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You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

talent.works

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Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#191

Post by mszcz »

bluGill wrote: post #63
pc86 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is bad too (in its current state of sophistication) but I still think it's better than having some HR generalist with 6 months on the job and no technical knowledge scanning resumes before anyone who knows what they're doing gets to them. At least if you know your resume will be scanned by a computer before-hand you can optimize for that. It's hard to optimize for a person with no skill-set. The place I've worke…

HR has one other job that you might not realize: make sure that your hiring/interview process is legally fair. You better not interview in such a way to make it impossible for some types of otherwise qualified people to pass (female, black...) while others find it easy (males, white...).

Ha! Often times they do that poorly as well.

My boss at a company I worked for recently wanted to hire a guy that is living in Poland but is self-employed in the UK. The HR said to him, literally, "we can't hire him because we don't know the implications of working with someone incorporated out-of-country". Yeah, not like it was their job to find out. That would be hard, could cut into their water cooler gossip time, no way!

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#192

Post by ska »

AnaniasAnanas wrote: post #81
Blackstone4 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are trying to hire at the moment and most of the resume we've received have been from men.... we'd like to interview some women....one of the good resume from a female is missing their email address.... in my book that would have been an automatic no but...since we need female candidates we tried calling them for an interview...

> since we need female candidates May I ask why? Why does it matter if the candidate is male or female? Why not just hire the most fit candidates regardless of their gender and be done with it?

   Why not just hire the most fit candidates regardless of their gender and be done with it?
Short answer, because you aren't actually capable of identifying them.

Longer: mostly because there is real value in team diversity, and it's almost impossible to remove your decision biases without actively addressing them. So if you identify a potential bias, it's not crazy to try and do something about it and see how that works for you.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#193

Post by neongreen »

scarejunba wrote: post #4

Perhaps companies over-list requirements because everyone knows requirements are not ANDed together. There is a scoring scheme that combines all of these, and the quality of the requirement. And let’s be honest having spent “5 years of Python” at a Google is a different story from having spent “5 years of Python” at an Infosys. To be honest, I’ve never seen a job description that exactly lays out what you’re going to…

> I've never seen

I did that for the company I work at (Wire) and it worked really well! We got 50 Haskellers, some extremely qualified.

A lot of them had commented in how they specifically liked the job ad, so I'll post it here: https://medium.com/@neongreen/wire-is-hiring-a-haskell-devel...

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#194

Post by geezerjay »

alain94040 wrote: post #121
dfxm12 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They wanted a 100% candidate. You sure about that? Maybe they wanted an easy way to tell people no. Maybe that 1/20 requirement was very heavily weighted compared to the other 19. Maybe they didn't really want to hire anyone at all or wanted to hire a specific person, but had to make a job posting for political/legal/policy reasons...

Great point. Having been on both sides of the hiring table, I can tell you that the candidate has no idea what we use to make decisions, because the candidate has no visibility into our internal issues. Most of our decisions (especially to pass) have nothing to do with the candidate. And they have no way to know, so instead they over-analyze their resume or what was said during the interview to try to extract some ki…

> Most of our decisions (especially to pass) have nothing to do with the candidate. And they have no way to know, so instead they over-analyze their resume or what was said during the interview to try to extract some kind of clue. Which is 99% wrong.

I've applied to jobs that required a long and tedious hiring process and in the end unfortunatley I didn't get hired, but I also had nice HR drones contacting me to provide a thorough review of my application.

Regardless of your decision process, if you don't give any feedback to those job seekers you turned down then you are the problem. The reason why candidates overanalyze stuff is because you left a wide gaping hole by providing no feedback.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#195

Post by achompas »

paultopia wrote: post #186

From the "methodology" section of this post: First, we randomly sampled 6,348 applications for 668 different users from TalentWorks. Then we extracted the qualifications from the original job postings and the users’ submitted resumes using proprietary algorithms. Finally, we grouped the results based on qualification match and regressed the interview rate using a Bagging ensemble of Random Forest regressors. This is.…

Very well put, I agree completely. The absence of controls in their model for school, education, experience etc. means we cannot draw definitive conclusions from their analysis.

