5 ms·

I think there's an inherent collective bias against making interviewing and hiring easier because that would make the hiring market more liquid, meaning their b

I think there's an inherent collective bias against making interviewing and hiring easier because that would make the hiring market more liquid, meaning their best people will be able to more easily find jobs elsewhere.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
Not really - what you describe is a prisoners dilemma. If it gets me good people to defect (make my hiring easier), I win. The world won't copy me so once I hire people, I can still keep them. I don't do this because I don't think I'll get good people.
- vinceguidry 10y ago
  I said the bias was collective, not individual. Individual Germans may not have thought of themselves as particularly bigoted against Jews, but that didn't stop them from participating in regimes that marginalized them. Most of the people fighting against slavery owned slaves. Jim Crow persisted well into the sixties and it's probable that many of the people against slavery would have been for Jim Crow. It's very possible for the hiring market to be biased against liquidity even when everyone wishes it were easier to hire.
  - bitexploder 10y ago
    I replied to you elsewhere but I did just remember that Google / Apple poaching deal. That isn't even a bias, but outright manipulation at a massive scale that hurt the market more than any bias probably could. I am just wondering where in the hierarchy things like this go vs. subtler market forces you are theorizing.
    - vinceguidry 10y ago
      Well, things evolve over time. Market manipulation would be slavery, while bias is just Jim Crow. The whole world is operating under a biased, ugly regime, it just gets better little by little over time.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    The market is made up of individuals acting in their own self interest. Why would any individual not make hiring easier if they thought they could gain from it? Note that Jim Crow/Davis Bacon/etc was a legal regime, a "must discriminate" set of laws to prevent people from acting in their own self interest. What such mechanism exists today preventing me from acting in my own interest?
bitexploder 10y ago
Speaking as a business owner actively hiring... the cost of a mishire is huge. It is difficult to understate mishire costs. This means you have to simply spend a lot of time with candidates. Even then you have a narrow window of time, relative to how long the business and employee have to live with one another, to figure out if it is a match. This means you will say no to a lot of people after investing significant time and effort into them (and them into your business). We owe it to our teams to hire well. If that means making it harder, so be it. Think about if it is easier for the wrong people to slip in under the radar. It can wreck culture and team quick. Most teams and businesses dont spend enough time. In Work Rules (Bock) they found the first four long interviews they did helped a lot at Google. After that interviews added one percent accuracy in judging a hire. It is a hard problem and I think the first and foremost goal in any hiring process that is well developed aims to make good hires the #1 priority. I won't discount your theory of a bias, but I think it is a small influencer if it exists.
- vinceguidry 10y ago
  In my experience, hiring is the most political act a company does, meaning individual goals very often take priority over company goals. Well above avoiding mishires, loyalty concerns are paramount in every organization I've worked for. You'd think that they'd treat hiring as the quintessential bet-the-company decision, and operate accordingly, but this simply doesn't happen. Leadership creates policies and procedures designed to introduce opacity in the process with the ostensible goal of avoiding mishires, but the real goal of preserving power.
  - bitexploder 10y ago
    Agree. The best thing a business can do is standardize their hiring practices to weed out intentional and unintentional bias and politics. It is hard, though, but possible. Guess that is why I love working in a small business. We keep it transparent and real. We just want to hack things and work with good people.
- sokoloff 10y ago
  > the cost of a mishire is huge. Absolutely agree and I'll add that you're shopping in a market for lemons. There are multiple adverse selection criteria against the pool of job seekers. (Excellent engineers are more likely to be retained/less likely to be fired. Excellent engineers are more likely to receive an offer when they do interview. Poor engineers are less likely to be retained, more likely to be fired, less likely to be hired.) In steady state, the applicant pool is of lower overall average quality than the pool of employed engineers.

yummyfajitas 10y ago

Not really - what you describe is a prisoners dilemma. If it gets me good people to defect (make my hiring easier), I win. The world won't copy me so once I hire people, I can still keep them. I don't do this because I don't think I'll get good people.

vinceguidry 10y ago
I said the bias was collective, not individual. Individual Germans may not have thought of themselves as particularly bigoted against Jews, but that didn't stop them from participating in regimes that marginalized them. Most of the people fighting against slavery owned slaves. Jim Crow persisted well into the sixties and it's probable that many of the people against slavery would have been for Jim Crow. It's very possible for the hiring market to be biased against liquidity even when everyone wishes it were easier to hire.
- bitexploder 10y ago
  I replied to you elsewhere but I did just remember that Google / Apple poaching deal. That isn't even a bias, but outright manipulation at a massive scale that hurt the market more than any bias probably could. I am just wondering where in the hierarchy things like this go vs. subtler market forces you are theorizing.
  - vinceguidry 10y ago
    Well, things evolve over time. Market manipulation would be slavery, while bias is just Jim Crow. The whole world is operating under a biased, ugly regime, it just gets better little by little over time.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  The market is made up of individuals acting in their own self interest. Why would any individual not make hiring easier if they thought they could gain from it? Note that Jim Crow/Davis Bacon/etc was a legal regime, a "must discriminate" set of laws to prevent people from acting in their own self interest. What such mechanism exists today preventing me from acting in my own interest?

bitexploder 10y ago

Speaking as a business owner actively hiring... the cost of a mishire is huge. It is difficult to understate mishire costs. This means you have to simply spend a lot of time with candidates. Even then you have a narrow window of time, relative to how long the business and employee have to live with one another, to figure out if it is a match. This means you will say no to a lot of people after investing significant time and effort into them (and them into your business). We owe it to our teams to hire well. If that means making it harder, so be it. Think about if it is easier for the wrong people to slip in under the radar. It can wreck culture and team quick. Most teams and businesses dont spend enough time. In Work Rules (Bock) they found the first four long interviews they did helped a lot at Google. After that interviews added one percent accuracy in judging a hire. It is a hard problem and I think the first and foremost goal in any hiring process that is well developed aims to make good hires the #1 priority. I won't discount your theory of a bias, but I think it is a small influencer if it exists.

vinceguidry 10y ago
In my experience, hiring is the most political act a company does, meaning individual goals very often take priority over company goals. Well above avoiding mishires, loyalty concerns are paramount in every organization I've worked for. You'd think that they'd treat hiring as the quintessential bet-the-company decision, and operate accordingly, but this simply doesn't happen. Leadership creates policies and procedures designed to introduce opacity in the process with the ostensible goal of avoiding mishires, but the real goal of preserving power.
- bitexploder 10y ago
  Agree. The best thing a business can do is standardize their hiring practices to weed out intentional and unintentional bias and politics. It is hard, though, but possible. Guess that is why I love working in a small business. We keep it transparent and real. We just want to hack things and work with good people.
sokoloff 10y ago
> the cost of a mishire is huge. Absolutely agree and I'll add that you're shopping in a market for lemons. There are multiple adverse selection criteria against the pool of job seekers. (Excellent engineers are more likely to be retained/less likely to be fired. Excellent engineers are more likely to receive an offer when they do interview. Poor engineers are less likely to be retained, more likely to be fired, less likely to be hired.) In steady state, the applicant pool is of lower overall average quality than the pool of employed engineers.