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> This is obviously not the case. Isn't it? While machine intervention might be able to weed out the most obvious low-quality candidates, I don't think there's
by ivanbakel 6y ago
> This is obviously not the case.
Isn't it? While machine intervention might be able to weed out the most obvious low-quality candidates, I don't think there's any strong evidence that most hiring processes actually select the strongest hires - just that they, out of the set of candidates that progress to the point of human intervention (i.e. interview), select a decent one.
The problem is that interviews don't scale well, and some kind of automatic culling of the field of candidates is necessary. Engineers, managers, etc all want to feel that whatever machine solution (keyword searching in resumes, applying AI to recorded video statements, HackerRanks) they select is better than random - but there's no incentive for them to check that that's true.
Obviously randomness + interviews is better than pure randomness, but ultimately hiring processes are still pretty random. If you need to weed out most of your candidates, you can't do much better than throwing most of their applications away - and companies end up doing just that, only they cargo cult an "automated process" that claims to do better.
- sokoloff 6y agoI would say that a random selection process would be worse than most hiring funnels that I've seen. This is doubly true considering the abject terrible quality of the lowest decile of candidate in software engineering. (The "spray and pray" resume machine-gunners would be way over-selected by any hiring process that relies on randomness when the rest of the industry is trying to select by interviewing.)