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Recently I've been thinking about inherent biased towards applicants based on their prior work / educational history, in terms of organizations they have been t

Recently I've been thinking about inherent biased towards applicants based on their prior work / educational history, in terms of organizations they have been to. I get that it acts as a moderate signal of how tenacious and inherently able that applicant might have been in the past if she went to XYZ school or ABC company. But there will be so many false negatives! A lot of folks who probably would be otherwise capable of the job at hand would be dismissed for not having the right pedigree. Also, past performance is not always the best Intuit if future success. And then of course is the issue of how do you even define success, especially in case if university graduates. How does a Yale or Harvard define our measure success for its students... Probably in terms of potential impact they have on the world or how good their names may look on the rolls 10 years down the line. A lot of the issues, especially in terms of job applicators but also applicable in admissions process, ultimately comes down to information and numeric asymmetry between the organisation and the applicant. If there was a way to somehow capture the readings - however brief - for rejection or selection of applicants or a documented scoring methodology, that itself would bring a lot of change. I would love to know if some resources to further explore the alternative models of applicant assessment which does not place as much importance on the past organisations / schools they have been to. Any suggestions would be much appreciated

screaminghawk 8y ago
I completely agree with this. The problem with bias is that it has affected peoples opportunities in the past. This will be reflected in a CV. I'm not sure the inclusion of name / age / etc will solve this problem, so Helsinki might still be on the right track. It feels like the solution is to intentionally introduce a reverse bias towards these candidates. But that idea does sit well... Also interested in any other suggestions here.
- __Joker 8y ago
  Yes, The other information is a job application, at least you can argue that somebody could make a decision based on those information. Whether decision process is just is obviously arguable. If name, age is totally irrelevant to a job, at best it will not be used for selection, while there is much risk that it will be used for discrimination consciously or not.
rb808 8y ago
I agree with the cynicism about choosing based on school. But it does work to some extent. If everyone agrees that XYZ/ABC schools/companies are the best, then rationally students will try hard to get in to those schools. Therefore you can get most of the best by filtering for that history. Sucks if you didn't care about grades when younger but actually turned out smart, but most works. (No I didn't go to a famous school)
- jkaplowitz 8y ago
  That works for some cases, but not where a candidate's parents also went to the same school or where the parents can and do donate a lot to the school. At most of the schools we're discussing, both situations give the student a boost in admission and in passing classes regardless of effort. (Disclosure: I went to a well-known school, but without either of the parental benefits I just described. My parents helped in other more indirect ways throughout my upbringing, but they didn't come from a wealthy or connected family background.)
biztos 8y ago
Even assuming that there is some small enough set of great schools to use them for that signaling as Google traditionally did -- I do not think that's a rational assumption, but that's another discussion -- then at least in the USA you should also know the candidate's parents' financial situation and whether their parents went to the same elite schools. For starters, because it's a lot easier to "get in" if you have no trouble paying for it, and you have your "legacy admissions." If you really think XYZ is that great, you should really want to hire the people who fought to get in, fought to succeed, and did.
ndarwincorn 8y ago
No suggestion, but an anecdote that illustrates a false negative like this.* Stack Overflow's got an Azure SRE spot open, asking for experience with PowerShell DSC and Terraform, among others. The main goal for the role appears to be scaling their enterprise offering. I've worked as both a sysadmin and a dev for years now, and used both to manage sizable deployments in public clouds, both Azure and others, mostly for enterprise software companies. This is a mildly specialized skillset (though getting less specialized by the day), and I figured I'd get at least a screening call. I didn't even make it through the automated resume screening, and if I had to guess it's because I don't have a degree, much less a CS degree. * On the off-chance my employer reads this, this was more of an exploratory application than me actively hunting for other opportunities.
extragood 8y ago
I used to recruit for tech start ups and can confirm that school is just about always the most important thing to get you in the door, particularly early on in your career. It's something that I fought against (I have a technical background and had the advantage of being able to evaluate technical skill somewhat independently), and did well because of it. There were a few candidates that I brought in that I was reprimanded for - physically brought into our partners' office to be told off - only to have that candidate receive multiple job offers from our clients. The partners weren't qualified to really evaluate technical skill, but knew what candidate qualities that a start up is willing to pay a recruiter's fee for. At the end of the day, my candidates were exceptional for having risen above their alma maters' reputations, and the Ivy league grads are more consistently good/qualified. When hiring, time is such an important factor. Many engineering teams are unwilling to take the chance on an a candidate that graduated from unfamiliar school because their hiring process is weak and/or inefficient. Or they waited too long to hire, and need someone "yesterday". At least they're more likely to end up with a good candidate by using the school as the qualifier, even if it costs them more because of the candidate's demand. TL;DR : The 'top' candidates' values are artificially inflated as a result of high demand, which itself is due to ill-conceived and insufficient hiring processes across most companies.
avip 8y ago
Recruiting is about minimizing false positives, not maximizing sensitivity.
andreakate 8y ago
Professor Iris Bohnet of Harvard wrote a fascinating book called "What Works" that you might find interesting. What I really like about the book is right from the jump Bohnet basically says all this "diversity training" and "PC culture" stuff is a waste of time and an uphill battle. We all like to pretend we're unbiased but Bohnet tells the truth from the outset: everyone has biases. The book focuses on systems that emphasize equal opportunity and remove some of those inherent biases we all have.[1] Bohnet's premise is that we'll get better results if we stop designing systems with the faulty assumption that most people/systems/institutions aren't biased in some way or another. There's a chapter about "blind auditions" that Orchestras began to implement in the 1970's that you might find interesting.[2] After reading that chapter I remember wondering how much we're overthinking a lot of these issues and whether we might be overlooking some pretty easy changes that could have a significant impact. One interesting fact from the blind auditions study was that even without being able to see the musician they were able to demonstrate bias (likely unconscious) when women wore high heels to their audition because the sound gave away their gender. It's really fascinating some of the ways we unconsciously "judge" those around us. [1]https://hbr.org/2016/07/designing-a-bias-free-organization https://hbr.org/2016/07/designing-a-bias-free-organization [2]https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/blind-auditions-orchestras-gender-bias https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...
- taurath 8y ago
  Couldn’t be further from most diversity training I’ve been in - the idea is to identify and find ways to work around bias, not try to “cure” it.
- fipple 8y ago
  I know that as a result of diversity training and guidelines I am 10x as cautious about my behavior at work in front of women as with just men. That means there is a camaraderie that the men have that the women are left out of. When I worked on Wall Street this divide didn’t exist but there was definitely a culture of sexually hostile work environment and sexual hatrassment.
  - 8y ago

