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The computers rejecting job applications

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191–200 of 261 posts

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#191
post #49

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 proce…

I paid someone $250 to get my resume past ATS systems, it worked.

Care to share the service/company?

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#192

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…

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.

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#193
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.

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#194
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."

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 preclud…

Choosing two schools and then saying the process is random seems disingenuous.

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#196
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: Pymetrics has hired a lot of former C64 game programmers.

Also seems biased towards programmers that prefer spaces instead of tabs...

Are they programming in Python?

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#tabs-or-spaces

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#197

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.

If the ranking system is accurate (that's a huge "if"), then it doesn't really matter what the bottom x% look like on paper.

The question is whether it's ever possible to devise an accurate measure of value quantitatively. Even if your job is press the red button, a person with low numbers might be such an inspiration to the team that everyone else works 15% faster, more than making up for their shortcoming. And you can't possibly anticipate all such factors in advance.

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#198

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.

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 b…

> But it doesn't make the task you refused to do meaningless

Did they say it was? I'd withdraw my application too. There's no good reason for it, just bad reasons that they think are good.

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#199
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."

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

Many hiring managers read your CV for the first time during the interview.

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#200
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."

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 preclud…

There are resumes you're going to see today that are a terrible fit, but might be exactly what you're looking for in three years. It matters how you go about rejecting those people. Charity is contagious, so is indifference. Disdain, on the other hand, is virulent.

You don't want people to delight in the prospect of working with one of your competitors. That's far, far worse than just missing out on hiring them and never getting a second shot.

There is also, I think, a false economy in having one person talk to an individual on their own. There is no one to see how that interaction goes. If I were in a protected class, you've also created a liability for yourself by having nobody to corroborate an exchange.

We are trying to make an inherently expensive process cheap and we are breaking everything in the process. We didn't fix deployments by doing fewer of them. Why do we think we're going to fix the onboarding process by avoidance? Finding and training people is part of building a team, which is necessary to build a product. If you have a bunch of people pushing back on the obvious parts, they're probably pushing back on the rest of it too, making little empires for themselves at the expense of their peers, the product, and the company.

We used to use referrals instead of cattle calls to fix this problem, but we don't like the kinds of hiring biases this brings in and so we threw the baby out with the bathwater. Now we have all of the worst, dehumanizing attributes of a lottery system, and not really many benefits from doing so.

Probably what we are all not learning from this decades long experiment is that if you haven't solved your diversity problem before you are famous enough to have an embarrassment of riches in your inbox, then you never will. Everything that comes after is a series of rear-guard actions trying to replace bad decisions with less bad ones, failing as often as succeeding, and justifying your arbitrary decisions as more merciful than the alternative, when in fact you mean more merciful for yourself.

Right now, for instance, I've been keeping my eye on José Valim (Elixir), because I have a suspicion that his team may have cracked that nut already, or soon will.

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