
| There's no evidence to bring? Like, in the case of bunch of
| people bringing personal anecdotes you can still create a
| sense of truth without evidence Christ.
| zippergz wrote:
| The companies I worked at had sourcers and resume
| screeners who did exactly that. Mostly but not all
| contractors. Not necessarily well-paid, but humans
| nonetheless.
| wu_187 wrote:
| I talked to a recruiter for a three letter company, and they
| told me that they actively search for keywords on people's
| resumes and the applications that most apply to the role. This
| would in fact be considered filtering. Now I don't know if the
| software they use (brassring) automatically "suggests"
| applicants (which would imply automated filtering) or not.
| valentinemsmith wrote:
| This reminds me of when I was working for an EdTech startup
| nearly a decade ago where the CEO invented his own "Mini Myers
| Briggs" test, and we developed a "feature" to reject any teachers
| applying who came back INTJ after filling out that stupid test.
| The CEO adamantly believed INTJs didn't make good teachers.
| kemiller2002 wrote:
| I used to work as a programmer in this field. I'm torn, on one
| side the "science" behind it is based on statistics and is
| supposed to be validated. Your view depends largely on whether
| you trust the validity of psychometrics. On the other side,
| someone makes a test wraps some statistics around it and says
| it's valid and measures what it's supposed can seem a little far
| fetched.
| hogFeast wrote:
| How can you "validate" it? Are companies making all their staff
| take these tests and then measuring performance? But the people
| in your company isn't RCT. Are companies basing this on
| research that is done on random people? Okay, but skills
| required on most jobs aren't correlated to some "general"
| intelligence. How do you deal with the fact that IQ appears to
| be correlated to income? How you deal with the fact that IQ
| doesn't correlate to success? Seriously, I don't understand how
| this makes sense to anyone who has studied stats at all (this
| is taught to 16 year olds where I am).
|
| This stuff is totally out of this world crazy. I am reasonably
| intelligent, I did an IQ test when I was 12 and it was 130...I
| am extremely bad at relatively basic elements of life and work.
| I am good at other things but there is no way this can all be
| measured or, even, quantified. What is more: the main thing
| determining my ability is still experience, and my skills
| change significantly over the course of a few years. This isn't
| how statistics or science is really supposed to work. Slightly
| obviously, and contrary to what people think, this entrenches
| inequality.
|
| I understand why companies do this:
|
| * Hiring is hard. It is hard to get people who are actually
| good at hiring, there are no courses for this at university,
| there are no real rules outside of experience. Ironically,
| companies get over this by doubling down on their weaknesses.
|
| * Underemployment is massive. It used to be hard to apply for a
| job, everyone just shotguns apps out now, and no-one has a job
| they want. Employers can do whatever: I am in the UK, even for
| menial tasks like working in the supermarket, they are doing
| weird, totally unscientific tests.
|
| * Everyone is terrified of hiring. Employment lawyers get
| richer, laws get more complex, and the risk of being villified
| in the press for an interview gone bad are massive. Ironically,
| these totally "objective" processes just solidify inequality.
| They are designed with context, there is no totally abstract
| notion of intelligence that is relevant to the work place, they
| are designed to produce stratification in intelligence that
| likely does not translate to any real-world scenario. These
| approaches cause the thing they are trying to prevent because
| the thing has become so terrifying for companies.
|
| Just my 2c, but this stuff is, imo, one of the worst modern
| corporate behaviour. Whether you think it is right or wrong
| morally, the outcomes are not good...the solution to bad hiring
| processes isn't psuedoscience. It is: hiring people who can do
| their job (again, these are linked, I have noticed that some
| companies are in the death sprial...they have bad processes
| that hire bad people, when a company does it well they just
| exist totally outwith this cycle).
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| I work with a lot of psychological testing, and IMO it's absurd
| to expect these kinds of tests to describe individuals. They're
| fine at creating norms and viewing statistical deviations, but
| There's a reason why, even in the ideal case, when you have a
| gold standard diagnostic test, with obvious symptoms, hundreds
| of thousands of previous cases to look at, few things are
| diagnosed solely on testing alone. And these tests likely don't
| get anywhere close to any of these ideals.
| vsareto wrote:
| It doesn't seem like science, or it's selectively chosen
| science.
|
| If we must do these tests, I should be able to take one or a
| few of these and keep that as a record and not have to do them
| again. But instead, I have to repeat the process for every
| company that gives them (recently, Berkshire-Hathaway and it
| had to be done before anyone would even speak about the
| position). These things rarely test for job-specific skills and
| are supposedly generalized intelligence tests, so the skills
| should be widely applicable, and therefore I shouldn't have to
| repeat this often. Hell, I do less for a drivers license
| renewal and 2 tons of metal at 60 mph is more lethal than most
| jobs behind these tests. Typically they've been math, reading
| comprehension, word association, memory, personality, and
| abstract/spatial thinking, which, frankly, was already done
| through high school and college. If the goal was finding
| signals for successful applicants, they already have had these
| signals.
|
| To me, that says they're less interested in finding out how
| smart you are, and it's really more of a filtering tool where
| science is being used to give it more credibility than it
| deserves.
|
| And of course, referring to the article, because it's AI,
| there's a gray area of accountability that I don't think the
| legal process has caught up with yet.
