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Sure: https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/3-im-recruiting-hiring-or-promoting-employees https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/3-im-recruitin.

by csydas 5y ago

Sure: https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/3-im-recruiting-hiring-or-promoting-employees https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/3-im-recruitin... Screen applications consistently. Apply the same standards to everyone applying for the same position. Effectively, you should have the exact same criterion for all candidates for the same position and avoid "on the fly" questions/too heavily customizing it. The legal discussion on all of this has basically boiled down to that you must ensure you're going through the same process for each candidate with the expected variances based on their employment/personal history (as it's relevant to the position) I may overstate the situation slightly with that statement, but the idea is that if you ask about a networking stack for candidate A, you should ask the same probing questions for candidate B also. (Consider maybe you know that candidate B doesn't know this stack and will look "negative" on a review to the hiring managers, but you really like candidate B for other reasons) Ultimately the idea is less about the specific questions and more that Candidate A and B are both reasonably considered in the same fashion for all of the requirements of the position, and that you aren't adding/omitting elements that may influence the applicability of the candidate in any fashion. So let me restate: It's not required you ask verbatim the same words for each candidate (this is the lay-person over-read). But for a given position, it should be established in advance a series of competencies that are necessary for the position and that are to be asked of each candidate. How you go about investigating it may vary from candidate to candidate, but should two interviews be reviewed, it should be expected that both interviews cover the same topics to a reasonable degree. (e.g., it is reasonable that if you ask "have you ever worked with library X" and the candidate flat out says they cannot answer questions on library X, you have reasonably covered that topic with this candidate. If you ask another candidate and they do have experience with library X and you ask some additional questions, you have not violated the spirit or letter of the requirement in this case.)

nostrebored 5y ago
This is dramatically more complicated than it actually is. It does come back to competencies and structures. For instance, at AWS, this boils down to wide technical competencies and leadership principles. Of the nearly 100 interviews I did at AWS, I probably never had two that were very close, just due to people’s resumes, prior experience, and breadth of interests. But, if you wanted to ask the recruiting team to add an interview to get more feedback, this would be a clear no.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I wonder how much of the last point is a high tolerance for false negatives? If a candidate is that close to a no-hire, maybe a rational choice is to say “No, you’re welcome to re-apply in N months.”
  - nostrebored 5y ago
    It was always cited as a legal risk. Stripe handled this by having an extra interview baked in by default. People who were viewed as no risk hires didn’t have to do it, but the default was an extra interview to cover risks. Because it wasn’t an aberration, it wasn’t giving a candidate preferential treatment. I honestly think it’s one of the smartest interview loops I’ve seen. I think they are one of the few large companies gambling a bit on the false positive side of things to shave off false negative points. And honestly, I was impressed with the people I interacted with at stripe more than AWS. They’re doing something right.
- nostrebored 5y ago
  Reading this again, it was more confrontational than I wanted it to be and lacked details about why I think super structured interviews are a bad idea. Some of the best candidates I’ve been involved with hiring have been compelling for reasons you’d never get to in a very structured way. For instance, a candidate who was just out of university. They were very shy about technical topics, and their tech depth wasn’t great. They went to a university in Africa that I knew taught people more stuff that was wrong than right, and they were starting at a disadvantage. To get him out of his shell I asked about things he’d done outside of academics. He told me that he had not done much because he was very busy. Busy with what? Oh, just starting a real estate investing side business with his family where he’d been responsible for their international expansion into the UK. With no finance background, he’d spent his time understanding the financial, legal and tax implications of their expansion and successfully launched in his third year of university. And I’d done a bit of finance so we talked about concepts there and he was able to walk me through complex topics in simple terms. My job for that interview was judging bias for action, curiosity, and diving deep into metrics. He couldn’t show that for tech because he went to a horrible university and had been very busy with other extra circulars. He apologized to me for spending so much time talking about non tech subjects. And here is the problem: people who are bad at interviewing are punished by rigid processes. There’s a lot of data to show that women and immigrants from certain backgrounds are more reserved on average. You have to be a much better interviewer to pull off a structured interview that lets these candidates shine.

by csydas 5y ago

nostrebored 5y ago

This is dramatically more complicated than it actually is. It does come back to competencies and structures. For instance, at AWS, this boils down to wide technical competencies and leadership principles. Of the nearly 100 interviews I did at AWS, I probably never had two that were very close, just due to people’s resumes, prior experience, and breadth of interests. But, if you wanted to ask the recruiting team to add an interview to get more feedback, this would be a clear no.

sokoloff 5y ago
I wonder how much of the last point is a high tolerance for false negatives? If a candidate is that close to a no-hire, maybe a rational choice is to say “No, you’re welcome to re-apply in N months.”
- nostrebored 5y ago
  It was always cited as a legal risk. Stripe handled this by having an extra interview baked in by default. People who were viewed as no risk hires didn’t have to do it, but the default was an extra interview to cover risks. Because it wasn’t an aberration, it wasn’t giving a candidate preferential treatment. I honestly think it’s one of the smartest interview loops I’ve seen. I think they are one of the few large companies gambling a bit on the false positive side of things to shave off false negative points. And honestly, I was impressed with the people I interacted with at stripe more than AWS. They’re doing something right.
nostrebored 5y ago
Reading this again, it was more confrontational than I wanted it to be and lacked details about why I think super structured interviews are a bad idea. Some of the best candidates I’ve been involved with hiring have been compelling for reasons you’d never get to in a very structured way. For instance, a candidate who was just out of university. They were very shy about technical topics, and their tech depth wasn’t great. They went to a university in Africa that I knew taught people more stuff that was wrong than right, and they were starting at a disadvantage. To get him out of his shell I asked about things he’d done outside of academics. He told me that he had not done much because he was very busy. Busy with what? Oh, just starting a real estate investing side business with his family where he’d been responsible for their international expansion into the UK. With no finance background, he’d spent his time understanding the financial, legal and tax implications of their expansion and successfully launched in his third year of university. And I’d done a bit of finance so we talked about concepts there and he was able to walk me through complex topics in simple terms. My job for that interview was judging bias for action, curiosity, and diving deep into metrics. He couldn’t show that for tech because he went to a horrible university and had been very busy with other extra circulars. He apologized to me for spending so much time talking about non tech subjects. And here is the problem: people who are bad at interviewing are punished by rigid processes. There’s a lot of data to show that women and immigrants from certain backgrounds are more reserved on average. You have to be a much better interviewer to pull off a structured interview that lets these candidates shine.