7 ms·

This makes me think of the (most likely apocryphal) story of the hiring manager faced with a huge stack of resumes. He divides the stack in half, and tosses th

by JackFr 6y ago

This makes me think of the (most likely apocryphal) story of the hiring manager faced with a huge stack of resumes. He divides the stack in half, and tosses the top half in the trash. "We don't want to hire those people. They're terribly unlucky."

happyconcepts 6y ago
Less harm there in the trash than in the cloud to be used by perfect strangers to profile you. "This will go down in your permanent record" comes to mind.
lordnacho 6y ago
This is such a common story that a lot of people have actually witnessed it. I mean you might as well do that with a stack of CVs, so people actually do it. A friend of mine witnessed this, and clearly the boss hadn't thought of it himself. Variations: "The way we hire traders is we don't hire unlucky ones." "The most important thing in sales is selling yourself." Followed by unceremonious dump into bin.
BerislavLopac 6y ago
I've read once of a company who fired everyone who had below average performance score.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  "We're the best, because we fire the worst!"
- srswtf123 6y ago
  I personally worked at a place that stack-ranked all their employees then cut the bottom 1/3 of performers. I was on a team of two, with the other guy a 15-year veteran. Guess who didn’t make it past the first year? Guess who also fixed more outstanding issues in that year than had been fixed in decades? Yep, me, the guy who failed the stack rankings and got fired. I’ve worked dumber places, but really that one was a bit much.
- technofiend 6y ago
  It's more typical to fire the bottom 10% but that's derisively called rank and yank. Microsoft, HP and others have allegedly used it at one time or another. The assumption is if you do your job well you'll rank well. The reality is your job becomes ensuring you rank well, which may not 100% align with doing the job you were hired for well.
  - kstrauser 6y ago
    It also neglects that you'll always have a bottom 10%, even if those people are absolutely amazing: hire 10 Harvard PhDs and one of them will be at the bottom. I can't believe stack ranking ever caught on.
    - technofiend 6y ago
      Yeah defenders of the institution hand wave and say well once you get enough people in the mix, the math works out. I'm skeptical when you're asked to force rank people into a bell curve no matter how small the population. People who are on the bottom due to forcing it into a curve tend to stay there or near there. Your bottom-most Harvard PhD is unlikely to find himself in the top 10% when mixed into a general population because other human factors come into play, not the least of which is it's incredibly time consuming to review and re-rank every person. So managers tend to leave people where they landed because fatigue eventually sets in. This in turn inspires other behaviors that are not really what the designer envisioned. For example one manager used to carry around a book of every mistake other teams made: if anyone challenged the ranking of one of his employees he'd start firing off potshots at the other manager's org. Needless to say his rankings were left alone. The irony is not lost on me that this manager eventually left to start a company that allegedly uses AI somehow to help people identify the best candidates. He spent his days subverting a system meant to measure employee performance and now claims expertise in finding the best performing employees.
    - ballenf 6y ago
      If the ranking system is accurate (that's a huge "if"), then it doesn't really matter what the bottom x% look like on paper. The question is whether it's ever possible to devise an accurate measure of value quantitatively. Even if your job is press the red button, a person with low numbers might be such an inspiration to the team that everyone else works 15% faster, more than making up for their shortcoming. And you can't possibly anticipate all such factors in advance.
- jimbokun 6y ago
  GE?
- BerislavLopac 6y ago
  Oh yes, and I know of at least one country that is considering setting the minimum salary as a percentage of the average salary...
  - thatguy0900 6y ago
    Just think, in only a couple of years everyone will be a millionaire
Bukhmanizer 6y ago
Frankly, the logistics of hiring make this a reality. I remember helping my boss hire interns, and picked a few out. Later on, they found out that they weren’t able to go to all of the schools that they wanted, they could only choose 2. Where did all the people from other schools go? Straight in the trash. Same deal with hiring full-time employees in my experience. Random, usually understandable circumstances preclude a huge swath of applicants from even being evaluated. And for many places, it doesn’t even matter, because they have so many candidates that they can’t distinguish between them at that level. But from a personal POV, it can be disheartening to get rejected from job after job if you don’t know that like 75% of the time it has nothing to do with you.
- sgerenser 6y ago
  The current large tech company I work for had a recruiter posting messages on LinkedIn like “we’re hiring like crazy in <my town> for people with <my background>!” I had already applied on their careers site and got no response. Messaged this recruiter and got no response. Applied again to a similar position maybe 2 months later, got a response, got an interview, and now I’m working there. Guess my point is there’s clearly a lot of randomness in the screening process.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    Any application process is mostly luck after you meet a certain threshold IMO.
    - beckingz 6y ago
      They're also mostly luck until you meet a certain threshold. Therefore, they're mostly luck.
  - gifnamething 6y ago
    I applied to my current employer 3 times in total. Better candidates would already be working for other companies after the first time.
- 6y ago
curiousllama 6y ago
You joke but this is actually how most recruiting AI systems work
moritonal 6y ago
This always annoyed me, because it's almost certain those candidates were in some kind of order. It'd be either based on the file-name when they were all printed, or the order they came in, or based on some weird method the printer uses, but they'd be some implicit order. So the candiates were unlucky, it's just the hiring manager couldn't be bothered to think about the biases... oddly relevant when talking about managers out-sourcing their racism/classism/agism/sexism/elitism/whateverism to AI.
KineticLensman 6y ago
See 'the secretary problem' [0], which is a more sophisticated version of the above. It's a process that can be summarised roughly as follows. Given a pile of CVs Read approximately 40% of them (actually 1/e, or ~0.368) Dump that 40% Select the first candidate that is better than the ones you have just dumped [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
- thekyle 6y ago
  The secretary problem says that once you pass on a CV you cannot go back and latter decide you want that person. I don't think that is a restriction that exists in real life hiring. It is possible to review all the CVs and then decide which one to pick.
  - CodesInChaos 6y ago
    When I was involved in hiring, we received a steady stream of CVs and then had to decide if we want to interview and eventually hire or reject a candidate (typically we decided right after the interview or programming task). While there is a short time window in which multiple candidates might be evaluated, this approach is pretty close to the assumptions of the secretary problem.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      I assume that's pretty typical. It's certainly my experience. We interview someone and have a call and it's usually either an enthusiastic yes. Or an OK I guess (or just no), in which case we keep looking. I'm not sure I can think of a case where we were "I guess they'll meet our needs if no one better comes along."
      - toast0 6y ago
        > I'm not sure I can think of a case where we were "I guess they'll meet our needs if no one better comes along." You may not have been at an organization with a policy that unfilled positions after X time get removed. When you get close to the end of the time, there's pressure to hire someone, even if they're not great, because otherwise you'll lose the position. On the other hand, I have had a case where someone was not hired for a position, and then later was asked to interview for a different position with the same hiring manager, and was hired for that.
acheron 6y ago
Of course if the job sucks, then you're screening for luck the wrong way.