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| I would guess that if you actually dig into it, the reason
| why each company who does it does them differently is legal.
| firefoxd wrote:
| This reminds me of some times in the mid 2000s, I was looking for
| a job. I had a friend who was a manager at EA. He was trying to
| get me a job as a game tester but no luck. I had to apply online
| through their system, but they couldn't find my application.
|
| After days of applying and not appearing, someone told him that
| it's possible that my application was being rejected. They found
| my name in the rejected pile. I don't know what exactly in my
| application was turning me into a red flag, or of if he didn't
| really want to hire me, but unless the system accepted me, I was
| not going to get hired.
|
| I was never hired.
| JustARandomGuy wrote:
| Related story: I applied for a position with United Airlines a
| few months ago. I started the job application, then stopped in
| the middle for whatever reason. United's job system emailed me at
| 9 PM a reminder to continue my application, and I completed it
| less than a half hour later. A half hour after that (just after
| 10 PM) United emailed me a rejection notice. So either some
| United recruiter was working late (I'm in the same time zone as
| United's HQ) or my resume was completely rejected by a bot.
|
| It's pretty annoying to put in all that work and get a rejection
| so quickly.
| heelix wrote:
| Very early in my career, I did an open house where I chatted
| with their principal architect and got hired. A few weeks
| later, after I had been working for a week, I received a letter
| from HR rejecting me. I wandered over to the HR office and
| meekly asked if I was still employed - and thankfully was.
| Apparently they had just gotten to screening the resumes that
| were handed in at the open house.
| totetsu wrote:
| When I took one one of these things for a temping company a few
| years back, and it was asking me about basic Excel things, I took
| a look at the network traffic in the browser. I could see it was
| just like "question 2, pass yes, respons time 10s" in JSON. So I
| feed it through portswigger burp proxy and modified the responses
| as they went. I still think I was demonstrating basic IT skills.
| AntiImperialist wrote:
| If computers can reject your job application, your value in the
| market probably is not worth much. I would work on that.
|
| I am not worried about computers blocking me. Google and Facebook
| do try to censor my comments with their algorithms. They're
| pretty easy to get around. I'm more concerned by individuals with
| political agenda (like for example, here, where I have been
| shadow-banned by being targeted manually for engaging in
| "wrongthink": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25624084).
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _" Everyone wants the right job, and to hire the right person.
| It doesn't benefit anyone for the match to be off. Trying to use
| these AI systems in smart ways is to everyone's advantage."_
|
| I mean, that's flagrantly untrue. There are plenty of, I hesitate
| to use the term "bad actors", but people who will lie and
| embellish their resume, tailor their answers to these personality
| quizzes in an optimal way, and otherwise game the system to
| maximize their payoff - which is to get hired.
| SharpeDidntFoul wrote:
| You can pay about $250 for someone to optimize your resume with
| certain key words, punctuation, and formatting choices to make it
| through these systems. I did this and it worked. I was going for
| entry level finance roles in tech and finance. I went to a top 40
| finance program, interned at Morgan Stanley, a hedge fund, and a
| respectable incubator, but had a hard time getting replies to my
| job applications. I used all the help and resources from my
| university's career center and followed everything on the
| infamous "Mergers and Inquisitions" website, which is supposed to
| be the holy grail of career guidance and resume formatting for
| finance majors. I had my resume looked at my everyone I could get
| critiques and edits from. I wasn't getting answers from my
| applications. After hiring someone to change the formatting, I
| got automated replies saying that they liked my resume and would
| reach out to schedule a phone screening. Same person, same level
| of "professionalism" on the resume, same experience, just
| different key words and seemingly arbitrary formatting choices to
| please the AI overlords.
|
| I found 5 people claiming to optimize resumes for algorithms for
| the sorts of jobs I wanted. They all had high reviews from
| customers. I then asked them all questions through email and
| phone calls to see if they actually knew what they were talking
| about. I picked the one who appeared the best. Not only did she
| have some personal proximity to the space, but she seemed to know
| all of the nuances of how to please the resume algos. It was the
| best $250 I ever spent.
|
| Point is, people are cracking these processes, it feels arbitrary
| but that's how the game works now if your a job seeker. Whether
| if be something like a resume screener or something of this level
| that claims to be able to understand your personality in 25
| minutes, you can crack the system. If your hiring, I can't
| imagine how confusing this whole mess is on top of your already
| busy work day, but it's easy to manipulate these screening
| software products to make them think whatever you want. I've met
| many sketchy software sales people who just schlep useless
| enterprise products at businesses. I wonder how much of the
| enterprise SaaS world is made up of this sort of thing.
| fiestaman wrote:
| I'm applying to stuff right now, mind emailing me this person's
| information?
| microtherion wrote:
| Yes, those AI systems surely create garbage results right now,
| and worse, once they are trained perfectly, they will provide
| perfect cover to codify existing hiring biases:
|
| 1. Take existing employee base, hired through biased process.
|
| 2. Use resumes to train multi-million parameter machine learning
| model.
|
| 3. System will replicate biases, while the process is completely
| opaque to review by even the people who created it.
|
| But then again, existing hiring practices are just as bad, e.g.
| hiring European engineers only if they graduated from Oxford,
| Cambridge, or the University of Bucharest:
| https://twitter.com/shaft/status/1355696154990628864
|
| Or the still widespread practice in Switzerland to demand hand
| written job applications for executive positions, in order to
| have the applications evaluated by graphologists...
| dcolkitt wrote:
| The next logical step would be to train an adversarial AI against
| the hiring AI. You'd have the system generate your resume and
| application to maximize your chances. Then the hiring AI would
| need to be re-trained to account for this. And so on.
