I think most of the problems come from how much money companies spend on HR people's salaries. You can't really expect a good job done when you pay very little for it. It's not that they don't do their best, but they simply can't be better than that.
He got 1%, we can't hire him
551–560 of 594 posts
Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
Software consulting places and body shops (unfortunately the line is increasingly blurry) don't generally do them. There was small software company in Jhb that used to send candidates for invasive IQ and personality tests to a psychologist, but they don't exist anymore. Many big corporates have psychometricians on staff. At least one even has a department dedicated to psychometric testing. There's plenty of demand fo…
"I also wouldn't be surprised if many of the tests contain an element of uncorrected racial/cultural bias, and the psychometric industry has been exploiting the inability of the government to enforce the law (Employment Equity Act), which makes discriminatory testing illegal." Why would the psychometric industry want to exploit such a lack of enforcement by vending a discriminatory test? Do you think their customers…
Perhaps I was unclear. I don't think that they deliberately bias the tests, I do think that they don't rigorously validate the tests to prove that they are non-discriminatory, perhaps because of laziness, or because they lack the statistical know-how.
Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him
#553Earlier quoted context omitted.
Software consulting places and body shops (unfortunately the line is increasingly blurry) don't generally do them. There was small software company in Jhb that used to send candidates for invasive IQ and personality tests to a psychologist, but they don't exist anymore. Many big corporates have psychometricians on staff. At least one even has a department dedicated to psychometric testing. There's plenty of demand fo…
Or just use the Employment Equity Act to discriminate directly if the candidate fits... The Employment Equity Act doesn't make discriminatory testing illegal, it legalizes discrimination.
Section 8 of the Employment Equity Act:
“Psychological testing and other similar assessments of an employee are
prohibited unless the test or assessment being used—
a) has been scientifically shown to be valid and reliable;
b) can be applied fairly to all employees; and
c) is not biased against any employee or group."
Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was interested in applying for a job here in Norway, but it turned out the company had 2-3+ interviews (which would mean spending the day at their offices) over several months, as well as some sort of IQ test and other things. That was in the spring and they expected to have picked out some people by the end of summer. I didn't apply, mostly because I am happy where I am, but also because a 3-5 month interview proc…
> Is this a common practice? Yes. Looks like 3 Interviews, 3-5 months of interview process is pretty normal in Europe. I have applied for a job in Norway as well once. > I can understand if you have another job and end up interviewing somewhere else while working, but if I was without a job I probably wouldn't be able to wait 5 months for someone to decide I've passed their tests. Well there is another common practic…
> you are turned down immediately by a logic "If he couldn't get a job, something must be wrong with him"
It's even worse, even if you freelance most people will assume there is something very wrong with you to the point that they are not turned down, but not even considered for the job.
Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
You basically shift responsibility to HR people (who don't know shit about candidates) and they only hire mediocre bets to avoid blame. That's because they're not sharing wins from stellar candidates but they take blame for bad ones. I wonder why blame shifting seems so central to american way of thinking. You'll give talent away to avoid it.
> I wonder why blame shifting seems so central to american way of thinking. Because blame goes down, and reward goes up, so its a lot more important to make sure that the blame for wrong doesn't get to you than to make sure you get the credit for right, since the reward for right is an "attaboy" where those above you reap the substantive benefits, while the punishment for wrong remains substantive. TL;DR Because capi…
TL;DR Because capitalism, mostly.
This isn't really unique to capitalism - it's just politics and interpersonal competition.
This kind of thing happened in the Soviet Union, it happened in monarchist France (court of Louis XIV), it happened throughout all of human history.
Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 res…
When my mother was doing sociology at Uni I read one of her texts (as you do) and it had an example of an IQ test been flawed, they gave the same test to two different groups of children and found that the poorer (working class as they where grouped in the study) children performed less well consistently.
One of the people looking at the results then looked at the breakdown of questions by group and noticed immediately that questions like "The cup goes on the a) saucer b) floor c) table d) shelf" where consistently "wrong" (correct answer was a) for the poorer group at which point he realised that working class children drink tea from mugs and saucers where a middle class thing.
The story might be apocryphal but its stuck with me since I was 12-13 whenever I run into any kind of standardised testing/results.
Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him
#557Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are three buckets of people you don't want to hire: - helpless - depressed - jerks In my subjective experience: The top one has about %50 shot of being a character flaw, eg, no amount of confidence-building will help. The middle one has the most hope, if the talent potential is significant. The best in the field can be painfully shy as well as depressed. The problem is that depression (not shyness) hurts morale…
Your buckets are quite simplistic and I doubt your company will be successful. First, if this is the states, you are not allowed to discriminate against clinical depression, so (2) will just lead to a lawsuit eventually. As for (1), if they have the skills are they helpless? Jerks are quite deplorable, but its a gradient right? How much jerkiness do you tolerate, or do you want saints?
I agree. I am working with people have these 3 types of characteristics. This 3-type categorization is way too simplistic to describe an individual. I find no problem working with them. People are interesting. They all have some kind of quirks and behavior patterns. It's important to be tolerant and adaptive. But people with strong technical depth is really hard to come by.
Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you spot the person who interviews well, but is a skilled sociopath who will destroy the morale of your team, causing other skilled talent to leave? That's the value of these tests ( when properly applied ): They allow an evaluator to make statistically accurate predictions of specific types of behavior. The key is the two words: statistically and specific. A single composite score will not tell you anything, but…
You can't catch psychopaths using tests like these. The whole point of being a psychopaths is that you can change the perception of your personality at will. So what your letting in is a subgroup of people who pass, and psychopaths.
That isn't actually what psychopathy means.
Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him
#560Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
Good post. These HR tests favor extroversion and obedience. In my experience, brilliant people are highly unlikely to exhibit these traits. I work with a guy who pounds on his desk daily, curses at code, has OCD, walks about aimlessly, is anti-authority, depressed, and is a self-described autistic. In other words, he's the type to score 1%. However, if you have any advanced math problem he can solve it in minutes, wh…
I think that these HR tests basically ensure uniformity of candidates to a certain extent. But if all people in a workplace are of the same nature, if they wear the same clothes (some companies require that too), and if they think in the same manner, a lot of out-of-the-box thinkers would be left out. And it is a law of nature that the higher the variety, the better the yield. I believe that a lot of differently thinking people can generate great ideas by mutual interaction.