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>Job Candidate Clustering >Basilica lets you easily cluster job candidates by the text of their resumes. A number of additional features for this category are

>Job Candidate Clustering >Basilica lets you easily cluster job candidates by the text of their resumes. A number of additional features for this category are on our roadmap, including a source code embedding that will let you cluster candidates by what kind of code they write. Wonderful! We were in dire need for yet another black-box criteria based on which employers can reject candidates. “We’re sorry to inform you that we choose not to go on with your application. You see, for this position we’re looking for someone with a different embedding.”

varjag 8y ago
"Your CV must have fell between the cracks in multidimensional vector space"
mlucy 8y ago
:P For what it's worth, people are doing job candidate clustering anyway right now. It's just that most people are doing it with keyword search or something. Doing it with embeddings instead would probably increase the quality of the clustering at the cost of some interpretability. (i.e. you wouldn't be able to say "We didn't show your resume to this employer because it didn't contain both the word "Java" and the word "Agile", but maybe that's a good thing). It's sort of a hard philosophical question how much you care about transparency/interpretability vs. quality, especially for socially important tasks like hiring.
- wutbrodo 8y ago
  Right, it's a little absurd to complain about flaws in a potential hiring filter without realizing how incredibly flawed current hiring is, relative to some unrealized ideal.
  - sgt101 8y ago
    Respectfully I disagree, if something is bad then the fact that the other thing might be bad doesn't make it ok. Either be demonstrably better (this isn't) or stop.
    - dantheman 8y ago
      If something doesn't work, sometimes it's better to try something else. Especially when the only way to see if something is better is to try it.
    - wutbrodo 8y ago
      The solution does claim to be better along some axes; your statement would seem to imply that you can't work towards a solution to any problem until all of them are solved. That seems like a recipe for never improving anything, no? It would be like complaining about an agricultural innovation that's projected to reduce starvation, because it doesn't also cure diabetes. I wouldn't want such progress to "just stop" because they're leaving a given problem unsolved.
panarky 8y ago
word2vec: king - man + woman -------- = queen Basilica: resumes of candidates - resumes of employees you fired + resumes of employees you promoted --------------------------------------- = resumes of candidates you should hire
- kvb 8y ago
  word2vec[0]: computer programmer - man + woman --------------------- = homemaker Basilica? [0] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.06520.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.06520.pdf
  - ben_w 8y ago
    One thing I’ve been tempted to research but never had time for myself: can one use that aspect of wording embeddings to automatically detect and quantify prejudice? For example, if you trained only on the corpus of circia 1950 newspapers, would «“man” - “homosexual” ~= “pervert”» or something similar? I remember from my teenage years (as late as the 90s!) that some UK politicians spoke as if they thought like that. I also wonder what biases it could reveal in me which I am currently unaware of… and how hard it may be to accept the error exists or to improve myself once I do. There’s no way I’m flawless, after all.
    - teraflop 8y ago
      > For example, if you trained only on the corpus of circia 1950 newspapers, would «“man” - “homosexual” ~= “pervert”» or something similar? If it did, what conclusion would you be able to draw? As far as I know, there's no theoretical justification for thinking that word vectors are guaranteed to capture meaningful semantic content. Empirically, sometimes they do; other times, the relationships are noise or garbage. I am wholeheartedly in favor of trying to examine one's own biases, but you shouldn't trust an ad-hoc algorithm to be the arbiter of what those biases are.
      - pasabagi 8y ago
        I think there's a further problem that there's never been a shortage of evidence, about things like this. The point is, prejudice and discrimination are not evidence-based in the first place. People who support existing unjust structures are generally strongly motivated to turn a blind eye. Even people who don't support them are - it's simply far easier and more socially advantageous to stop worrying and love the bomb.
dang 8y ago
This breaks the Show HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) as well as the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), which ask you not to post shallow dismissals, especially of others' work. That's particularly important in Show HN threads. We don't want a culture where the reflex is to be a jerk and kick things. That doesn't mean you can't raise concerns. Someone else raised the same concern that you did in a fine way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18348005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18348005. When in doubt, emulate them and ask a simple question.

varjag 8y ago

"Your CV must have fell between the cracks in multidimensional vector space"

mlucy 8y ago

:P For what it's worth, people are doing job candidate clustering anyway right now. It's just that most people are doing it with keyword search or something. Doing it with embeddings instead would probably increase the quality of the clustering at the cost of some interpretability. (i.e. you wouldn't be able to say "We didn't show your resume to this employer because it didn't contain both the word "Java" and the word "Agile", but maybe that's a good thing). It's sort of a hard philosophical question how much you care about transparency/interpretability vs. quality, especially for socially important tasks like hiring.

wutbrodo 8y ago
Right, it's a little absurd to complain about flaws in a potential hiring filter without realizing how incredibly flawed current hiring is, relative to some unrealized ideal.
- sgt101 8y ago
  Respectfully I disagree, if something is bad then the fact that the other thing might be bad doesn't make it ok. Either be demonstrably better (this isn't) or stop.
  - dantheman 8y ago
    If something doesn't work, sometimes it's better to try something else. Especially when the only way to see if something is better is to try it.
  - wutbrodo 8y ago
    The solution does claim to be better along some axes; your statement would seem to imply that you can't work towards a solution to any problem until all of them are solved. That seems like a recipe for never improving anything, no? It would be like complaining about an agricultural innovation that's projected to reduce starvation, because it doesn't also cure diabetes. I wouldn't want such progress to "just stop" because they're leaving a given problem unsolved.

panarky 8y ago

word2vec: king - man + woman -------- = queen Basilica: resumes of candidates - resumes of employees you fired + resumes of employees you promoted --------------------------------------- = resumes of candidates you should hire

kvb 8y ago
word2vec[0]: computer programmer - man + woman --------------------- = homemaker Basilica? [0] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.06520.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.06520.pdf
- ben_w 8y ago
  One thing I’ve been tempted to research but never had time for myself: can one use that aspect of wording embeddings to automatically detect and quantify prejudice? For example, if you trained only on the corpus of circia 1950 newspapers, would «“man” - “homosexual” ~= “pervert”» or something similar? I remember from my teenage years (as late as the 90s!) that some UK politicians spoke as if they thought like that. I also wonder what biases it could reveal in me which I am currently unaware of… and how hard it may be to accept the error exists or to improve myself once I do. There’s no way I’m flawless, after all.
  - teraflop 8y ago
    > For example, if you trained only on the corpus of circia 1950 newspapers, would «“man” - “homosexual” ~= “pervert”» or something similar? If it did, what conclusion would you be able to draw? As far as I know, there's no theoretical justification for thinking that word vectors are guaranteed to capture meaningful semantic content. Empirically, sometimes they do; other times, the relationships are noise or garbage. I am wholeheartedly in favor of trying to examine one's own biases, but you shouldn't trust an ad-hoc algorithm to be the arbiter of what those biases are.
    - pasabagi 8y ago
      I think there's a further problem that there's never been a shortage of evidence, about things like this. The point is, prejudice and discrimination are not evidence-based in the first place. People who support existing unjust structures are generally strongly motivated to turn a blind eye. Even people who don't support them are - it's simply far easier and more socially advantageous to stop worrying and love the bomb.

dang 8y ago

This breaks the Show HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) as well as the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), which ask you not to post shallow dismissals, especially of others' work. That's particularly important in Show HN threads. We don't want a culture where the reflex is to be a jerk and kick things. That doesn't mean you can't raise concerns. Someone else raised the same concern that you did in a fine way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18348005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18348005. When in doubt, emulate them and ask a simple question.