|
| In the far future, this feedback loop creates an economy where
| every job application is total gibberish. No human can possibly
| explain why their resume is a recipe for carne asada, an excerpt
| from Moby Dick, and a bunch of windings. But supposedly it's
| predicted to increase final offer salary by 13.54%, so nobody
| questions it. Anybody who still writes out their resume by hand
| is considered a luddite weirdo, and definitely not someone you'd
| want to have join your company.
| SharpeDidntFoul wrote:
| I kind of rambled on about this in another comment on this
| thread, but I paid someone $250 to optimize my resume with key
| words to appease AI. It worked. I got automated replies to
| schedule phone screenings from jobs that had rejected my old
| resume. It's already happening.
| dunefox wrote:
| Or just send in an image of a koala with a noise filter over
| it. 99% confidence for a prime candidate.
| dennis_jeeves wrote:
| Lol.
| airhead969 wrote:
| Yeap. There then ought to be a whole cottage industry of gaming
| AI applications and AI hiring.
|
| So, we're basically voluntarily letting the machines take over
| and replace human jobs, nuance, and critical thinking?
|
| Oh and then the next logical progressions are AI performance
| reviews and AI management. Within a decade, your AI boss will
| slinging around a coffee cup and saying "yeah, I'm gonna need
| you to come in on Sunday too."
|
| _You are a true believer, blessings of the State, blessings of
| the masses. Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents
| and be happy._
| beckingz wrote:
| There are numerous resume consultants who specialize in
| getting past HR screens and keyword filters.
| patrickthebold wrote:
| I have a section on my resume called:
|
| 'Technologies I'm Unfamiliar With'
|
| Underneath is a Laundry list of today's sexiest technologies.
|
| It's not quite as advanced as your suggestion, but it's pretty
| effective. It's also a good icebreaker when you have the in
| person interview.
| wincy wrote:
| I'd say your name pans out, that seems pretty bold to me.
| myself248 wrote:
| I would title it "Growth opportunities I look forward to
| exploring", and then yes, absolutely.
| stuaxo wrote:
| This must be an American thing, if someone wrote that on a
| CV in the UK, this sort of text would probably put people
| off.
| sharkweek wrote:
| If I were a hiring manager, and I liked everything else I
| saw, I'd get a good laugh out of this, which might propel
| them to the top of my "to be interviewed" pile.
| hinkley wrote:
| The 'American thing' is putting keywords in white text on
| a white background.
|
| This is just normal stuff.
|
| I get people hitting me up on Linked In for tech that I
| outgrew 10 years ago. I can either take them off entirely
| (making me look very 1 dimensional) or counterbalance
| that with things I'd love for someone to pay me to learn.
|
| I haven't made any decisions so far so the status
| continues to remain quo.
| site-packages1 wrote:
| I think the joke is that the automated scanners weeding
| out resumes as in the article posted look for keywords
| like "React" or "Machine Learning" but without context,
| so when they see "Machine Learning" on a CV, they are
| more inclined to accept it, not knowing the context. As
| an interviewer you can simply play dumb on that aspect.
| sharkweek wrote:
| This is the biggest of big brain moves I've ever heard when
| it comes to gaming these types of stupid auto-filters.
| Definitely stealing this for future use.
| greesil wrote:
| Very clever!
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Resume Index:
|
| Personal Information ... 1
|
| Education and Certifications ... 1
|
| Previous Experience ... 1:2
|
| Known Technologies ... 2
|
| Technologies I'm Unfamiliar With ... 2:348
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| I've always viewed staying up with the latest tools,
| technologies, and practices as part of my job. I've also
| found that the people who tend to not do this or display a
| similar sentiment you touched on with your comment, it's
| because you have carved out a large enough amount of success
| or niche with what you are working with. Am I reading into
| this too far?
| nitrogen wrote:
| The breadth of the industry makes it completely impossible
| to keep up with everything. I started typing out a list,
| but the list would be impossibly long.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Like nitrogen explains as well, it's just too much, even if
| you concentrate on what you are actually usually working
| on/in, depending on what your field is.
|
| I.e. if you are working on anything that is currently a
| 'web app' of some sort, then depending on what company you
| were at, you would either be using one framework or
| another. So you might write in the "I know technology X"
| column things like "jQuery, React", because your last job
| used JQuery, then they grew up and switched to React. In
| the "I don't know technology Y" column, you write things
| like "BackboneJS, AngularJS" etc. (the actual lists would
| be much longer, this is just to take an example). You're
| still current if you use either Angular or React it just
| happens that you (or someone at your company) didn't choose
| one but the other. And then there's the myriad of other
| frameworks that come and go or that a particular niche of
| companies might prefer. If you're a web app FE or full
| stack guy you can still pick any of these up easily enough,
| so it makes sense to list them for the "pattern matching HR
| drones" (or computers :)) to get the interview.
| 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote:
| As someone who gets to participate in the hiring process
| more than I'd like to, I look for balance on resumes.
|
| If you bring nothing but J2EE 1.4 experience I'm going to
| assume you've carved out a focused niche. I'll steer the
| interview towards broad, modern practices and technologies.
|
| If your resume talks about nothing but modern technologies,
| I'll try to dive deep to be sure you aren't a dilettante
| with surface knowledge in a ton of things but no deep
| capabilities where it matters to $company.
|
| In general the best resumes show a balance of deep
| expertise in foundational tech and exposure to new
| technologies. A dev might have done Python for a decade but
| has started poking at Elixir, an ops person knows Linux
| like the back of their hand before they start talking about
| Kube, etc.
| 2112 wrote:
| The scary-ier part is how many life-critical processes might
| end up ( or already are ) like this. That being said ; balls
| have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to.