by JackFr 6y ago

happyconcepts 6y ago

Less harm there in the trash than in the cloud to be used by perfect strangers to profile you. "This will go down in your permanent record" comes to mind.

lordnacho 6y ago

This is such a common story that a lot of people have actually witnessed it. I mean you might as well do that with a stack of CVs, so people actually do it. A friend of mine witnessed this, and clearly the boss hadn't thought of it himself. Variations: "The way we hire traders is we don't hire unlucky ones." "The most important thing in sales is selling yourself." Followed by unceremonious dump into bin.

BerislavLopac 6y ago

I've read once of a company who fired everyone who had below average performance score.

dcolkitt 6y ago
"We're the best, because we fire the worst!"
srswtf123 6y ago
I personally worked at a place that stack-ranked all their employees then cut the bottom 1/3 of performers. I was on a team of two, with the other guy a 15-year veteran. Guess who didn’t make it past the first year? Guess who also fixed more outstanding issues in that year than had been fixed in decades? Yep, me, the guy who failed the stack rankings and got fired. I’ve worked dumber places, but really that one was a bit much.
technofiend 6y ago
It's more typical to fire the bottom 10% but that's derisively called rank and yank. Microsoft, HP and others have allegedly used it at one time or another. The assumption is if you do your job well you'll rank well. The reality is your job becomes ensuring you rank well, which may not 100% align with doing the job you were hired for well.
- kstrauser 6y ago
  It also neglects that you'll always have a bottom 10%, even if those people are absolutely amazing: hire 10 Harvard PhDs and one of them will be at the bottom. I can't believe stack ranking ever caught on.
  - technofiend 6y ago
    Yeah defenders of the institution hand wave and say well once you get enough people in the mix, the math works out. I'm skeptical when you're asked to force rank people into a bell curve no matter how small the population. People who are on the bottom due to forcing it into a curve tend to stay there or near there. Your bottom-most Harvard PhD is unlikely to find himself in the top 10% when mixed into a general population because other human factors come into play, not the least of which is it's incredibly time consuming to review and re-rank every person. So managers tend to leave people where they landed because fatigue eventually sets in. This in turn inspires other behaviors that are not really what the designer envisioned. For example one manager used to carry around a book of every mistake other teams made: if anyone challenged the ranking of one of his employees he'd start firing off potshots at the other manager's org. Needless to say his rankings were left alone. The irony is not lost on me that this manager eventually left to start a company that allegedly uses AI somehow to help people identify the best candidates. He spent his days subverting a system meant to measure employee performance and now claims expertise in finding the best performing employees.
  - ballenf 6y ago
    If the ranking system is accurate (that's a huge "if"), then it doesn't really matter what the bottom x% look like on paper. The question is whether it's ever possible to devise an accurate measure of value quantitatively. Even if your job is press the red button, a person with low numbers might be such an inspiration to the team that everyone else works 15% faster, more than making up for their shortcoming. And you can't possibly anticipate all such factors in advance.
jimbokun 6y ago
GE?
BerislavLopac 6y ago
Oh yes, and I know of at least one country that is considering setting the minimum salary as a percentage of the average salary...
- thatguy0900 6y ago
  Just think, in only a couple of years everyone will be a millionaire

