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The computers rejecting job applications

bbc.co.uk

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Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#131

Post by mohaine »

andrewem wrote: post #87
OliverGilan wrote: post #38

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.

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 woul…

There are MANY programable keyboards (and just plain USB device controllers). The chances that this can't be gamed are zero.

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#132

Post by jccalhoun »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #6
underseacables wrote: post #3

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.

>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 havin…

It is also the practice in some Asian countries. I applied for a job at a Japanese university and they wanted a photo.

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#133

Post by curiousllama »

beckingz wrote: post #129
Balgair wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. ;)

So how do you find the right psych person to monitor the psych hiring AI?

I actually built an AI to do that for you

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#134

Post by nicbou »

underseacables wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#135

Post by jimbokun »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #23
JackFr wrote: post #10

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."

I've read once of a company who fired everyone who had below average performance score.

GE?

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#136

Post by acheron »

JackFr wrote: post #10

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."

Of course if the job sucks, then you're screening for luck the wrong way.

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#137

Post by myself248 »

patrickthebold wrote: post #89
dcolkitt wrote: post #36

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 a…

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.

I would title it "Growth opportunities I look forward to exploring", and then yes, absolutely.

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#138

Post by d1zzy »

aboringusername wrote: post #119

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…

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.

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#139

Post by tharkun__ »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #104
patrickthebold wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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.

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#140

Post by technofiend »

kstrauser wrote: post #107
technofiend wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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