screaminghawk 8y ago

I completely agree with this. The problem with bias is that it has affected peoples opportunities in the past. This will be reflected in a CV. I'm not sure the inclusion of name / age / etc will solve this problem, so Helsinki might still be on the right track. It feels like the solution is to intentionally introduce a reverse bias towards these candidates. But that idea does sit well... Also interested in any other suggestions here.

__Joker 8y ago
Yes, The other information is a job application, at least you can argue that somebody could make a decision based on those information. Whether decision process is just is obviously arguable. If name, age is totally irrelevant to a job, at best it will not be used for selection, while there is much risk that it will be used for discrimination consciously or not.

rb808 8y ago

I agree with the cynicism about choosing based on school. But it does work to some extent. If everyone agrees that XYZ/ABC schools/companies are the best, then rationally students will try hard to get in to those schools. Therefore you can get most of the best by filtering for that history. Sucks if you didn't care about grades when younger but actually turned out smart, but most works. (No I didn't go to a famous school)

jkaplowitz 8y ago
That works for some cases, but not where a candidate's parents also went to the same school or where the parents can and do donate a lot to the school. At most of the schools we're discussing, both situations give the student a boost in admission and in passing classes regardless of effort. (Disclosure: I went to a well-known school, but without either of the parental benefits I just described. My parents helped in other more indirect ways throughout my upbringing, but they didn't come from a wealthy or connected family background.)