| But if you don't have access to that kind of technology, i i
| can i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [0]
|
| [0] https://thenextweb.com/artificial-
| intelligence/2017/06/19/fa...
| hkmurakami wrote:
| This has a strong Kurt Vonnegut smell to it.
| 2sk21 wrote:
| I also thought of Player Piano when I saw this
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| he's ded, you know it, right?
| bregma wrote:
| So it goes.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| We can just replay the history of SEO. I believe we're at the
| point (was it the late 90s for SEO?) where it's time to put all
| the keywords onto your resume in a white font.
| aboringusername wrote:
| Computers decide if you get a job (and access to a resource
| called "money", pretty important for living).
|
| Computers decide if your Google accounts gets deleted, without
| warning.
|
| Computers decide if you can get credit, or open a bank, or
| participate in society.
|
| And there is 0, yup, 0 accountability. Computer doesn't like you?
| Tough shit, get fucked, nothing you can do. If you don't have an
| internet connection, you're fucked. If you don't have fast upload
| speeds and a capability to record video and are willing to store
| it on someone else's computer (where they will datamine it and
| use it against you in the future, or it'll be "leaked"/sold) then
| you're fucked.
|
| So now, to get a job I need:
|
| To participate in surveillance and trading of my data where it'll
| be data raped
|
| A smart phone
|
| A fast internet connection
|
| So great, fuck you to all the poor people I guess who find
| technology hard, they can just go die.
|
| I'm beginning to think computers were the biggest mistake humans
| ever made. We need regulation and fast against this sort of
| thing, to make the hiring process fair and accessible to
| everyone.
| encom wrote:
| This is maybe true in Silicon Valley. Not in the real world.
|
| Also, nobody needs a Google account.
| mafuy wrote:
| I wish it were as you say. Effectively, at least a facebook
| account was needed at two of the universities I was at. I've
| also seen instances of important (even life threatening)
| information being transmitted via social networks,
| exclusively. So yes, sometimes you pretty much have to be
| part of that game.
| d1zzy wrote:
| Computers are just a tool, they're great at processing lots of
| data very fast. That makes certain types of tasks a good fit
| for them. None of the things you mentioned were necessarily
| better before computers, they simply used other methods to do
| the selection. But that doesn't mean those methods were better.
|
| > I'm beginning to think computers were the biggest mistake
| humans ever made. We need regulation and fast against this sort
| of thing, to make the hiring process fair and accessible to
| everyone.
|
| It was never fair and accessible to everyone (for those
| companies that would employ algorithm based resume screening).
| Just that instead of whatever other arbitrary mechanism they
| had used until now to filter out candidates they now use "AI".
|
| It's good to be trying to find better solutions to these
| problems, but don't rile up against computers because computers
| might be part of the solution.
| Jochim wrote:
| In regards to society computers are still a relatively new
| invention. The behaviour we're seeing at the moment will either
| be regulated away or the affected populations will end up as
| neo-serfs, subjects to decision making systems they are allowed
| no control over. The EU is at the forefront of the fight
| against this: people can demand an explanation of algorithmic
| decision making and GDPR prevents organisations from holding
| your data without consent.
|
| Computers are powerful tools and can be put to both
| constructive and destructive purposes. I'm hopeful that at
| least some societies will figure out sensible limitations on
| what use they can be put to.
| JackFr wrote:
| This makes me think of the (most likely apocryphal) story of the
| hiring manager faced with a huge stack of resumes.
|
| He divides the stack in half, and tosses the top half in the
| trash. "We don't want to hire those people. They're terribly
| unlucky."
| acheron wrote:
| Of course if the job sucks, then you're screening for luck the
| wrong way.
| curiousllama wrote:
| You joke but this is actually how most recruiting AI systems
| work
| KineticLensman wrote:
| See 'the secretary problem' [0], which is a more sophisticated
| version of the above. It's a process that can be summarised
| roughly as follows.
|
| Given a pile of CVs
|
| Read approximately 40% of them (actually 1/e, or ~0.368)
|
| Dump that 40%
|
| Select the first candidate that is better than the ones you
| have just dumped
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
| thekyle wrote:
| The secretary problem says that once you pass on a CV you
| cannot go back and latter decide you want that person. I
| don't think that is a restriction that exists in real life
| hiring.
|
| It is possible to review all the CVs and then decide which
| one to pick.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| When I was involved in hiring, we received a steady stream
| of CVs and then had to decide if we want to interview and
| eventually hire or reject a candidate (typically we decided
| right after the interview or programming task).
|
| While there is a short time window in which multiple
| candidates might be evaluated, this approach is pretty
| close to the assumptions of the secretary problem.
| ghaff wrote:
| I assume that's pretty typical. It's certainly my
| experience. We interview someone and have a call and it's
| usually either an enthusiastic yes. Or an OK I guess (or
| just no), in which case we keep looking. I'm not sure I
| can think of a case where we were "I guess they'll meet
| our needs if no one better comes along."
| toast0 wrote:
| > I'm not sure I can think of a case where we were "I
| guess they'll meet our needs if no one better comes
| along."
|
| You may not have been at an organization with a policy
| that unfilled positions after X time get removed. When
| you get close to the end of the time, there's pressure to
| hire someone, even if they're not great, because
| otherwise you'll lose the position.
|
| On the other hand, I have had a case where someone was
| not hired for a position, and then later was asked to
| interview for a different position with the same hiring
| manager, and was hired for that.
| happyconcepts wrote:
| Less harm there in the trash than in the cloud to be used by
| perfect strangers to profile you.
