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He got 1%, we can't hire him

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Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#251

Post by tootie »

georgemcbay wrote: post #211

Oh god, I am shocked and horrified to hear that these sorts of tests may now be making their way into the tech industry. I've never encountered one of these personally, but my then-girlfriend who was a recent nursing school graduate looking for her first job ran into them and failed the first few of them. After reading about them online I'm convinced the only way for you to "pass" these tests is to be slightly psycho…

I worked IT at a bank and they administered a test like this (Meyers-Briggs). Not during the hiring process, it was intended to be used by managers to build teams based on personality quadrant. I'm pretty sure the results were ignored though.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#252

Post by mathattack »

potatolicious wrote: post #217
mathattack wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree very much. There are many bad HR people, and many HR people who are given bad direction. It's very hard to imagine a company of over 30 or 40 people surviving without one. Is the CEO supposed to be up on all the HR rules? Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day? Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs? Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens? Chase down back…

I agree that HR serves a role in the company and that they cannot simply be fired, but there are a few points I heavily disagree with: > "Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day?" No, but neither should this be a HR responsibility. HR has no fucking idea how well someone is doing, nor can they be reasonably expected to since they neither work with these employees daily, nor do they have domain kno…

Let's agree to disagree. My view on the small company CEO is that most of their time should be spent on products, customers, fundraising and hiring. Within hiring it's mostly analysis of candidates and selling people on joining the firm. Anything they do that's not one of these things is a distraction.

If they're spending their time on Glassdoor figuring out what DBAs get paid when they could be at a customer the customer suffers. Much more efficient for HR to do it. Much better to let a specialist propose an organization design to get the firm from 10 people to 100. Let the HR person do the research, let the CEO decide. If the CEO is reading all the books on org design instead of being in front of VCs, there won't be funding.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#253

Post by DanielBMarkham »

I had lots of questions after reading this. So why was the test given, if it wasn't used to disqualify people? And who came up with this test idea in the first place anyway? Why was it important?

In general, it's a mistake to substitute technical knowledge for ability to perform. You might be a freaking genius, but one that nobody can get along with. So how well this guy did during his technical evaluation is besides the point. Don't hire people that can't construct normalized data models. End of story.

A much more interesting part of the technical evaluation exercise was seeing how people worked in ad hoc teams. Is being mostly quiet, having difficultly with the language, and prompting other people to ask questions a good thing? Probably not. Is it bad enough to disqualify somebody? Probably not.

The dirty secret about hiring is that there are no right answers. There is no magic thing that once you have it, you automatically are perfect for a job. It's technical chops, it's personality, it's social skills, it's communication skills, and so on.

The best part in the comments looks like more of the membership theory: only hire people that you want on a team, and ignore everything else. Probably works great for small teams. I wonder how that would scale, though.

So I didn't get a lot from this. Wish there was more in it.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#254

Post by jerf »

tootie wrote: post #249
rayiner wrote: post #218

There is absolutely zero reason why HR/recruiting people should have final say on a candidate. None. It should be inconceivable, at a technical company, to hand over that much hiring power to a non-technical person. HR people are valuable in a company. But their role is to get resumes in front of the real decision makers, and to take care of all the stuff like W-2 forms and whatnot nobody wants to deal with, not make…

Well, HR does have final say-so in terms of logistics. Like does the candidate require sponsorship to work in this country, do they have a criminal record, did their reference say they were an asshole, are they asking for more money than we can afford. Even judging personality and communication skills is not outside their expertise. The lesson of this article is to not use personality tests.

