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If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

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Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#231

Post by skybrian »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #188
skybrian wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Google interviewer definitely shouldn't be doing that. Sounds like you got a bad one.

I've had a different one contact me repeatedly every 6 months like clockwork for the last 5 years. Of the ~10 I've had one that listened to WHY I wasn't immediately interested and factored that into his future communications. The rest of them came off exactly as the parent comment to yours described. edit: to clarify what happens, every 6 months it's a new recruiter, and they always ping me multiple times until I res…

To clarify, I meant that the person doing the tech interview shouldn't care what school you went to and definitely shouldn't be throwing shade since that just distorts the evaluation.

The early part of the recruitment process is basically a process to get possibly qualified candidates to interview. What it's good for: if you ever want try interviewing at Google again, you can get an interview. I wouldn't expect anything more from it than that; it's pretty impersonal. :-)

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#232

Post by jroseattle »

moftz wrote: post #181
jroseattle wrote: post #123

When we find a candidate we're interested in pursuing, we ask our recruiting operation to do two things prior to sending us the candidate's resume. 1) Remove the candidate's name/address. Replace with local-to-office = yes|no. Leave phone for screening call. 2) Replace the candidate's education credentials with yes|no on post-HS attendance, and the focus of study. No other information necessary. It's made a huge diff…

Is GPA included? I bombed my first two years at school due to being totally unprepared. I took a semester off and came back to actually do well but the damage was done. I was consistently looked over at nearly every career fair interview. I never put my GPA on my resume and the moment the question would come up, I already knew they weren't going to hire me despite anything else on my resume or what we discussed in th…

No.

We have yet to find a predictive correlation between GPA and performance metrics for our employees and their work.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#233

Post by Consultant32452 »

AgentME wrote: post #220
Consultant32452 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not disagreeing that the situation is bad. I just don't see how adding bias to your recruitment is a solution to the problem. If we had a bunch of women who couldn't get engineering jobs I'd understand, but we seem to have the opposite situation where everyone is competing for a limited resource. If you're proportionate to the pool, you're probably doing well.

Rather than try to counteract the bias with an opposing one on the input pool, the answer can be to try to find new less-biased input pools to draw from.

We have to be careful about using the phrase "less biased" because bias goes both directions. In fact almost all universities go out of their way to get women into their tech programs. I think what you're talking about is trying to find a candidate pool that is more biased towards minorities than average, which is fine, but let's use the correct language.

Generally speaking I do see the lack of diversity in tech as a problem and I applaud people making an effort to rectifying that. Unless the universities the OP was pulling from are really out of synch with the industry I have a hard time understanding why being proportionate is a problem. In fact, it seems like the right place to want to be.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#234

Post by wpietri »

whipoodle wrote: post #117
gonehome wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree - and this is even more true at state schools than the slightly more selective schools (like RPI that I went to). State schools have people that got into MIT, but didn't go for financial reasons or family reasons. Nobody at RPI got into MIT because if they did they would have gone to MIT (maybe some rare exception exists, but this is generally true). School admission is obviously not a perfect indicator of ab…

I didn't even understand the whole world of prestige and specialization among colleges when I was 16 or 17 and trying to pick a school. I didn't know that some schools were where the "good" people go. I just knew I was supposed to go to college, so I visited the local Penn State campus and people said "don't come here". Then I visited another state school and people seemed to like it, so that's where I went. I wonder…

> If you don't have people in your family who went to college you are unlikely to be initiated into all this.

Absolutely. The number 1 reason I'm in tech is that my dad was a programmer. The reason he's in tech is that his dad was high enough up at an insurance company to swing my dad a job back when computers were new and nobody knew what to do with them. And that probably worked out because the generation before that was reasonably well off due to some lucky choices.

