Matt Mullenweg advocates audition/tryouts instead of job interviews. https://hbr.org/2014/04/the-ceo-of-automattic-on-holding-aud...
That has to be one of the most employee-hostile hiring strategies I've ever read.
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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
111–120 of 410 posts
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#112How do you know that the person you'll be marrying won't cheat on you and won't leave you in hard times? If you apply the methods we use today for interviews you'll end up with a 50/50 chance at best, a coin toss. Yet why do some marriages last forever (till death do us apart) while others fail miserably or crumble even after 20 years? The search for the global optimum cannot be performed by asking a set of questions…
If you ask someone to predict a coin toss, and use the methods we use today for interviews, you'll end up with a 50/50 chance at best. Yet some people guess the coin toss correctly. It must be some unmeasured "gut" that's doing a good job for those people, right?
There are a huge number of coin tosses to guess when evaluating someone for marriage potential. Maybe less for a job candidate. But the candidate is not the coin being tossed. We're talking about the ability to estimate probabilities for a whole range of stuff that combinedly give us a measure of confidence.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does this work in practice? If there are consistently used questions and specific criteria for assessing responses, can a candidate just learn the likely questions and what constitutes the "right" answer?
This is a good and important question. Also: while I have a lot of respect for people at Google trying to innovate on hiring, make no mistake: Google's heart is in the right place, but they aren't at the forefront of structured hiring, and their hiring processes are notoriously capricious. The reality is that generating good questions for a structured interview is difficult. You can't just pose a programming problem.…
> but they aren't at the forefront of structured hiring,
Is anyone though?
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
This article is critiquing the unstructured get-to-know you interview. It is not critiquing highly structured interviews with clear goals, nor technical challenges, nor references checks or past performance. In your example, how would you structure a series of questions and procedures to limit the risk of marrying someone who will abandon you or cheat on you? I think you can apply good interview process techniques to…
The trouble with this advice is that, while it's accurate if your one and only goal is to predict the likelihood of someone divorcing or cheating on you, it seems profoundly unfair. To examine this "unfairness", let's imagine it at its most extreme: a society in which divorcees are so stigmatized that it's practically impossible to ever re-marry; in which children of divorcees are likewise stigmatized; in which victi…
The other problem is that it assumes that divorce is a bad outcome to be avoided, while a long marriage must be successful and happy; neither are axiomatic.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#115How do you know that the person you'll be marrying won't cheat on you and won't leave you in hard times? If you apply the methods we use today for interviews you'll end up with a 50/50 chance at best, a coin toss. Yet why do some marriages last forever (till death do us apart) while others fail miserably or crumble even after 20 years? The search for the global optimum cannot be performed by asking a set of questions…
> I argue that it cannot be done consciously. It's gut/instinct thing. If you have a mechanical approach, anyone can game the system and get a job because humans can be like chameleons to present themselves as the right candidate, and they can study for the interview.
Not sure why you think people can't game your gut instinct as well. A whole lot of bullshit artists out there, which may or may not be a requisite skill for the job they're applying for.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#116Laszlo Bock (former SVP of People at Google) did a great job summarizing decades of research around structured interviewing in his book 'Work Rules!' For a quick reference, the two defining criteria for a structured interview are: 1.) They use one or several consistent set(s) of questions, and 2.) There are clear criteria for assessing responses That second point is really important. You can't only ask candidates the…
A book conveniently published in the wake of the PR disaster that was their wage fixing scandal.
Nothing about Google's hiring process can be deemed reputable when they'd go so far as to illegally conspire with other tech giants to prevent potential employees from achieving the best possible outcomes for themselves. Maybe things have changed over there, but given the slap on the wrist they got, I'm skeptical.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#117Laszlo Bock (former SVP of People at Google) did a great job summarizing decades of research around structured interviewing in his book 'Work Rules!' For a quick reference, the two defining criteria for a structured interview are: 1.) They use one or several consistent set(s) of questions, and 2.) There are clear criteria for assessing responses That second point is really important. You can't only ask candidates the…
Google is definitely not a benchmark for interviews. From what I experienced, they must have a huge rate on false negatives. You can only afford this if you're Google (or that level).
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#118How do you know that the person you'll be marrying won't cheat on you and won't leave you in hard times? If you apply the methods we use today for interviews you'll end up with a 50/50 chance at best, a coin toss. Yet why do some marriages last forever (till death do us apart) while others fail miserably or crumble even after 20 years? The search for the global optimum cannot be performed by asking a set of questions…
i see some faulty reasoning there. humans have billions of years of evolution in them that contributes to their mate selection instinct. Notice that monkeys and birds also have good mate selection, it isn't a big-brained thing. Not sure how that has anything to do with selecting good engineers.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
That has to be one of the most employee-hostile hiring strategies I've ever read.
You're pretty much limited to hiring either only the jobless or someone with the ability to work two jobs at once for an extended period of time while you hold your tryout. There are a lot of people who can't devote that kind of time to a second job (some candidates burn a week's vacation!) And it's not some mere formality, according to their stats they hire about a third of the people they try out.
I presume they only hire about a third of the people who try out for the same reasons you mention; the only candidates are the jobless or people willing to screw their current employer and moonlight while "working from home".
Sounds like a recipe for a bunch of bad candidates.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#120Laszlo Bock (former SVP of People at Google) did a great job summarizing decades of research around structured interviewing in his book 'Work Rules!' For a quick reference, the two defining criteria for a structured interview are: 1.) They use one or several consistent set(s) of questions, and 2.) There are clear criteria for assessing responses That second point is really important. You can't only ask candidates the…
It ensures consistency, but how do you know that whatever you're measuring for is actually correlated with job performance?