You explained why they should have input, not why they should have final say.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#255

Post by ctdonath »

amirmc wrote: post #26

Thought experiment: For those running companies and hiring people. Would you take the time to occasionally run your interview processes over your existing employees? I'm not talking about involving them, I mean actually putting them through it. It would be one way to sanity-check that the process is selecting for the things you want from those coming from outside . As a company grows, the non-technical systems and po…

The author addresses this:

She also told me that if I was re-interviewing at the company then I likely wouldn't get the job based on my psychometric profile, which was actually ironic since I was highly respected in my role and was one of only a handful of people that could convincingly debate technical alternatives with Senior Management.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#256

Post by dudurocha »

I'm a recent hire in a big company ( for brazilian standards, 600+ people). And my boss told me the the HR recommended the other candidate. But my boss already knew me, and actually, he called me direct to the recruitment process. So, our company value the opinion of the manager, it knows that the best managers know which people are best for their spots.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#257

Post by rayiner »

mathattack wrote: post #103
antirez wrote: post #14

Improving a company 101: * Get rid of HR people. * Profit.

I disagree very much. There are many bad HR people, and many HR people who are given bad direction. It's very hard to imagine a company of over 30 or 40 people surviving without one. Is the CEO supposed to be up on all the HR rules? Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day? Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs? Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens? Chase down back…

It depends on how big your company is, but for anything under say 5,000 people:

> Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day?

HR should not be setting compensation. That's a business question and something the business people need to understand and deal with.

> Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs?

Organizational structure is also a business question. It goes directly to what sorts of team structures, etc, are most effective in delivering the company's product.

> Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens?

Not necessarily the CEO, but some technical person should do the initial fit screens.

> Chase down background checks?

This is the sort of thing HR should do.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#258

Post by gnu8 »

6cxs2hd6 wrote: post #239
gnu8 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies should lose discrimination / disability / wrongful termination lawsuits. HR's purpose is to get businesses off the hook for these crimes. Maybe you're thinking about it as an actual or theoretical startup owner, where you don't want to get in trouble. I can understand that. But people are more important than businesses and any business that abuses people deserves to be shut down.

> Companies should lose I don't know how you feel about silly software patents being used to extort money from companies, because trolls know it will be cheaper to settle than to fight. The same thing can and does happen with labor law. Obviously some claims have merit and deserve to be heard by a court and get some reasonable relief. At the same time, just as there are "patent trolls", there are "employment law trol…

I would suggest that the vast majority of employment law disputes are legitimate cases of a human being abused by a business.

In contrast, most software patent disputes are simply businesses extorting other businesses because they can, rather than because they were harmed and deserve to recover damages.

The two are not really the same. Generally speaking, when a company damages a human, it should pay what it owes rather than trying to weasel out of the situation.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#259

Post by ionforce »

Supermighty wrote: post #74
mgkimsal wrote: post #64

"The psychometric test was supposed to produce a "true" reflection of how someone saw themselves, and I was told it couldn't change over time - i.e. whatever it determined was fixed, immutable and infallable." 20 years ago I took the Meyers-Briggs test multiple times (well, once a year for 3 years). My numbers changed a little bit each time - I was fairly strong I and N, but very weak 'T' and 'J', to the point where…

I've taken the Meyers-Briggs several times and tried to answer in a way to get different outcomes. I've answered realistically, speculatively, and hopefully. Each time I got the same result.

There's no way this is possible unless you are selecting different shades of the same category of answer. The overall framework of MBTI is largely binary. To produce different results, all you have to do is choose the complete opposite of answers you chose last time.

"I make lists frequently" is the opposite of "I don't maintain lists at all"

What wouldn't work is substituting "Crowded environments make me tired" with "I like to hang out sometimes, other times alone". The delta isn't wide enough.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#260

Post by badman_ting »

tokenadult wrote: post #224

Wow. The articles about completely idiotic hiring procedures never cease--because the reality of companies using idiotic hiring procedures never ceases--and each new submission is actively discussed here on Hacker News. How to hire good workers is already a solved problem, but most hiring managers don't do even minimal research to find out what best practice is. I'm told that this Hacker News community disfavors repe…

> How to hire good workers is already a solved problem

Oh? I hadn't heard about that.

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