|
| "This will go down in your permanent record" comes to mind.
| lordnacho wrote:
| This is such a common story that a lot of people have actually
| witnessed it. I mean you might as well do that with a stack of
| CVs, so people actually do it. A friend of mine witnessed this,
| and clearly the boss hadn't thought of it himself.
|
| Variations:
|
| "The way we hire traders is we don't hire unlucky ones."
|
| "The most important thing in sales is selling yourself."
|
| Followed by unceremonious dump into bin.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| Frankly, the logistics of hiring make this a reality. I
| remember helping my boss hire interns, and picked a few out.
| Later on, they found out that they weren't able to go to all of
| the schools that they wanted, they could only choose 2. Where
| did all the people from other schools go? Straight in the
| trash. Same deal with hiring full-time employees in my
| experience. Random, usually understandable circumstances
| preclude a huge swath of applicants from even being evaluated.
| And for many places, it doesn't even matter, because they have
| so many candidates that they can't distinguish between them at
| that level. But from a personal POV, it can be disheartening to
| get rejected from job after job if you don't know that like 75%
| of the time it has nothing to do with you.
| ryandrake wrote:
| This is why I always laugh when someone trots out the tired
| "shortage of engineers" excuse about why they can't seem to
| hire. For any tech job posting, the employer needs a super-
| aggressive filter just to get the list of applicants down to
| some manageable double-digit count, and this filter is not
| always going to be nice or fair unfortunately.
| sgerenser wrote:
| The current large tech company I work for had a recruiter
| posting messages on LinkedIn like "we're hiring like crazy in
| <my town> for people with <my background>!" I had already
| applied on their careers site and got no response. Messaged
| this recruiter and got no response. Applied again to a
| similar position maybe 2 months later, got a response, got an
| interview, and now I'm working there. Guess my point is
| there's clearly a lot of randomness in the screening process.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Any application process is mostly luck after you meet a
| certain threshold IMO.
| beckingz wrote:
| They're also mostly luck until you meet a certain
| threshold.
|
| Therefore, they're mostly luck.
| BerislavLopac wrote:
| I've read once of a company who fired everyone who had below
| average performance score.
| BerislavLopac wrote:
| Oh yes, and I know of at least one country that is
| considering setting the minimum salary as a percentage of the
| average salary...
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Just think, in only a couple of years everyone will be a
| millionaire
| technofiend wrote:
| It's more typical to fire the bottom 10% but that's
| derisively called rank and yank. Microsoft, HP and others
| have allegedly used it at one time or another. The assumption
| is if you do your job well you'll rank well. The reality is
| your job becomes ensuring you rank well, which may not 100%
| align with doing the job you were hired for well.
| kstrauser wrote:
| It also neglects that you'll always have a bottom 10%, even
| if those people are absolutely amazing: hire 10 Harvard
| PhDs and one of them will be at the bottom.
|
| I can't believe stack ranking ever caught on.
| technofiend wrote:
| Yeah defenders of the institution hand wave and say well
| once you get enough people in the mix, the math works
| out. I'm skeptical when you're asked to force rank people
| into a bell curve no matter how small the population.
| People who are on the bottom due to forcing it into a
| curve tend to stay there or near there.
|
| Your bottom-most Harvard PhD is unlikely to find himself
| in the top 10% when mixed into a general population
| because other human factors come into play, not the least
| of which is it's incredibly time consuming to review and
| re-rank every person. So managers tend to leave people
| where they landed because fatigue eventually sets in.
|
| This in turn inspires other behaviors that are not really
| what the designer envisioned. For example one manager
| used to carry around a book of every mistake _other_
| teams made: if anyone challenged the ranking of one of
| his employees he 'd start firing off potshots at the
| other manager's org. Needless to say his rankings were
| left alone. The irony is not lost on me that this manager
| eventually left to start a company that allegedly uses AI
| somehow to help people identify the best candidates. He
| spent his days subverting a system meant to measure
| employee performance and now claims expertise in finding
| the best performing employees.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, I guess the joke works perfectly well for 10% too.
| The company will just live for a bit longer.
|
| The fact that the practice is immediately visible as stupid
| does not stop real companies from adopting it.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| "We're the best, because we fire the worst!"
| srswtf123 wrote:
| I personally worked at a place that stack-ranked all their
| employees then cut the bottom 1/3 of performers. I was on a
| team of two, with the other guy a 15-year veteran.
|
| Guess who didn't make it past the first year? Guess who also
| fixed more outstanding issues in that year than had been
| fixed in decades? Yep, me, the guy who failed the stack
| rankings and got fired.
|
| I've worked dumber places, but really that one was a bit
| much.
| jimbokun wrote:
| GE?
| moritonal wrote:
| This always annoyed me, because it's almost certain those
| candidates were in some kind of order.
|
| It'd be either based on the file-name when they were all
| printed, or the order they came in, or based on some weird
| method the printer uses, but they'd be some implicit order.
|
| So the candiates were unlucky, it's just the hiring manager
| couldn't be bothered to think about the biases... oddly
| relevant when talking about managers out-sourcing their
| racism/classism/agism/sexism/elitism/whateverism to AI.