But I still grew up with little idea how to play the elite educational game. My family valued learning a great deal, but the jockeying for social advantage was never given much consideration. It's a very specific set of knowledge and skills.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#235

Post by wpietri »

jldugger wrote: post #73
drewg123 wrote: post #37

When I was at Google, I was asked if I wanted to make a recruiting trip to my alma mater. I was excited until I found out they were talking about my grad school where I got my MS, and not UB, a large state school where I got my BS. I told them I'd be happy to take a trip to recruit at UB. I got mostly crickets back from that reply. However, I ended up getting signed up for a series where they had a panel of a few HR…

> They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school Can you really expect any different from a company founded from within the halls of Stanford, and then staffed primarily from there? On the other hand, I bet if you sat down and ran the numbers, recruiting from state schools isn't productive. For better or worse, school selec…

> Can you really expect any different from a company founded from within the halls of Stanford, and then staffed primarily from there?

Yes, I can. The whole point of education is to rise above your biases and intuitions.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#236

Post by untog »

eropple wrote: post #65
drewg123 wrote: post #37

When I was at Google, I was asked if I wanted to make a recruiting trip to my alma mater. I was excited until I found out they were talking about my grad school where I got my MS, and not UB, a large state school where I got my BS. I told them I'd be happy to take a trip to recruit at UB. I got mostly crickets back from that reply. However, I ended up getting signed up for a series where they had a panel of a few HR…

> They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc). Agreed--I was accepted everywhere I applied save one and I ended up going to the University of Maine. I've never hurt for work and I paid off my student loans by the age of 25. Google sniffs around now (aside: rec…

maybe you shouldn't assume I want to talk to you and tell me to sign up for a phone call

Urgh, this a hundred times over. I get a form e-mail every six months or so from a Google recruiter that says something along the lines of "sorry we missed each other! Find a slot in the attached Google Calendar for us to set up a call"

...no. That attitude straight off the bat makes me not want to go anywhere near the process of applying for a job at Google.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#237

Post by wpietri »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #94

I went to a non-top tier undergraduate school. I made efforts--at big companies as well as the one I founded--to recruit from my alma mater . I ended up defaulting to NYU, Harvard and Stanford. Career services at non-top tier schools are shit. Once, as a personal favor, I offered to help a company with a well-known CEO recruit from my state school. When I brought it up with a dean I knew, career services got mad. The…

I happened to chat recently with some people from the startup Handshake:

https://www.joinhandshake.com/

It's founded by 3 graduates of Michigan Tech University, a small but well-regarded school that even other Michiganders think is far north. Their goal is to level the playing field for internships and first jobs.

It was great to meet people so sincere about solving this problem.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#238

Post by nerpderp83 »

ronilan wrote: post #215
guelo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the biases start with the university imagine how deep it goes.

It's hard to imagine, but it can still be concluded, with certainty, that if they start earlier they go deeper.

Google should probably interview my preschool teacher, would be a good predictor of Googleyness.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#239

Post by twic »

stevenwoo wrote: post #182
felipemnoa wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe UB stands for University at Buffalo [1] or more precisely State University of New York at Buffalo. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_at_Buffalo

as someone who grew up in Texas, I was wondering WTF UB meant and how so many people seemed to know what it was. RPI I knew because I they sent me literature while I was in high school 30 years ago.

UB = undefined behaviour

RPI = Rob's Pairing Interview

I understanding wanting to avoid the former, but the latter is pretty good.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#240

Post by lutorm »

fareesh wrote: post #203

As an outsider in another country, my impression seems to be that the quest for diversity seems to have turned into something of a religion in several cultures. In principle, as a solution to the problem I am principally all in favor of anonymous, faceless, no alma mater preference etc. interviews and application processes, and/or whatever other measures are suggested to remove the possibility of bias or unconscious…

The underlying assumption is that, if you average over a large enough population, there should be no underlying consistent difference between subsets selected on gender, race, or class, so a difference of outcome is presumed to be a result of difference of opportunity.

The underlying assumption is definitely an assumption, but it seems like a good zeroth-order assumption to me.

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