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

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

#381

Post by dylangs1030 » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 5:50 PM UTC

asdfdsa1234 wrote: post #362

dylangs1030 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem with psychometric tests is that they're easy to game by answering them with the values the company is almost certainly looking for. You'd think that, but a quality psychometric test can't be gamed if it was developed in-house and is only taken once by the candidate. This particular company might not have had one of those, however. Professional personality tests can't be gamed - you also can't find these…

Can you go into more detail? It's hard to imagine how a test could be devised that wouldn't be gameable by giving answers that would be expected of a person with a normal personality.

It's not particularly difficult to devise a personality exam that way - in the best case scenario, the candidate cannot game the test, and in the worst case scenario, they game it but the proctor is fully aware of the gaming, so you simply reject the test (or the candidate).

Instead of trying to get rid of questions that are gameable, the psychometrists design the test with statistical consistency - things as obscure as, say, what color the candidate answers in a multiple choice question out of orange, yellow, blue and red can be used to correlate with other questions (not literally, but to a candidate it would be equally obscure and seemingly innocuous as a question). If a candidate answers one question in what they perceive to be the societal ideal, this will be exposed in other questions where it's not possible to cross-consistently game the question unless you've read and thoroughly understand a manual of psychology or psychometry.

Tests designed this way allow for a certain amount of "gaming" by candidates before it crosses a statistical threshold, at which point it essentially tells the proctor, "The answers are so inconsistent that the candidate wasn't being honest." and you have to throw out the whole test (which in the context of hiring, means rejecting the candidate).

The reason why this works is because while people will answer "Would you consider yourself hard working?" with "Always" or some other unrealistically gamed superlative, they won't realize that other questions that are seemingly unrelated are highly correlated with that quality - if you answer yes to one and no to another, you probably lied on the transparent one, with high confidence.

Tests like this[1] have been around for so long that they consistently get better, though there are some valid criticisms of them being easier for non-minorities (for a variety of reasons). They are used in clinical and professional contexts, and while the quality personality tests will theoretically be consistent across multiple-test takings (in other words, results are relatively immutable), in practice you should probably avoid giving one individual a lot of exposure to the same exact test twice.

Hope that helps.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Multiphasic_Personali...

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

#382

Post by nknighthb » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 5:50 PM UTC

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…

> their role is to get resumes in front of the real decision makers

I worked for a while for Company A, which was founded by a team that included senior engineers and senior management from larger company B, licensed technology from B, did critical contract work for B, and at one point was supposed to become the primary manufacturer of B's products.

Company A shut down. My resumé went into company B's HR department, never to be heard from again. Eventually I had to pull a string that led to B's senior management. Suddenly an interview process was setup.

I get there, and the first words out of the HR drone's mouth when we sat down, with a deeply confused look on her face, were "What's Company A?". She'd just suffered severe whiplash when a directive from on high had told her that she would be setting up an interview for a candidate she'd ignored. She wasn't new, she'd been there over two years.

Everyone involved in my hiring except her knew what A was, who I was, and why I was there. The interview process was little more than a check for whether I annoyed the hell out of the people I'd have to work with or not. I was being handed to B on a silver platter, a pre-vetted, pre-trained, instantly-productive candidate. The most senior technical person who interviewed me walked into the room, sat down, and said "I really don't have anything to ask you".

If you insist on using recruiters, do not put them in HR. Embed them with the departments they're hiring for, where they might actually learn something about the work the company does and what it needs.

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

#383

Post by bitwize » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 5:56 PM UTC

jackowayed wrote: post #370

rlu wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the sake of argument though, if the point of the test (in OP's case anyways) is to determine culture fit, should it matter what the "right" answer is if the rest of the team got it "wrong"?

Ugh! This comment conveys the all-too-common reality that "cultural fit" is code for "everyone should be like us." To the extent that cultural fit is a defensible hiring criterion, or even a good one, it doesn't mean pure homogeneity. There are a lot of ways where it's obvious that you don't want homogeneity. Take the question above. It may be good for the company if all of the individual contributors like being take…

I had a dream once that I got a job with a San Francisco startup. All of the people there resembled the sort of characters a dimestore novelist would come up with to fit a "hacker" archetype. There was an Asian guy with blue hair and earrings, a girl who was fond of tight-fitting "punky" clothing, etc.

In the dream I left the job because I felt I didn't fit in with them. Thankfully I've managed to get in with more diverse communities of coworkers in real life.

