Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring

> They manage to screen me out before I have the opportunity to talk about anything computing related

When I was in college about 10 years ago, I was dreaming a company would interview me on actual algorithms, but sadly I rarely had the occasion to do anything above basic coding.

If you want to see clearly what you can do to get hired, the following perspective helped me a lot. From experience, most hiring processes seem to be shaped less by technical signal and more by the interviewer's defensibility strategy in case of a bad hire. What I mean by that should be clearer from the list below:

- informal interview plus experience matching, hires based on how similar candidate prior jobs seem to be for current role - informal interview and vibe check with the team or personality test check if candidate is compliant if senior or charismatic if junior - take-home project with a nominal 1-hour time limit, but an implicit expectation that candidates spend days on it. Since the interviewer cannot verify how long anyone spent, they default to rewarding the most polished submission.

- take-home project with narrow stated requirements, followed by judgment against unstated "best practices" the company follows - CV farm, the company is collecting CVs and has no serious intent to hire - if the interviewer has no skin in the game (is not verified, performance doesn't matter, they're a consultant leaving next month anyway), anything could happen. This is the most dangerous kind of interview because almost anything can happen and it gives you the least actionable data.

- formal interview pipeline, usually found at large corporations or in finance; interviewer has a clearly scoped job and are expected to evaluate one part of the candidate against a rubric, not make a general judgment about overall hireability. Biases will still exist, but they are more constrained because the process uses multiple interviewers, trained evaluators, explicit scoring grids So, interview pipelines can be predictable. It is that you should identify what kind of process you are in as early as possible. If it is experience matching, make your background look obviously adjacent to the role. If it is a take-home, assume polish will count more than the stated time limit. If it is a vibe screen, technical skill may not be the primary variable. If it is a formal pipeline, prepare for the rubric. And if it is a CV farm or a low-accountability interview, do not over-update on the rejection.

In your specific case, I wouldn't overindex on on the intelligence or personality assignment. More probable the CV already got deproritised, but they also sent you the test automatically. The rejection may tell you less about your ability than about the kind of pipeline you were in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

I drew the opposite conclusion from your link: (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits employment tests that are not a 'reasonable measure of job performance'). All an employer would need to say is "We've found that people who can't dots-in-box are bad at cody"

I just dug up the link (https://www.alvalabs.io/hiring-system/assessments/logic-test) to take another look, and sure enough, there's giant text saying "A strong predictor of job performance." Consider HR's arses covered!

They have the nerve to label it is a "logic" test. I bet I'd be the only one on their staff able to write out simple natural deduction proofs.

You have HR which decides to outsource filtering, and then the outsourced company who decides how it's done.

The line managers actually trying to recruit are no where near this decision - indeed they don't share a common manager till you get to the CEO - who is too busy to care about this sort of stuff.

In my experience the only way to fix this is to tell HR that you want the unfiltered CV list and do it yourself. The problem with that is if you work at a large well known company you'll get 100's if not 1000's of applicants for any job you advertise and most applicants don't appear to have even read the job description. So you are committing to a very large amount of work.