He got 1%, we can't hire him • Hacker News Board

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

#321

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 3:54 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #257

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…

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 wha…

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

I read "out in the market calibrating salaries" as gathering market information which serve as an input for management in making compensation decisions.

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

#322

Post by KeliNorth » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 3:57 PM UTC

lambda wrote: post #312

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…

> There is absolutely zero reason why HR/recruiting people should have final say on a candidate. I can think of one. If they are responsible for doing a criminal background check, and have found serious criminal activity in the prospective employee's past. That's not to say that some prospective hires can't be rehabilitated; but in certain cases, hiring someone with a criminal background is just too much of a risk, a…

I used to work for a pre-employment background screening agencies. It's illegal to reject someone based on any criminal history as long as the person has not lied about their background. Unfortunately, it's not illegal (federally, with the EEOC, each state may have their own differences) to discriminate by personality test.

This is definitely something I saw prevalent in the hiring world: if it isn't outright illegal, use it to prevent someone from being hired. In many cases we had clients that'd tiptoe the line and ask if certain reasons would be valid for rejecting a person, and some HR managers were upset when they learned it was against the law to disallow someone who had admitted their criminal history from being hired. So they found another reason.

There is still a massive amount of hiring discrimination. It's just not the "official" reason anymore since that'd be illegal. That job was soulbreaking.

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

#323

Post by bengrunfeld » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 3:57 PM UTC

Honestly, even technical tests have their limits. Personally, my memory is digital, meaning that I'm rubbish in "sit down and remember 100000 facts about tech" tests, but if you give me time to research a project and put together a solution, it comes out gold. Technical tests do not mirror your working routine, because you have time to discuss, ask advice, and scan Stackoverflow. Poor kid.

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

#324

Post by ajross » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 3:58 PM UTC

tankbot wrote: post #299

Not to be nitpicky, but rather to help: You are using 'me' and 'I' backwards. It's really distracting and made it difficult to get through the beginning of the post to the actual story. The rules are simple: Take Carl out of the sentence. Would you say "Me made myself available"? No. Then why "Carl and me made ourselves available"? Would you say "score extra points with I"? No. Then why "score extra points with Carl…

Amusingly, exactly this characteristic -- being "really distracted" by things like grammar errors, or in general annoyed by other people for minor/nonessential reasons -- would get you dinged like crazy on the test being discussed. It marks you as a non-conformist and "hard to work with".

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

#325

Post by HelloMcFly » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 3:58 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #318

HelloMcFly wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand why you think that way, but there are reasons HR-related folks get involved in these types of things. Note that I cannot speak for this particular company or their processes, but I can speak generally. Properly validated psychometric tests are valid predictors of job performance (by which I mean objectively and factually correlated with actual work performance), and a properly constructed work-relevant t…

> Anyway, there is a reason companies adopt "Big Corp" characteristics as the scale. The primary reason is for legal compliance through standardization of process, and the other is that data is supportive of the validity of objective predictors of job success relative to subjective judgments. I can't speak to your second point, but as to your first point, I should note that law firms themselves definitely do not use…

If they discard the second point, the first point may become less relevant. Companies that choose not to follow evidenced-based hiring practices, instead focusing more on pedigree or a few interviews, may do just fine as long as everyone is treated consistently and their processes don't show observable bias. They do so at their own detriment, but legally they can be OK.

Also worth noting: sometimes less rigorous way is the better way. Developing validated tests doesn't work as well with smaller numbers, and can be expensive. There are also considerations to be made for the selection ratio (candidates selected over candidates applied). The utility isn't always worth it, and I shouldn't make it out to seem so.

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

#326

Post by droithomme » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 4:02 PM UTC

The key to all this is HR refuses to identify the test or what it measures or allow anyone outside HR to examine it or question its empirical validity.

This test is probably not even graded and it's unlikely that it is accepted in psychology, or even heard of.

What is happening is the new hire was the wrong race, so he got "1%". Because he questioned the system, the author then was forced to retake the test and told he failed based on some mysterious new "antiauthoritarian" aspect of this single-dimensioned 0-100 metric not because the test showed that, but because HR is using the test as a prop to make sure the wrong races, looks, and attitudes don't show up on the payroll.

A discrimination lawsuit subpoenaing HR's test and information about its validity and scoring will be extremely instructive in ferreting out what is really going on here.

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

#327

Post by bitwize » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 4:06 PM UTC

It's well known that if you want to get a sales job you must first pass a Unicru test. The way to pass a Unicru test is to answer "strongly agree" to statements your boss would want to hear, and "strongly disagree" to statements he would not. One or two wrong answers get you demoted from "green" to "yellow" on the Unicru. Significantly more than that gets you "red" (no hire). Oh, and "agree" is a wrong answer to a question which should be answered "strongly agree".

The personality type the Unicru test selects for is bizarre and paradoxical; I doubt any living human could have these characteristics without wearing a cap (from The Tripods). You have to be a self-starter but have no mind of your own; you have to take initiative but only on things of which the company approves.

Nice to see this practice trickling into tech. I'd say "welcome to fucking America" except apparently this is in the UK.

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

#328

Post by techdragon » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 4:08 PM UTC

Just read it. Utterly disgusted. If I had more than a few months savings in the bank I probably would have just quit. A company that lets exactly THAT kind of HR person make any decision, has succumbed to the PHBs.

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

#329

Post by HelloMcFly » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 4:09 PM UTC

scott_s wrote: post #320

HelloMcFly wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand why you think that way, but there are reasons HR-related folks get involved in these types of things. Note that I cannot speak for this particular company or their processes, but I can speak generally. Properly validated psychometric tests are valid predictors of job performance (by which I mean objectively and factually correlated with actual work performance), and a properly constructed work-relevant t…

Properly validated psychometric tests are valid predictors of job performance (by which I mean objectively and factually correlated with actual work performance), and a properly constructed work-relevant test will be on the whole will be more valid than subjective judgments from most technical professionals. Do you have any support for this where the employees are both technical and creative? I'm obviously thinking a…

I've been personally involved in validity testing for graphic designers, and while the validity coefficients were reduced they were still of practical significance, and had incremental validity over cognitive ability testing (which is always the best predictor, but tends to show racial bias). I will see if I can find any published research as I've not seen any and am now curious myself.

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

#330

Post by lambda » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 4:10 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #315

lambda wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is absolutely zero reason why HR/recruiting people should have final say on a candidate. I can think of one. If they are responsible for doing a criminal background check, and have found serious criminal activity in the prospective employee's past. That's not to say that some prospective hires can't be rehabilitated; but in certain cases, hiring someone with a criminal background is just too much of a risk, a…

Even in that case, HR can identify the risk paramters (likelihood of risk manifesting, expected cost if it manifests, overall expected cost taking all of that into account, etc.) but they can't weigh the cost against the expected benefits.

There are plenty of cases in which the company just needs to have a policy that it's an unacceptable risk. For instance, if the job involves getting a security clearance, a felony on your background check basically means that you are unfit for the job. Or if you are dealing with highly sensitive financial data, there can just be too much of a risk.

I'm not saying that all HR departments should have such a policy (in fact, in some cases it can be illegal to request criminal background information, at least on the initial application form). But there are some cases in which a policy like that could be necessary and final.