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Poor Predictors: Job Interviews Are Useless and Unfair
11–20 of 43 posts
Re: Poor Predictors: Job Interviews Are Useless and Unfair
#12Out of interest, do any companies review the people they have hired 6/12 months later vs how they did on the interview?
Re: Poor Predictors: Job Interviews Are Useless and Unfair
#13Companies invest so much time and resources in screening because the of a suboptimal or unqualified employee is far greater than the benefit of a good employee. A poor fit employee is a major drag.
I think both sides bear responsibility here. If you can't work well with someone you dislike, then _you're_ the one with a gap in your professionalism.
Re: Poor Predictors: Job Interviews Are Useless and Unfair
#14> The task is rendered even more difficult by the fact that most people lie in job interviews. Woah what? Seriously? Back when I was starting my career, I had an acquaintance tell me that "everyone lies" and to feel free to pad my resume, because "everyone does it" and if I didn't do it, then my overall impression will be discounted anyways down to below what my actual capabilities were. I always chalked that up to h…
Seems like an obvious case of "shades of grey" vs a binary thing.
Most people don't blatantly lie and claim they were the CEO of Apple. But does a random mid-level engineer at Apple slightly exaggerate their role on a team during an interview? Subjective, but likely very common.
Plus, many jobs are almost intractable to appropriately assign value to. If you were one of 5 people pitching a deal to a company, and it works, who's to say which person was the key to success? All 5 people might truly believe that they were the reason the deal closed and take credit for it in future interviews.
Re: Poor Predictors: Job Interviews Are Useless and Unfair
#15Companies invest so much time and resources in screening because the of a suboptimal or unqualified employee is far greater than the benefit of a good employee. A poor fit employee is a major drag.
Make a contract with probation time (from 2 weeks to 3 months) and bam, no major drag.
Re: Poor Predictors: Job Interviews Are Useless and Unfair
#16Interviewing is important. That said, I've worked at small companies (4 people) and large ones (30K+ people), and in my experience the overwhelming majority of candidates can be screened effectively by going through their resume with them and asking them simple questions, like:
1. What was the problem you were trying to solve? Why did you solve it this way?
2. If you were the decision maker, why did you choose this technology stack?
3. I see you have a lot of Python/Java/... experience. What do you like and dislike about about Python/Java/...?
No need to get into your hobbies and how you would invert a binary tree. Generally, neither of those are relevant questions.
Unless you're at FAANG and there is a line of amazingly qualified candidates out the door and around the corner, the above will effectively screen for competent software developers, assuming the interviewer is technically competent.
Re: Poor Predictors: Job Interviews Are Useless and Unfair
#17Companies invest so much time and resources in screening because the of a suboptimal or unqualified employee is far greater than the benefit of a good employee. A poor fit employee is a major drag.
Sorry no, that's why you have a trial/probation period even in Europe, ranging from a month to a couple of years when you can fire them without any cause or severance. It's precisely so you can gauge their performance on the job without any risk to the employer. So what's the issue here? But companies are being needlessly pedantic about only wanting to hire "the best of the best" and nothing else will suffice as if t…
This would be great. It's odd to me that we in the US get the worst of both worlds: despite at-will employment laws and almost no employment contracts, it's difficult to get hired because companies are so afraid of bad hires, and companies don't exercise their right to fire people who don't work out.
We hire like it's hard to fire people!
Re: Poor Predictors: Job Interviews Are Useless and Unfair
#18I always hear job interviews are useless but do people really stand by that? If you had an interviewee with a bad interview and one with a good interview, you would feel confident hiring the one with the bad interview? If someone refused to interview, would you hire them because of their refusal like the article recommends? I don't know a single real life person that would consider this a good idea. This seems like a strange virtue signaling if people are going on the internet saying things and then doing the opposite.
Re: Poor Predictors: Job Interviews Are Useless and Unfair
#19Companies invest so much time and resources in screening because the of a suboptimal or unqualified employee is far greater than the benefit of a good employee. A poor fit employee is a major drag.
Sorry no, that's why you have a trial/probation period even in Europe, ranging from a month to a couple of years when you can fire them without any cause or severance. It's precisely so you can gauge their performance on the job without any risk to the employer. So what's the issue here? But companies are being needlessly pedantic about only wanting to hire "the best of the best" and nothing else will suffice as if t…
And in US employment is at-will, no? What exactly is the risk for a company? Rogue employee stealing IP? Any employee can do that already. Can't fire a low performer? We just saw more 300k people in the industry let go in 2022/2023/2024. And at-will, trial period already exist.
If anything the risk is for the employee. But if companies stop trying to be Google and stick to their actual level of prestige, employees wouldn't have to do a multi week/month interviewing marathon just to get a foot in the door, and it balances out, easy to get your foot in another door.
I don't know if it's cargo culting, ego, or what, but non of the hiring practices so many companies carry out make sense. Pick top 10 resumes, spend 2h interviewing each, offer 3 month trial or at-will hire/fire your top pick. Saved you 50-100k in recruiter costs.
Re: Poor Predictors: Job Interviews Are Useless and Unfair
#20Interviewing is important. That said, I've worked at small companies (4 people) and large ones (30K+ people), and in my experience the overwhelming majority of candidates can be screened effectively by going through their resume with them and asking them simple questions, like: 1. What was the problem you were trying to solve? Why did you solve it this way? 2. If you were the decision maker, why did you choose this t…
> No need to get into your hobbies
I know you are trying to be 'one of the good ones' by saying this, but my hobbies are significantly more interesting and reflective of my ability than the work I did collecting a paycheck by appeasing the frontend framework gods for some crapp that is long dead now.
And the people in charge of hiring with this "resume first" mentality will likely keep it that way.
Why does "previous employment" even play into the calculation of how my collaboration will help you achieve your goals?