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WTF with high school questions?
31–40 of 238 posts
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#32It feels like Canonical does this silly shit so only the truly desperate will apply, and thus take lower compensation. I would of closed the tab pretty quickly.
It's more likely that they had someone junior write these questions and no one senior ever looked it over. This reflects badly on the HR department at Canonical, it's probably not some conspiracy to find desperate people.
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#33A lot of people who have problems with various recruiting techniques seem to assume a universe where nobody is dishonest. You can call for references but in many cultures people do not want to be mean and will say nice things about you even if you were a terrible employee. People will also lie and scheme and it can be difficult to really dig into someone's professional career to know if they are serious and good peop…
That would be a good argument if people were being hired solely on the basis of their responses to these questions. No one's doing that. These are simply filter questions used to decide who to do initial interviews with and need to be discussed in terms of their false positive/negative failures.
False positive: people can lie with no meaningful way to verify.
False negative: you're increasing the funnel drop rate of your recruiting pipeline while simultaneously selecting against more experienced and non-traditional candidates.
Why would you ask this except for cargo culting?
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#34These questions are so silly and miss the point.
I could have been valedictorian, but it doesn't mean anything if I can't work with a team.
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#35Why do recruiters have such trouble with such a simple task like gauging a candidate's real skills? Seriously. Here is how to do it. I'm looking for a React Developer, I ask the following simple questions: 1. Tell my about your contributions to major projects you have been involved in. (if they share their work ask more in-depth questions about it) 2. With $givenTechnologyStack, how do you usually solve state managem…
They aren't engineers. Even engineers rarely solve problems anywhere near the optimal way, due to a million reasons, ranging from political to technical. How do we expect HR and recruiters to optimally solve hiring, a immensely complex problem?
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#36Reminds me of https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 , which a lot of companies still do for irrelevant positions.
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#37Personally, I don't know any awesome engineers who sucked at school. I don't know if any of them would work at Canonical (which has exhausted most of its growth potential by now), though.
Nothing wrong with the question, imho, if you have lots of applicants. I doubt it adversely selects for the job. It drops a lot of legitimately skilled people, but every method does.
For interviewing, it makes sense to budget an amount of time you want to spend on interviews per unit time, an amount of time you're willing to spend per unit hire, and just optimize those metrics. If you're hitting those targets, there's no harm in all sorts of arbitrary selection criteria that don't hit protected categories. They do two things: help you hit the time budgets, and transmit your priorities to candidates.
Personally, I find it hard to be upset about someone else's selection criteria. That's their honest expression of what they care about. It's like people complaining about interview feedback. Why ask if you're going to fight about the answer? It's like that.
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#38Shopify has an initial round with recruiter called "Life Story interview". You basically start from the beginning, talking about your high school experience, what did you like there and what did you study, your childhood hobbies ...
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#39While I agree that questions about High School are dumb, if a candidate answered the question with "this question is irrelevant" in a free-form text field (as they did in the screenshot), I would probably thing twice about hiring the person.
Why? Should a candidate go find their high school certificate to answer an irrelevant question?
I have more respect for someone who credibly says "this specific question isn't worth my time" than someone who meekly does whatever is asked.
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#40I looked at canonical applications before. This is just a taste of it. Each time I looked, the questions made me not apply.
Is this why Ubuntu gets worse every release?