Another commenter also pointed out the fit curve. Note the wide prediction intervals starting at ~40% and frequency of points across all charts. It's hard to draw conclusions above that cutoff, since outcomes vary significantly and high-matchers are scarce. This may also be a failure of the "proprietary" qualification-extracting algorithms.

Most applicants also seemingly interview at a Weird, weird post. It should be titled "we rarely see > 50% match in job requirements, which either says something about applicants or our proprietary algorithms."

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#196

Post by sushid »

scarejunba wrote: post #148
carlmr wrote: post #47

I've only once ticked of roughly 95% of job requirements. I didn't get the job. They actually cited the 1/20 requirements I didn't fulfill and said they can't hire anybody who doesn't have that. They wanted a 100% candidate. Looking through the list of the things they listed as must haves and that they wanted an internal candidate I showed them it is statistically very unlikely they would even find a better candidate…

Looks to me like a Green Card job. They wanted the job for an internal candidate and so they crafted in a way that only that candidate would meet it. The law requires them to advertise in a public newspaper of record or some such thing. They can only really reject you for lack of qualifications for such a job ad by law so that's probably what happened. If it was open for a while, they probably have a few internal can…

This is 100% it unless the GP commenter had some red flags. This also happens for visa reasons outside of the US.

I know of at least one person at a fairly well known UK company that had to undergo the same waiting process.

Generally if the position is ultra-specific compared to their other postings, it's for someone they have in mind.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#197

Post by monocasa »

jbob2000 wrote: post #160
wil421 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes it isn’t even an HR person. A computer will scan your resume and if you don’t match enough keywords a person won’t even read it.

Here's a life hack: put every keyword possible in white text on the last page of your resume. A human will think it's a blank page, a computer will think you've hit every keyword possible.

I do the same thing, but with the public job description verbatim.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#198

Post by anticensor »

dragonwriter wrote: post #177
anticensor wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does US anti-discrimination law really operate like "you have to serve the protected class whatever the consequences for unprotected ones?" European ones typically require both weak and strong classes be served equally, not in results, but in the manner and the matter.

> Does US anti-discrimination law really operate like "you have to serve the protected class whatever the consequences for unprotected ones?" “Protected class” is something of a misleading piece of legal jargon; “class”, in it, means something closer to “axis of differentiation” than “group”. [0] So, “black” is not a “protected class”, “race” is. (This gets confusing because there is a related concept in Constitution…

> blacks are a suspect class

Non-whites are a suspect class (relevant legal term was colored race).

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#199

Post by wtracy »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #173
mcv wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If HR has no idea what the job means, they also shouldn't be the one selecting candidates and conducting interviews.

HR doesn’t really conduct interviews beyond maybe a quick high level screen. They select candidates, but also only as a high level screen, it’s up to the engineering team to screen more deeply and do interviews.

Of all places, Facebook had a pretty clearly non-technical person screen me over the phone.

Apparently they gave her a list of questions and answers. The questions were structured so that none of the answers were open-ended. ("What is the OSI seven layer model? What is a Unix signal?")

So, yeah, I'm not sure I would call it a real interview, but sometimes HR does get called upon to screen candidates.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#200

Post by sgc »

GhostVII wrote: post #70
sgc wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also need the data on interview to hire rates to make much of it. Companies might just be more willing to interview women despite their lack of apparent qualifications in the name of diversity, but then can't justify the hire. That would seem to be a healthy phenomenon if it were the case.

That would still be discrimination though, just in a way that benefits an underrepresented group. Discrimination isn't always bad, and it is legal to descriminate in hiring if you are doing it for diversity.

It's not going to break the bank if they are not hired otherwise than based on their merits. Paying extra attention to a historically underrepresented class of people is generally considered not only meritorious, but necessary. I agree nobody should be hired without being the best for the job, but if an interviewer has limited time adding a few extra interviews for one group of people is the only practical solution. If it is hugely lopsided that is it's own problem, however the bump seems to be significant but not game changing.
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