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So I'm going to ask you a basic question: do you believe there is no correlation, a positive correlation, or a negative correlation, between a candidate having

• gnaritas 11y ago
  > What are the averages? It I'm sifting through dozens of resumes for an initial cull, guess what? I'm using heuristics. "Has a degree" is one (of many) of them. You'd have a much better experience if you threw out that heuristic, and also stopped looking at resumes. Resumes are generally packed full of bullshit and lies anyway, ignore them. Create a simple test problem and require candidates to submit code solutions to the problem. That immediately filters out all the bullshitters who can't code because they won't bother applying for a job that demands code as a resume. What you'll be left with is just a few submissions from people who can actually code, and most of the them will be shitty but functional solutions to the problem. A small few will submit great code to your sample problem, you'll see it right away, you hire those people. A computer science degree doesn't tell you anything at all about how well a person can program; computer science and software engineering are quite frankly vastly different things and little if any actual computer science is needed by most software engineers. Filtering by it as a heuristic does nothing positive for you, you're just filtering out a bunch of great programmers; it's a terrible heuristic.
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• dilemma 11y ago
  Before you call someone else's comment useless, consider if yours is any better: You have no evidence supporting your hunch that degreed applicants make better employees, so you're making your most important business decisions based on feels. You have never performed a long-term study or an A/B test of degreed and non-degreed applicants. You run all applicants through a filter that eliminates outliers and produces a mediocre average, before you start looking for people that are above average, able to fit your team. The problem with your hiring process isn't the candidates but that your ties to them are too weak and that there are too many of them, so that you can't put enough time into learning about them. Degrees have nothing to do with it.
• barrkel 11y ago
  I've found CVs contain almost no actionable information beyond an indication of what the candidate is interested in doing, technologically - ten years of Java isn't great, for example. A simple 10 minute coding problem on Codility is a more useful filter - just to see if they can read and write code at all.
• DrJokepu 11y ago
  I have interviewed and hired many people over the years, from all walks of life. I hold a CS degree awarded by rather prestigious British university. In my experience, there is no correlation _whatsoever_ between a candidate's "quality" (although I'm not really sure what that means) and whether they have a degree from a "good institution". As a consequence, the only reason I look at the education section of a candidate's CVs is to see if I can find anything that could help starting a conversation, such as an interesting final year project.
• alexandercrohde 11y ago
  Unfortunately that is not the only question worth asking. Let me turn this question around to help illustrate. Do you think there is a correlation between IQ and candidate quality? Any correlation, positive, negative? Is that the ONLY QUESTION that determines whether IQ test results should be on a resume? The fact of the matter is that sometimes more information causes people to make less accurate judgments. Overweighting of information of small use can lead to worse judgments.