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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

#411

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. None. It should be inconceivable, at a technical company, to hand over that much hiring power to a non-technical person." And yet they often do. Consider that for a moment and wonder why it is so common, especially in technical companies. What I have found over the years is that technical people hire people they think are…

I've seen this happen myself as well, in 3 cases at 2 different companies we wound up firing a person due to those sorts of issues. But in my opinion it should not be (and it was not) a big hassle to fire someone. I've also hired some people I was on the fence about from a personality perspective and have been pleasantly surprised at working with some productive, albeit quirky people.

But, underpinning your story is the blame/cover angle which I completely understand, and would consider an antipattern itself. If a few people screen someone and decide to take a bit of a chance on them from a personality perspective and they don't work out, let them go, learn from it, and move on.

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

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Exactly what I was trying to get across. It's HR's job to come up with general salary trends by seniority, geography and anything else that management wants. It's management's (really the CEO's) job to apply it. Is it a company that want to pay median salaries with lots of benefits? Low base relative to the industry, but lots of bonus and equity? Lots of cash? All these are the CEO's decision, but they shouldn't be t…

This is really not HR's job. HR people are hired for experience with benefits management and bookkeeping; when they try to trend salaries, they inevitably wind up just sourcing extremely dubious data from extremely dubious sites. Most companies would be better off not pretending that HR has any other function than trying to minimize the cost of health insurance to the company.

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

#413
post #350

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…

IBM uses a test called IPAT for hiring. It's more of an IQ test than personality.

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

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you're trying to separate "face to face" performance and put that in the domain of HR, and "technical test" performance and put that in the domain of the technologists, then you're going to have a bad time. That prospective hire who did great on the face to face isn't going to spend part of every work day chatting with HR... Between your technical people and your technical management, there should be enough people…

That's not what I said.

What I'm saying is that putting too much faith in tests isn't just something HR do (I've seen people put far too much faith in technical tests), and that HR having a veto isn't per se a bad thing so long as they exercise it sensibly based on things within their expertise.

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

#415

I once failed a test because I wasn't good at abstract thinking. And they decided to be a good developer, you had to be a good abstract thinker. At that time, the test was already more than 10 years old. I didn't get the job, although I had several references that I was one of the best and also most social and motivated developers they had ever worked with. One of the references also stated that I was really good at…

If you're good at abstract thinking everything is the same. Even being the same is the same as not being the same ;). Really a good skill for software design, as you can build a lot of functionality that looks different on the same base and save a lot of time. Your software will also become easier to maintain and to extend. Thinking "out of the box" is creativity. This isn't the same as abstract thinking, though you…

But then, not getting what abstract thinking is about is probably a good sign that you aren't an abstract thinker?

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

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a case of bad (Too centralized? Too incompetent?) HR, rather than an issue with having an HR department. You get what you pay for with recruiters, and more broadly HR. If you go to the lowest price resource for Java programming, HR or Accounting, expect to pay the price later. But you did the right thing too, which is working around HR to get your name at the top of the stack. There isn't anything ne…

"Too centralized" is exactly my point. An "HR department" is a monolithic unit that operates in its own bubble. It doesn't understand what anyone outside its bubble does. It's an inherently poor vehicle for staffing the rest of the company. The people screening resumés should have some meaningful criteria by which to judge them, and it's just impractical when they spend all their time in administrative-land.

At my prior employer I found that I was 10X more efficient than HR at screening resumes, so I would do it after hours rather than trust them. But... This would be inefficient if I were the CEO. And I've worked in situations where the recruiter had done the jobs that they were recruiting for - now that was efficient!

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

#417
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

remember that MBTIs have no evidence base - they can be helpful in allowing someone to "see" jobs they might be happier in, as they did for me, but they don't necessarily measure anything statistically significant about a personality.

That's arguably backward. The MBTI was developed to help people place into jobs, but it has not proven itself to be a useful indicator of that. Conversely, all it is is a personality measurement. When you analyze the type system, it's actually a fairly decent one. (Probably the best we have today, but that doesn't mean much if you think they're all bad.)

Well, really, how different is it from the Chinese Ground/Fire/Water/Wind personality traits system? You can explain anything with it: Roger is Water with some wind, and B-Con is mostly Fire with some ground mixed in. We need more "ground" people for our team!

What does that tell you that "hey, this team is pretty pie in the sky and chasing ideas that aren't likely to be monitized. Let's get a product manager in here to give some direction!" The latter, I argue is far superior cognitive model, and has the decided advantage of being based on empirical observations. (I know you weren't arguing for MBTI, I just used your post as a launching off point since you mentioned the existence of different systems).

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

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enoug…

This is actually part of the so-called "bogus pipeline." Test-takers are told that the test can detect any attempt to lie, causing them to answer the questions more honestly than they would otherwise. The MMPI does detect inconsistent and unrealistically extreme answers, but it's not quite as foolproof as claimed above.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogus_pipeline

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

#419
post #333
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are you talking about psychology is awesome i am quite interested in the field however HR's use of psychology by just ticking boxes is not correct. I think you should ask yourself some hard questions about psychology. It's true that psychology's current practices are rather unreliable, but it's not obvious how to solve that problem, given the field's subject, the human mind. If the target were the brain, that…

If you're trying to say psychology is not an exact science I agree. You can't use psychology to make exact predictions of how people will behave however the more you learn about psychology the better you get at figuring out people and make a educated guess what motivates them. For instance i find myself using MBTI ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator ) a lot when meeting new people and tailorin…

> If you're trying to say psychology is not an exact science I agree.

It's not a science at all. Sciences make observations, then craft generalizing theories to explain the observations, then test the theories in unrelated contexts, then discard those theories that fail. This is certainly not how psychology works. In psychology, it's commonplace to see a therapy for a disease whose existence hasn't yet been established, or that was brought into being by a secret vote rather than a microscope (as was true during the DSM-5 editorial process).

Am I exaggerating the requirements for real science? Let's perform a thought experiment to see. Let's say we can have science without theories, only with observations, as in modern psychology. Here goes ...

Let's say I'm a doctor and I've created a revolutionary cure for the common cold. My cure is to shake a dried gourd over the cold sufferer until he gets better. The cure might take a week, but it always works. My method is repeatable and perfectly reliable, and I've published my cure in a refereed scientific journal (there are now any number of phony refereed scientific journals). And, because (in this thought experiment) science can get along without defining theories, I'm under no obligation to try to explain my cure, or consider alternative explanations for my breakthrough — I only have to describe it, just like a psychologist.

Because I've cured the common cold, and because I've met all the requirements that psychology recognizes for science, I deserve a Nobel Prize. Yes or no?

Ask yourself what's wrong with this picture, and notice that the same thing is wrong with psychology — all description, no explanation, no established principles on which different psychologists agree, no effort to build consensus, and no unifying theories.

> You can't use psychology to make exact predictions of how people will behave however the more you learn about psychology the better you get at figuring out people and make a educated guess what motivates them.

Only if you're suffering from a bad case of confirmation bias. You need to understand that psychology is undergoing a major upheaval eight now, mostly because of improvements in neuroscience that suggest neuroscience will eventually replace psychology, in the same way that astronomy replaced astrology in the 17th century.

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

#420

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…

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…

Huh. Hewlett-Packard is as BigCorp as BigCorps come, and we don't use psychometric tests -- at least not here in the software division, and not anywhere else that I've ever heard of.
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