| motohagiography wrote:
| The value provided by this "AI" solution is that it diffuses
| accountability for a decision away from any individual making a
| hiring decision. Would it be ethical if it were used to operate a
| food rationing system, or maybe a vaccine rationing system, and
| at what point does the level of plenty make it acceptable? I
| could convolve or convolute any scheme to make the attribute I
| was selecting for seem "random" and then refuse to acknowledge
| the views of anyone who couldn't explain gradient descent as
| well. There may be a general principle here where if you are
| mediated by machines, you cease to be a person and just represent
| a sample in a set of samples, and hiring processes like this
| indicate an economically inferior-good kind of employer that
| people select away from as soon as they can afford to.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| What responsibility is there to diffuse? There is no obligation
| to form a relationship. Internal ass-covering maybe? But really
| that would just shift to whomever decided upon the AI system -
| if they had a system that just rolled a die and picked a resume
| by index their bosses would not be pleased.
|
| While there is cliche angst about being mediated by machines
| that has existed since bueracracies - but the parts were
| humans. Sadly the bueracracies qualify as an improvement over
| literal fiefdoms.
| hertzrat wrote:
| The obvious connection that we'll see in the news soon is how
| companies will combine this with all the digital tracking and
| profiling being done. Every message somebody sends to a teammate
| in an online game or discord conversation will be a factor in a
| job application result 5-10 years later
| libtorte wrote:
| I find the concept of not being allowed to hire (or not hire)
| whoever you want horrifying.
|
| My life goal is to get my kids to a level where they can afford
| to refuse to take demeaning tests. But if companies want do
| employ them, they should be allowed to do so.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Doing an online application to initiate contact with a potential
| employer is already a strike against the applicant.
|
| The whole point of these systems is to whittle down the pool of
| candidates down to single digits. Of course each candidate is
| going to "perfectly match" the stated faux-objective criteria
| because that's what the users of these systems think they want.
| Whether or not that's what they need is another question
| entirely.
|
| For the jobs where it's possible, it's much better to reach out
| directly to human beings and exercise one's human professional
| network. The best jobs are filled by referral and/or reputation,
| almost always.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Google did a study on what elements of the hiring process
| correlated with good performance and found that references
| we're almost useless.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Google is Google. They hire _VAST_ numbers of people straight
| out of college. It's practically a pipeline for them. I am
| not saying that neglecting referrals from professional
| contacts _doesn 't_ work for Google, but rather that it's
| commonplace and "good enough" for other places.
|
| Moreover, from the point of view of an individual rather than
| the employer's performance metrics, it's generally better to
| make a human connection if you're just talking about the
| chances of getting hired.
| ghaff wrote:
| That's been my experience but it probably does legitimately
| depend. I think there are some people whose skills match sought
| after keywords and they're fine with those positions. If you've
| got a more eclectic (and often more senior with varied types of
| experience), keywords probably don't help much at all.
| decafninja wrote:
| I don't bother with online applications anymore - I don't
| think I've ever had a single experience where doing so didn't
| result in an automated rejection letter or simply no
| response. Seems like a total waste of time.
|
| Applying via human connections (whether it be a friend,
| coworker, or even a recruiter - first or third party) has
| been tremendously more successful.
| OliverGilan wrote:
| About a year and half ago I was applying for a software
| engineering internship at Goldman Sachs and they made me take a
| Pymetrics test. One of the tasks was to press the spacebar as
| many times as possible in 30 seconds. I didn't do the task and
| withdrew my application.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| A finger-tapping test is often used to normalize other kinds of
| response time, essentially to control for uninteresting
| between-person differences in neuro-muscular performance. Was
| there some kind of cognitive control task too, e.g. where they
| ask you to refrain from responding to certain stimuli?
| Typically in something like that you'd have a hard and an easy
| condition, and the difference in average response times between
| those conditions is a proxy for "cognitive control" or
| impulsivity. If an employer were interested in that they'd want
| to remove the effect of finger speed.
|
| I don't think companies should be administering psychometric
| tests. But it doesn't make the task you refused to do
| meaningless.
| [deleted]
| wmil wrote:
| They successfully filtered out one of the applicants who won't
| put up with their bullshit.
|
| It's a pure win on their side.
| NotPavlovsDog wrote:
| This. People think stupid tests and ineffective recruitment
| stand for incompetence. They may actually signify a well-
| tuned process to identify compliant, mediocre individuals
| that don't produce results, stand out, nor are self-
| motivated, but rather aim to please the boss, without
| question, and to "fit in".
|
| As an engineer, you want to increase your value contribution
| to the org and the org should see you the same way. This
| usually means look for software product companies with at
| least some meritocracy. It should be about software all the
| way down.
|
| In any other scenario, it's about something else, usually
| pleasing the boss, you are a servant, and good luck with
| that.
| Clubber wrote:
| >They may actually signify a well-tuned process to identify
| compliant, mediocre individuals that don't produce results,
| stand out, nor are self-motivated, but rather aim to please
| the boss, without question, and to "fit in".
|
| You might be giving them too much credit. I suspect that
| may have been the original intent of the question, but was
| mindlessly aped after appearing in an article by countless
| hiring managers and recruiters.
| NotPavlovsDog wrote:
| It doesn't even have to be conscious. Implementing a
| meaningless test still provides a valid test as far as
| candidate compliance and desire to fit in are concerned.
|
| Merit-driven applicant: This test is not backed by
| science, does not measure anything related to performance
| relevant to the job and is arbitrary. Oh, and did you
| check how do the developers of the test address the
| fundamental problem of lack of replicability and
| reproducibility in psychology?
|
| Hiring (if they can actually articulate and self-reflect,
| a rare occurrence): So you think you're smarter than us?
|
| Subservient applicant: I gave this test 110%, thank you
| for this opportunity! I look forward to learn more about
| how I can contribute to the continued success of [org
| name]!
