The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give

So, what training do you suppose anyone has in interpreting these tests? No one in the hiring loop is a trained psychologist, why would I want you to try to interpret the results of the MMPI or whatever? First of all, and I know the law says differently, but this is medical information. I'm not sharing the MRIs of my back (which you also can't interpret), and I'm not sharing mental health information either.

But, suppose you did have a degree and specialized training in these tests. Do you think such a person can reasonably predict job performance and fit? It's reading tea leaves. The two biggest predictors of on the job performance is first, previous on the job performance and then general intelligence. After that it is all noise. You can go to an office and talk to a shrink for weeks and they still won't really grasp how you think or be able to make predictions about your future. If you dispute that, show me the research.

It's phrenology and biases all wrapped under the blanket of "objectivity".

Example of bias: Test X output Y shows correlation with OTJ performance (really, peer reviewed and all that). Cool! Correlation, not equivalence. Which means at least some portion of the population will do poorly on the test, but great at the job, and vice versa. What are the chances that neurodiverse people are in that category, or women, or blacks in a white culture, or.... And, regardless of that, suppose you are one of the people, in no particular protected or disadvantaged group, that does poorly. Should you never get hired, or get offered lower pay/responsibilities, because you do bad on this standardized test that gets run by so many companies? Is this what we want from society? Even pretending that the person seeing the results of the test in fact has the training and ability to interpret the results. There are cultures where they tend to show up as lying on these tests, but it is a cultural artifact. We know this. And a real medical professional consider the tests as indicative or suggestive - a point from which to start. Are you actually paranoid, or did you have a bad test day, or does your culture value something that pings poorly on the test? You don't know without a lot more investigation. HR is merely going to say "pass". Well, they'll ghost you, but anyway.

I'm sure someone can come up with some good examples of tests (well, maybe not sure, but I'll credit it is possible), but these tests all seem to be someone's hobby horse, promoted because it makes things seem objective and fair (so we don't get sued!), or because it is woo.

I've overstated my case a bit, but cmon. No one interviewing is a doctor, they shouldn't be using tests designed for medical relevance, and we should strive for inclusiveness. Can you code and not insult your interviewer while being questioned? Sounds like a hire to me. Oh, the MMPI says you are on the introverted side, or have issues with depression? Go fuck off, interviewee? I don't want to live in that world.

> High school is relevant for people don't do much after high school.

Odd that Canonical would want such people.

Yes, that's one significant benefit of the written interview.

We had 110,000 applications to Canonical last year, which is a lot to process for a company of 800. We offer a very high-quality remote-first employment experience, with international travel twice a year for up to two weeks so teams can plan, bond and play. That's attractive to a lot of people.

Candidates these days apply for between 5 and 75 roles in a batch, and I'm pretty focused on selecting for people who genuinely care about open source and the role we can play in making it a level playing field with high quality developer and production experiences.

About 30% of the people who are moved to written interview submit them, so it does serve to separate out those who understand our mission and are excited about it, from those who just clicked on our link along with 50 others.

The written interview also helps reduce culture and gender bias in our hiring.

Given that we hire globally we know that the people reading the candidate resume may not have context on the resume norms and expectations in the culture and place that the candidate comes from. We ask them to move any plausible candidate to written interview, and then we generally have the written interview reviewed twice by two separate people, in an anonymized fashion so the reviewer can only assess what's there, with no bias from resume.

Yes, I do want to work with people who are passionate about what we do.

It makes for more interesting meetings, more interesting ideas, more interesting software. I love what I do, and I choose to set things up to maximise the chance that the people around me are equally excited about what impact we could have in the world.

Life is short, the way I want to use it is to help people who contribute to open source - all open source - have the biggest possible impact from their generosity. By making open source easy and cheap to consume and rely on in production, I think we amplify the contributions of others, and I feel very good about that. We also try to innovate on pieces of the landscape, and those are fun too.

But you may be confusing the first step of our hiring process - the written interview - with the whole of the process.

If someone does well on the written interview, which is usually twice-assessed and done so on an anonymous basis, they get additional screening tests and interviews to assess professionalism and experience and competence, which helps us place them in the best part of the company for them. It also helps them learn about us and how we work to make sure that they are making the right choice for the next segment of their career.

In the past I think we over-prioritised passion-for-Linux relative to competence, and we paid a price for that. So now I'm pretty focused on looking for both, and ensuring discipline in the offers we make across the whole company.

Our talent assessment team include several people with Masters and PhD level qualifications in psychometric and behavioural assessment, so that we can provide a rigorous and professional perspective in this regard. Every candidate who gets past early stage interviews meets a dedicated HR professional.