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I had a math teacher in middle school that put it pretty well: if you have two candidates that are equally qualified, but one knows calculus and the other doesn

I had a math teacher in middle school that put it pretty well: if you have two candidates that are equally qualified, but one knows calculus and the other doesn’t, you may as well go with the one that knows calculus. From a hiring perspective, it cuts down the size of your candidate pool. Interviewing is expensive, so it’s better to choose from 5 people instead of 30. From a personal perspective, I don’t want to work with you if you don’t know how to use a hashmap. There’s a difference between filtering duplicates efficiently and validating a binary tree, so it does it some injustice to lump it all together as irrelevant algorithms testing.

Jach 9y ago
I'm very careful inferring information I didn't actually test for. If the output of my process ranks two people the same, I can't do anything but flip a coin for one and recommend hiring both. I can't go back to their resumes and see "ahh yes, this person knows calculus, might as well go with them." Because the other person might know calculus too but didn't think it relevant to put on the resume. If the process is giving equal outputs to multiple candidates, then you might need to fix it to be more granular. There's plenty of room for subjective criteria, e.g. it shouldn't be hard to have a few ranks on "seems nice to work with" metric and so it shouldn't be hard to have a process where equal outputs are unlikely. On the other hand there's the concept of a journeyman in the craft world, anyone with that level of skill is basically interchangeable for the usual jobs. So you might by design have a test that just outputs "at least journeyman level" or not, and you can just hire the first one you find.
- user5994461 9y ago
  It's impossible to rank two people the same. You will never encounter two people with the same profile, the same experiences in the same domains, who both want to do the same thing next. Well, I suppose if we only look at first year college grad, there is a lot of duplicates.
- johnsonjo 9y ago
  Some people are different and will differentiate candidates by sometimes seemingly unrelated things. I remember hearing a story in my Engineering Communications class that someone was selected for a job over an equally qualified candidate for putting down that they liked to play chess as a hobby. Apparently the person hiring liked chess and thought it stimulated the mind, and I believe they also thought it gave a more human feeling to the candidate.
johnsonjo 9y ago
In operations management there’s two terms that come to my mind that you are describing. These terms are directed towards consumers’ behavior in whether they will buy a product. The first term is ‘Order Qualifier’ this is the minimum possible feature set (of goods services) that a consumer needs in order to purchase your product. The second is ‘Order Winner’ which differentiates a product from another product once the products have qualified, i.e. met the minimum requirements. You could apply the general principle to recruiting. To me the way your teacher described Calculus as something that differiantiates two job candidates that are equally qualified it seems more like an Order Winner, but you then went on to say you should narrow your whole group of candidates by that. You shouldn’t cut down your whole pool of candidates by an Order Winner, but by an Order Qualifier. As an example if you’re hiring web developers they may pass an Order Qualifier if they have necessary web development skills. The Order Winner might be that they have good people skills. That may be backwards depending on what you need gaurenteed more. If you feel they can be trained you can certainly do it the other way around. It all depends on what you feel qualifies them and what differentiates them in the final choice.

Jach 9y ago

I'm very careful inferring information I didn't actually test for. If the output of my process ranks two people the same, I can't do anything but flip a coin for one and recommend hiring both. I can't go back to their resumes and see "ahh yes, this person knows calculus, might as well go with them." Because the other person might know calculus too but didn't think it relevant to put on the resume. If the process is giving equal outputs to multiple candidates, then you might need to fix it to be more granular. There's plenty of room for subjective criteria, e.g. it shouldn't be hard to have a few ranks on "seems nice to work with" metric and so it shouldn't be hard to have a process where equal outputs are unlikely. On the other hand there's the concept of a journeyman in the craft world, anyone with that level of skill is basically interchangeable for the usual jobs. So you might by design have a test that just outputs "at least journeyman level" or not, and you can just hire the first one you find.

user5994461 9y ago
It's impossible to rank two people the same. You will never encounter two people with the same profile, the same experiences in the same domains, who both want to do the same thing next. Well, I suppose if we only look at first year college grad, there is a lot of duplicates.
johnsonjo 9y ago
Some people are different and will differentiate candidates by sometimes seemingly unrelated things. I remember hearing a story in my Engineering Communications class that someone was selected for a job over an equally qualified candidate for putting down that they liked to play chess as a hobby. Apparently the person hiring liked chess and thought it stimulated the mind, and I believe they also thought it gave a more human feeling to the candidate.

johnsonjo 9y ago

In operations management there’s two terms that come to my mind that you are describing. These terms are directed towards consumers’ behavior in whether they will buy a product. The first term is ‘Order Qualifier’ this is the minimum possible feature set (of goods services) that a consumer needs in order to purchase your product. The second is ‘Order Winner’ which differentiates a product from another product once the products have qualified, i.e. met the minimum requirements. You could apply the general principle to recruiting. To me the way your teacher described Calculus as something that differiantiates two job candidates that are equally qualified it seems more like an Order Winner, but you then went on to say you should narrow your whole group of candidates by that. You shouldn’t cut down your whole pool of candidates by an Order Winner, but by an Order Qualifier. As an example if you’re hiring web developers they may pass an Order Qualifier if they have necessary web development skills. The Order Winner might be that they have good people skills. That may be backwards depending on what you need gaurenteed more. If you feel they can be trained you can certainly do it the other way around. It all depends on what you feel qualifies them and what differentiates them in the final choice.