|
| Speaking to a mediocre manager with a very stable career,
| tt was a revelation for me to hear them say "smart people
| get frustrated quickly. I've learned through the years to
| select those that are agreeable". Value and value
| creation were not on that managers radar.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >"smart people get frustrated quickly. I've learned
| through the years to select those that are agreeable"
|
| That might make sense if you're hiring people to dig
| holes in the ground but seems absurd to use as a filter
| for any sort of skilled professional position.
| glitchc wrote:
| Sounds like 50% of video games in the market. Just pretend it's
| about how high you can jump with infinite jump enabled!
| curiousllama wrote:
| To be fair, I've been training for that task my entire life
| kleiba wrote:
| Good on you, mate.
|
| It would be great if you gave them feedback along the same
| lines, although chances are it would just get ignored.
| kleiba wrote:
| Fun fact: Pymetrics has hired a lot of former C64 game
| programmers.
| Radim wrote:
| Is that a reference to the infamous C64 Summer / Winter
| Games? Where you had to twiddle your joystick as fast as you
| can?
|
| Fascinating that should carry over into the 21st century
| hiring process.
| kleiba wrote:
| Yeah, I might have lied when I wrote "fact"...
| itronitron wrote:
| Also seems biased towards programmers that prefer spaces
| instead of tabs...
| bloqs wrote:
| Bravo. Genuinely well done..
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Cordless drill with a small paddle bit held the right distance
| from the space bar would have aced that test.
|
| Of course there's software tricks you could have used as well.
| nicbou wrote:
| Or a software input device
| site-packages1 wrote:
| Or, presumably, holding the spacebar down and letting the
| repeat function do its thing
| bregma wrote:
| `yes | tr 'y\n' ' ' >/dev/input`
| andrewem wrote:
| There was an arcade game many years ago where that was part of
| the game play, and this "test" could probably be manipulated in
| the same way: " Because the game responded to repeatedly
| pressing the "run" buttons at high frequency, players of the
| arcade version resorted to various tricks such as rapidly
| swiping a coin or ping-pong ball over the buttons, or using a
| metal ruler which was repeated struck such that it would
| vibrate and press the buttons."
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_&_Field_(video_game)
| mohaine wrote:
| There are MANY programable keyboards (and just plain USB
| device controllers). The chances that this can't be gamed are
| zero.
| onion2k wrote:
| Pushing candidates who actually question the requests being
| made to select themselves out of the running sounds like the
| ideal recruitment software for a consulting firm.
| bogwog wrote:
| That sounds like it could be discriminatory against people with
| certain disabilities.
|
| Besides the fact that it's stupid and somewhat embarassing.
| OliverGilan wrote:
| I literally was embarrassed. I didn't want to work for a
| company that selected talent like that.
| aspaceman wrote:
| Yeah I wouldn't feel proud of getting that job.
|
| We had some of those too there'd also be this webcam screen
| thing where you answer vague interpersonal questions as the
| camera looks at you.
| NotPavlovsDog wrote:
| Perhaps you aspired to find a job that rewarded on merit.
| They perhaps aimed to form an orderly line of obedient
| sycophants. The test worked, to the benefit of both
| parties.
| 00deadbeef wrote:
| I just timed myself. 224 times. I wonder what that says about
| me?
| aurbano wrote:
| You have too much free time - not good for our company sorry.
| bregma wrote:
| It says you're going to be buying a new keyboard soon. The
| one you usually use has a worn-out space bar.
| jdmichal wrote:
| Is it bad that my first reaction would be to bind autohotkey to
| spam out space bar events?
| 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote:
| Probably, too try-hard. I think mine would be to press the
| spacebar once. I'd get rejected for not following
| instructions.
| curiousllama wrote:
| I was part of a very in-depth evaluations of both Pymetrics &
| HireVue for a large company recently (2 different evals, among
| others). Some interesting things we observed:
|
| (1) It was not clear to us, with any level of certainty, whether
| either tool did anything more useful than filter out people who
| don't want to take the test / don't trust "AI".
|
| (2) It was not clear to us, with any level of certainty, whether
| (1) was a useful, arbitrary, or counterproductive selection
| criterion for the roles we were hiring for.
|
| (3) It was very clear to us, with a high degree of certainty,
| that both impressed a LOT of the higher ups
|
| (4) It seemed somewhat clear that both were unlikely to get us
| sued (note: this is a high bar). However, HireVue (as of a year
| ago) could not in ANY meaningful way substantiate this claim "AI
| is more impartial than a human interviewer, as it has no bias,"
| and it angers me that they make that claim.
|
| After conducting a bunch of reviews like this (including other
| tools), I concluded that most AI recruiting software is a combo
| of (a) very useful process automation and (b) hocus-pocus,
| magicical, pseudo-AI. I had people telling me they used
| supervised learning because they had a team of supervisors in
| India. I had people telling me they had "Custom AI" when they
| were just calling some random unverified third party API. And I
| OFTEN heard nonsense, unverified claims of "unbiased" AI, as if
| eg training a hiring model using geographical factors won't tell
| you "don't hire non-college-age people from the south side of
| Chicago".
|
| If anyone is looking to use recruiting AI, get a good IO psych
| person and listen to them.
| aspaceman wrote:
| How do you find good psych people? Showing my bias but it's a
| genuine question. I remember in school all the psych and social
| psych folks being total jackoffs in blowoff classes.
|
| How do you find people you can take seriously? Who don't just
| quote psychology today and act like it's insight? Like I know
| the field is professional and has skilled professionals - but
| how do you find them?
