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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

#421

Post by tptacek »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #405
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. 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…

This sounds good in theory, but in reality HR people are not especially skilled in picking up on the character issues that matter to teams; moreover, when you instruct the HR team that their role in the process is to screen for this kind of stuff, you end up with HR people creating sporadic roadblocks for hiring.

Rayiner is absolutely 100% right about this. The real role of HR people is tax forms and health insurance, and little else.

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

#422

Post by lutusp »

fosap wrote: post #342
lutusp wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe the more rigorous ones should change their titles, not to be associated with standard "psychologists" anymore? I have been recommending that serious students, those who want to avoid the stigma of psychology, enter the field of neuroscience instead. Neuroscience will eventually replace psychiatry and psychology as the preferred approach to treating what we now call "mental illnesses", most of which are actual…

But psychiatry and psychology do not have much in common. Psychiatrists are medicals doctors treating the organ "brain". It's pretty much interchangeable with neuroscience. And before once changes, one should reason very carefully, because they are completely different, and medical school is very hard, while one says that psychology tends to be easy. Also there is not much new about this approach. It's probably as ol…

> But psychiatry and psychology do not have much in common.

Psychiatry and psychology are branches of human psychology -- both rely on the study of human psychology for validation. And if human psychology were a rigorous, empirical science, people wouldn't be able to say, as you just have, the psychiatry and psychology do not have much in common.

Would you say the same thing about cosmology and particle physics? They're very different -- one studies events at the smallest possible scale, the other at the largest possible scale. But no one suggests that they're unrelated to either each other or to their parent field of physics. The reason is they're sciences.

> Psychiatrists are medicals doctors treating the organ "brain".

No, that's false -- you just described the field of neuroscience (except that neuroscience is more a research than a medical field at the moment). Psychiatrists are psychologists with a medical degree, they are not neuroscientists, and they treat the mind, not the brain.

> It's pretty much interchangeable with neuroscience.

Not remotely. Neuroscience studies the brain and nervous system, psychiatry is a branch of psychology that studies the mind.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychiatry

Quote: "Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental disorders."

Note the phrase "mental disorders," i.e. disorders of the mind. Not "brain disorders".

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

#423

Post by RogerL »

meowface wrote: post #409
noir_lord wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be fair, they likely get a lot of applictions, and some portion of those applicants may be mentally ill in some way, possibly on drugs, or may otherwise be truly abysmal employees who don't care about anything. Tests like those can weed out people who clearly shouldn't be considered. They have no place at a serious company hiring for a technical position, though. Usually 10 or so minutes of face-to-face talking is…

Well, that's the thing. I happily stipulate that anyone that doesn't recognize that answering "strongly disagree" to "I think it is okay to steal office supplies" probably will not perform well on the job. Not so much due to the minor stealing issue, but more due to the inability to recognize this answer will never, ever get you hired (this is of course confounded with the people that decided the test and job is BS and they are willfully answering 'wrong').

We were all subjected to a test like this recently here. I'm talking most people have been here 5+ years. And suddenly my boss needs a test like this to figure out that I am introverted, that Bob likes to take charge, and so on??!!?!? Really? Fire that manager, if they are that incompetent. I refused to take the test, and fortunately my boss felt the same way and backed me 100%.

It's outrageous. You've observed my capabilities, you know I am great (or poor, or whatever), and suddenly I have to take a test where I am supposed to tell you if I am lonely, if I make friends, and so on. No. No. No.

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

#424

Post by scott_s »

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.

Is this an accurate description of what you mean by a cognitive ability test? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_Abilities_Test

If so, under which circumstances are they used? For a graphic designer, the natural "test" would be for fellow graphic designers and potential managers to look at an applicant's work samples, or to ask them to produce one. This method directly tests the applicant's ability to do the type of job, although there is no objective metric. You are relying on people's subjective assessment. How do cognitive ability tests compare?

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

#425

Post by RogerL »

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…

Okay, that is the MMPI. That is not evidence that any test that is not the MMPI cannot be gamed. The MMPI (and I disgree with it in so many ways) was researched and tested for decades, and perhaps they can detect lying. Perhaps. I don't buy that any lesser test cannot be easily gamed absent a heck of a lot of experimental evidence for that specific test.

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

#426

Post by pseut »

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…

Think of them this way: they don't test your personality, they test whether you know what the obviously correct answers are for a personality screening test.

Now imagine what must be going through someone's head when they answer "never/strongly disagree" to the question "How often do you try to treat customers and coworkers with respect?" and the tests start to make a little more sense as a screening mechanism.

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

#427

Post by amberes »

amberes wrote: post #415
BetaCygni wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Blah! I just did some abstract reasoning tests and i had an excellent score. Now, the tests on the net might be crap... Bu who says the tests HR uses aren't?

People aren't even able to make a good estimate of how long a project will take, or if it will even get finished. So how can they determine which kind of people are a right fit to work on those projects?

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

#429

Post by jamesli »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #405
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. 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…

Technical people also look for "signals" or "red flags" during interview. They ask themselves questions like, if the candidate is a good fit for the team, if I want to work with him, etc.

HR people are not necessarily better in identifying these "signals". They might emphasize on "signals" that are not a big issue for technical people. Some technical people could be a little quirky. As long as it is not serious, it is not a big deal.

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

#430

Post by bad_user »

rcthompson wrote: post #376
bad_user wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, your girlfriend may have been too immature at that point to realize what the right answers to Unicru were, but it's really obvious what the interviewer wants to hear after getting some life experience with assholes: bend over, don't complain, smile, etc... I never got such a test, but if I did, I would try really hard to score 0% just because fuck you. Funny thing is that the capable guy being exemplified in th…

Ironically, if you did that then the score would probably be accurate.

Well yes, looking at the link above, I'm actually agreeing with many points from the "strong disagreement" list.
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