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

#384

Post by RogerL » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 5:57 PM UTC

Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #264

jerf wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We tend to say anyone involved in the process can veto and I'd extend that to HR if they'd shown themselves to add to the process. Work permit issues are entirely a reason to veto and they're better placed to spot that sort of thing that the dev team, similarly issues around references and the like. The issue here isn't with HR per se, it's with a bad HR department overreaching, but personally I'd be just as skeptica…

we tend to say okay, you say that, but any empirical evidence that this leads to better decisions? Especially when, as in this article, the only one saying no is the one unable to judge the person's ability to actually do the job?

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

#385

Post by tyttoo » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 5:59 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…

>Let's see. One of the big ones is "she had a baby." Well, that's something that only a female CEO could do. And she took two weeks of maternity leave for it; no more than many CEOs take for vacation. That entire criticism seems to be "she's a woman"

No, it's "she had a baby". She wasn't criticized for being a woman, but for the choice she made. Criticizing people for their choices is still acceptable, or is even that off-limits now?

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

#386

Post by dylangs1030 » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 6:00 PM UTC

HelloMcFly wrote: post #363

dylangs1030 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem with psychometric tests is that they're easy to game by answering them with the values the company is almost certainly looking for. You'd think that, but a quality psychometric test can't be gamed if it was developed in-house and is only taken once by the candidate. This particular company might not have had one of those, however. Professional personality tests can't be gamed - you also can't find these…

Often, at least in the work contexts, it doesn't matter if they can be gamed. Validity testing is done with the effects of gaming built-in, and there is some evidence that gaming has relations with performance benefits. A acquaintance of mine is finishing his dissertation on faking on personality and integrity tests, so I'll know more on that soon.

Yes, but in that context gaming is known and accounted for. My definition of gaming was manipulation without the proctor or evaluation showing any statistically significant deviation, which is virtually impossible on modern personality tests. The "gaming" becomes transparent and used to score the candidate, if it's present at all.

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

#387

Post by noir_lord » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 6:02 PM UTC

HelloMcFly wrote: post #329

scott_s wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> cognitive ability testing (which is always the best predictor, but tends to show racial bias).

I'm intrigued, is the "bias" because the test is unfair to one racial or more racial sub-groups or because the test is "fair" and that is how they actually perform or is it a language thing.

I do reasonably well on standardised IQ tests but I suspect if I did a German one I might struggle.

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

#388

Post by noir_lord » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 6:04 PM UTC

eieio wrote: post #364

rlu wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "Big Corp" though? I work at MS and they certainly don't do tests like this - and from my understanding neither does Google, Amazon, Facebook (is fb a "bigcorp"? perhaps not yet..). Dunno about IBM - wouldn't be surprised either way I guess. Perhaps the bigger lesson here is to not do personality tests. With that said, obviously gauging team fit is super important - but you don't need (and should avoid) a tes…

> What is "Big Corp" though? I work at MS and they certainly don't do tests like this - and from my understanding neither does Google, Amazon, Facebook (is fb a "bigcorp"? perhaps not yet..). Dunno about IBM - wouldn't be surprised either way I guess. I'm an Amazon employee and I can confirm that I didn't have to take any kind of personality test when I applied here. I was also encouraged to apply to IBM via a friend…

When I was younger I applied a few places that had those McDonalds type tests, they are so completely trivial to subvert.

The questions basically where a thinly veiled attempt to figure out how pliable and compliant you where.

They should have just had one question "Do you like having a roof over your head?" because lets be honest you don't work those kinds of jobs because you enjoy them.

All this psychometric stuff is just a lot of crap.

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

#389

Post by foobarbazqux » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 6:07 PM UTC

LaGrange wrote: post #355

foobarbazqux wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with psychometric tests is that they're easy to game by answering them with the values the company is almost certainly looking for. Any company issuing a psychometric test is looking for obedience, hard work, discipline, profit orientation, civility, non-threatening creativity, etc. etc. etc. So what you get by discouraging a broad diversity of personalities is a mix of people who actually have those spec…

Actually, spotting and weeding out sociopaths is one of the points. I know that you may believe that you're a good judge of character, but actually a smart sociopath (not the norm, btw) is likely to be able to game you just as easily as the test.

Well, my main objection is to hiring people on the basis of their character, whether it's with a test or not. Assess for whether or not the person can do the job and make you a profit.

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

#390

Post by moocowduckquack » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 6:09 PM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #300

hvs wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are hyperbolic, then you can expect pedantry in return.

If every hyperbole was met with pedantry then nobody would ever go fishing again, and HN would turn into the worst newsgroup you can remember from the 90s.

This would be good for the fish.