| metrics314 wrote:
| For hiring and assessment design look for people with at
| least Master degrees in Industrial Organizational psychology.
| PhD isn't necessary because it's an applied field and there
| aren't many applied PhDs so work experience is more
| important. Most start out in public sector which is much more
| rigorous in their interviewing and defining roles than the
| private sector is. SDSU and SFSU have great programs in CA
| and their professors can connect you to their alumni
| networks. SIOP is the professional organization. IOPredict,
| Biddle, and RocketHire are some consulting firms.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| You don't hire right out of university, but middle-to-senior
| people who have established themselves in academia.
| Balgair wrote:
| Well, first you put out a job ad. Then because the psych
| people are so numerous, you'll be inundated with resumes.
| Since you don't know what to really look for, you decide that
| an AI from some company will help out with that. So you use
| an AI to hire people to get rid of the AI, except in the case
| where you hire people to get rid of the AI, because you don't
| know how to hire those people. ;)
| beckingz wrote:
| So how do you find the right psych person to monitor the
| psych hiring AI?
| curiousllama wrote:
| I actually built an AI to do that for you
| LocalH wrote:
| Who's gonna monitor that AI?
| stuaxo wrote:
| Based on how these things go, it's almost a certainly that this
| will be found to be discriminating in some way that is
| unethical/illegal within the next few years.
| finolex1 wrote:
| The pymetrics test mentioned in the article involves among
| other things, clicking on a balloon till it pops and pressing
| the keyboard as many times as possible in a minute. As much as
| people love to hate on leetcode-style interview programming
| questions, they are at least remotely related to performance on
| the job.
|
| Personally, I've found it to be a good filter in terms of
| deciding where to interview at. Companies that have adopted
| these pop-psychology tests (management consulting companies and
| big banks like BCG, JP Morgan) signal that they've let non-
| technical upper management hold sway over recruiting in
| comparison to tech-centric companies/hedge funds etc. that seem
| to have more rigorous recruiting standards.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| that's the balloon task, it measures willingness to take
| risks in contexts of ambiguity (the chance of it popping is
| not known). the button press task is probably used to
| normalize response time data, since some of the between
| person differences in average response time is due to
| (probably uninteresting) differences in motor-control of the
| neuromuscular system. were there any other tasks like ones
| that asked you to identify the color of the text regardless
| of what the word said (e.g. a blue word "red")?
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| The "willingness to take risks" is probably also
| "willingness to take crap" by an unemployed or
| underemployed person. A gainfully employed person may move
| on when the pseudoscientific video games come up during the
| screening interview. It is a risk to go work for such
| companies.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I think I would dispute the characterization of this as
| pseudo-scientific. The analogue balloon risk task is well
| validated, if in some ways poorly understood. That is,
| while standard economic risk models don't map onto it
| very well, it does correlate fairly substantially with
| real-world risky behaviors (so again, not economic risk
| where there is variance of outcomes, but more like the
| kind of risk taking where there are predictably bad
| outcomes, like trying heroin).
|
| On the other hand, the use of these measures by big corps
| very well might be pseudo-scientific. I generally object
| to psychometrics being applied to prospective employees;
| it feels very dystopian to me. I also know that these
| measures require more subtle interpretation--and caution
| --than you're likely to get from anyone in HR, especially
| when we are talking about making inferences about
| individuals rather than groups of individuals.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| > Personally, I've found it to be a good filter in terms of
| deciding where to interview at
|
| Emphasizing this point for others. This is the best way to
| approach it IMO.
|
| The company should work to impress you as much as you work to
| impress them.
| naravara wrote:
| > The company should work to impress you as much as you
| work to impress them.
|
| This becomes more true the further in your career you go.
| But for entry level positions it's really just a numbers
| game.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Got a call from a recruiter that was looking for an oddly
| specific combination of skills. Me, so it's Company X? He
| was flabbergasted. I gave 3 months notice. I was literally
| the only person in the world with that combination of
| skills. So I asked how much, went to bosses, I'll stay on
| longer if you pay me that rate.
|
| Good money for a few months.
| 2112 wrote:
| I'm curious about what the combination of skills was ?
| treeman79 wrote:
| Obscure mainframe tech and ruby, VB. About 15 years ago.
| Ruthalas wrote:
| I suppose that speaks positively of the recruiter's
| ability to find the right person for the job!
| metrics314 wrote:
| I'm an IO psych at a large tech company that evaluated
| pymetrics against job performance and there was no
| relationship, just near 0 correlations so recommended not using
| them and we don't. These AI tools are not transparent enough in
| explaining their outcomes and lack what we call face validity
| or job relevance. A coding test is at least a good filter at
| the top for entry level roles with large pools because it has
| relevance and false negatives aren't as much of a concern (but
| we test still for disparate impact) otherwise for most roles a
| structured interview is the best option.
| curiousllama wrote:
| This is why tech companies are good. Our output basically
| said "this is entirely indistinguishable from random choice,"
| and we got the response "Great! Can't get sued over
| randomness!"
| kyrieeschaton wrote:
| Even fairly strong correlations break down on restricted
| ranges of inputs. Eg, if you're hiring between 80-90th
| percentile candidates (top ones get better offers, lower ones
| get filtered out), yes, the correlation will get swamped by
| noise; not so much if you are hiring between 0 and 100.
| MikeDelta wrote:
| I read another post about talent. If you use AI in your process
| and try to industrialize your hiring to make it as cheap as
| possible, I think you will be either very, very good at finding
| and fostering talent... or very, very bad.
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