Bukhmanizer 6y ago

Frankly, the logistics of hiring make this a reality. I remember helping my boss hire interns, and picked a few out. Later on, they found out that they weren’t able to go to all of the schools that they wanted, they could only choose 2. Where did all the people from other schools go? Straight in the trash. Same deal with hiring full-time employees in my experience. Random, usually understandable circumstances preclude a huge swath of applicants from even being evaluated. And for many places, it doesn’t even matter, because they have so many candidates that they can’t distinguish between them at that level. But from a personal POV, it can be disheartening to get rejected from job after job if you don’t know that like 75% of the time it has nothing to do with you.

sgerenser 6y ago
The current large tech company I work for had a recruiter posting messages on LinkedIn like “we’re hiring like crazy in <my town> for people with <my background>!” I had already applied on their careers site and got no response. Messaged this recruiter and got no response. Applied again to a similar position maybe 2 months later, got a response, got an interview, and now I’m working there. Guess my point is there’s clearly a lot of randomness in the screening process.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  Any application process is mostly luck after you meet a certain threshold IMO.
  - beckingz 6y ago
    They're also mostly luck until you meet a certain threshold. Therefore, they're mostly luck.
- gifnamething 6y ago
  I applied to my current employer 3 times in total. Better candidates would already be working for other companies after the first time.
6y ago

curiousllama 6y ago

You joke but this is actually how most recruiting AI systems work

moritonal 6y ago

This always annoyed me, because it's almost certain those candidates were in some kind of order. It'd be either based on the file-name when they were all printed, or the order they came in, or based on some weird method the printer uses, but they'd be some implicit order. So the candiates were unlucky, it's just the hiring manager couldn't be bothered to think about the biases... oddly relevant when talking about managers out-sourcing their racism/classism/agism/sexism/elitism/whateverism to AI.

KineticLensman 6y ago

See 'the secretary problem' [0], which is a more sophisticated version of the above. It's a process that can be summarised roughly as follows. Given a pile of CVs Read approximately 40% of them (actually 1/e, or ~0.368) Dump that 40% Select the first candidate that is better than the ones you have just dumped [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

thekyle 6y ago
The secretary problem says that once you pass on a CV you cannot go back and latter decide you want that person. I don't think that is a restriction that exists in real life hiring. It is possible to review all the CVs and then decide which one to pick.
- CodesInChaos 6y ago
  When I was involved in hiring, we received a steady stream of CVs and then had to decide if we want to interview and eventually hire or reject a candidate (typically we decided right after the interview or programming task). While there is a short time window in which multiple candidates might be evaluated, this approach is pretty close to the assumptions of the secretary problem.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I assume that's pretty typical. It's certainly my experience. We interview someone and have a call and it's usually either an enthusiastic yes. Or an OK I guess (or just no), in which case we keep looking. I'm not sure I can think of a case where we were "I guess they'll meet our needs if no one better comes along."
    - toast0 6y ago
      > I'm not sure I can think of a case where we were "I guess they'll meet our needs if no one better comes along." You may not have been at an organization with a policy that unfilled positions after X time get removed. When you get close to the end of the time, there's pressure to hire someone, even if they're not great, because otherwise you'll lose the position. On the other hand, I have had a case where someone was not hired for a position, and then later was asked to interview for a different position with the same hiring manager, and was hired for that.

acheron 6y ago

Of course if the job sucks, then you're screening for luck the wrong way.