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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

#391

Post by hoka »

rlu wrote: post #350
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…

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…

An anecdote, for sure, but a friend of mine just failed a Google interview for not knowing 'Dalvik' was the name of the Android VM, despite knowing it was stack-based and used, among other things, to avoid licensing fees. The non-technical interviewer saw that his answer to the trivia question was wrong, and that concluded the interview.

It's possible that trivia question was the straw that broke the camel's back, but since she wasn't sure whether or not his additional information was correct and/or sufficient, he 'lost out'.

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

#392

Post by KeliNorth »

lambda wrote: post #351
KeliNorth wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's illegal to reject someone based on any criminal history as long as the person has not lied about their background. Source? As far as I know, it's legal, but you have to show a good reason to do so, and finely tailored policies, that aren't simply a broad "we don't hire anyone with a criminal record." There are plenty of cases in which you may, or even may be required by law, not hire someone based on particula…

I was overly broad with that, excuse me. It's much more complicated, but generally you can't exclude someone based on a criminal record alone as you rightly point out, and that's not accounting for other circumstances. So yes, financial will matter (of course, any financial crime means that license will be revoked and that record will be accessible as well), but unrelated crimes are different.

http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/arrest_conviction.cfm

The main reason someone gets rejected from criminal reasons, in my experience, is having an old record that's been cleared or expunged, and then answering "No" when the employment application asks a specific wording of "Have you ever been convicted of a crime?" - The answer would be yes, and a criminal check would reflect something had happened, but that the record has been expunged due to enough time passing for that particular crime. It sounds convoluted, and it is. Not sure it really should, but I only worked in the industry. Whether or not the industry followed the letter of the law is much, much different.

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

#393

Post by jgross206 »

enraged_camel wrote: post #349
JonFish85 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget enforcing dress codes and other such nonsense policies in the "employee handbook." I personally don't have a problem with this. Someone has to be responsible for making sure that the office doesn't look like a sty / homeless shelter. When investors/customers/interviewers stop by, there's a certain level of professionalism that needs to be present. So if there's a rule that people need to wear a top, they…

If I were a business owner and a customer judged me for allowing my employees to wear comfortable clothes around the office, I would not want them as a customer. Same with investors. Why? Because them caring about outward appearances would signal to me that they have a fundamental lack of understanding about what factors are relevant to running a successful business. Don't get me wrong: if an employee is visiting a c…

> Why? Because them caring about outward appearances would signal to me that they have a fundamental lack of understanding about what factors are relevant to running a successful business.

why does it matter to you if your customers understand what factors are relevant to running a business?

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

#394

Post by bentcorner »

dylangs1030 wrote: post #381
asdfdsa1234 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

Can you provide a deeper example? I'm honestly curious - what sort of question is innocuous enough to be answered honestly, yet useful enough to provide information? (i.e., do slackers like the color yellow or something?)

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

#395

Post by [deleted] »

noir_lord wrote: post #388
eieio wrote: post #364

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. 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…

[deleted]

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

#396

Post by HelloMcFly »

noir_lord wrote: post #387
HelloMcFly wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a bit of a mystery, truly, and bias can mean different things (e.g., slope vs. intercept predictive bias). Note also that predictive bias is not the same thing as mean subgroup differences (e.g., mean score differences of White vs. Black candidates).

This is a quick overview of the topic: http://www.siop.org/_Principles/pages31to34.pdf

An interesting thing is that the predictive bias is reduced for open-form response questions vs. select-one tests. It's an indication that there is more at work than just subgroup differences.

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

#397

Post by 6cxs2hd6 »

gnu8 wrote: post #258
6cxs2hd6 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 rat…

I don't have stats on % of frivolous lawsuits for patents vs. employment matters. I'll be generous and stipulate there are fewer bogus employment claims. But it's not 0%.

In the U.S. legal system, you can sue anyone for anything, and it will cost them _something_ to make you go away. It's not hard to come up with _some_ claim that's not obviously absurd enough to get dismissed quickly. There are individuals who realize this --- as well as attorneys who have an economic interest in helping more people realize this.

So again, I grant that many claims have merit. But I don't think you can stipulate that every employee claim is automatically valid, i.e. that every company is automatically guilty of every claim against it. Sometimes companies suck. And sometimes so do employees. It's life.

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

#398

Post by hexagonc »

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…

In regards to the role of HR in hiring a candidate, I think it is a bit more complicated then you make it out to be. The problem is that a candidate won't just exist in isolation on the team he/she was hired to. There needs to be some representative of the rest of the company, outside of his/her project team and managers, to vouch for him/her. After all, this is a person that may be given building access, that will interact with other employees at company events, the cafeteria and the hallways.

I don't know anything about the details of the test in the article, but I can imagine someone doing well in their technical interviews, but failing miserably on company fit. Maybe he (settling on a 'he' in this case) is a brilliant programmer but showed serious misogynistic tendencies when interviewing with a female HR person. Maybe something came out of his HR interview that revealed him to be a borderline psycho who could code well but was a troublemaker. Considering that it is HR that will have to deal with this person in the future if there are complaints against him, I think it is only fair that they set some baseline level of acceptability for candidates.

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

#400

Post by [deleted] »

bitwize wrote: post #336
columbo wrote: post #198

I used to work for a company that writes and administers these tests. This company broke the cardinal rule. #1 - Only give personality tests in their native language. This is unacceptable , a personality test is NOT a language aptitude test. Personality tests will have questions like this: True or False I am happy when others are taking advantage of me. Non-native speakers may not appreciate that "taking advantage" i…

The correct answer, in any case is "True". Employees who object to their bosses taking advantage of them are a liability risk and are automatic no-hires.

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