biztos 8y ago

Even assuming that there is some small enough set of great schools to use them for that signaling as Google traditionally did -- I do not think that's a rational assumption, but that's another discussion -- then at least in the USA you should also know the candidate's parents' financial situation and whether their parents went to the same elite schools. For starters, because it's a lot easier to "get in" if you have no trouble paying for it, and you have your "legacy admissions." If you really think XYZ is that great, you should really want to hire the people who fought to get in, fought to succeed, and did.

ndarwincorn 8y ago

No suggestion, but an anecdote that illustrates a false negative like this.* Stack Overflow's got an Azure SRE spot open, asking for experience with PowerShell DSC and Terraform, among others. The main goal for the role appears to be scaling their enterprise offering. I've worked as both a sysadmin and a dev for years now, and used both to manage sizable deployments in public clouds, both Azure and others, mostly for enterprise software companies. This is a mildly specialized skillset (though getting less specialized by the day), and I figured I'd get at least a screening call. I didn't even make it through the automated resume screening, and if I had to guess it's because I don't have a degree, much less a CS degree. * On the off-chance my employer reads this, this was more of an exploratory application than me actively hunting for other opportunities.

extragood 8y ago

I used to recruit for tech start ups and can confirm that school is just about always the most important thing to get you in the door, particularly early on in your career. It's something that I fought against (I have a technical background and had the advantage of being able to evaluate technical skill somewhat independently), and did well because of it. There were a few candidates that I brought in that I was reprimanded for - physically brought into our partners' office to be told off - only to have that candidate receive multiple job offers from our clients. The partners weren't qualified to really evaluate technical skill, but knew what candidate qualities that a start up is willing to pay a recruiter's fee for. At the end of the day, my candidates were exceptional for having risen above their alma maters' reputations, and the Ivy league grads are more consistently good/qualified. When hiring, time is such an important factor. Many engineering teams are unwilling to take the chance on an a candidate that graduated from unfamiliar school because their hiring process is weak and/or inefficient. Or they waited too long to hire, and need someone "yesterday". At least they're more likely to end up with a good candidate by using the school as the qualifier, even if it costs them more because of the candidate's demand. TL;DR : The 'top' candidates' values are artificially inflated as a result of high demand, which itself is due to ill-conceived and insufficient hiring processes across most companies.

avip 8y ago

Recruiting is about minimizing false positives, not maximizing sensitivity.

andreakate 8y ago

Professor Iris Bohnet of Harvard wrote a fascinating book called "What Works" that you might find interesting. What I really like about the book is right from the jump Bohnet basically says all this "diversity training" and "PC culture" stuff is a waste of time and an uphill battle. We all like to pretend we're unbiased but Bohnet tells the truth from the outset: everyone has biases. The book focuses on systems that emphasize equal opportunity and remove some of those inherent biases we all have.[1] Bohnet's premise is that we'll get better results if we stop designing systems with the faulty assumption that most people/systems/institutions aren't biased in some way or another. There's a chapter about "blind auditions" that Orchestras began to implement in the 1970's that you might find interesting.[2] After reading that chapter I remember wondering how much we're overthinking a lot of these issues and whether we might be overlooking some pretty easy changes that could have a significant impact. One interesting fact from the blind auditions study was that even without being able to see the musician they were able to demonstrate bias (likely unconscious) when women wore high heels to their audition because the sound gave away their gender. It's really fascinating some of the ways we unconsciously "judge" those around us. [1]https://hbr.org/2016/07/designing-a-bias-free-organization https://hbr.org/2016/07/designing-a-bias-free-organization [2]https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/blind-auditions-orchestras-gender-bias https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...

taurath 8y ago
Couldn’t be further from most diversity training I’ve been in - the idea is to identify and find ways to work around bias, not try to “cure” it.
fipple 8y ago
I know that as a result of diversity training and guidelines I am 10x as cautious about my behavior at work in front of women as with just men. That means there is a camaraderie that the men have that the women are left out of. When I worked on Wall Street this divide didn’t exist but there was definitely a culture of sexually hostile work environment and sexual hatrassment.
- 8y ago