4 ms·
That honestly sounds like an awful strategy to attract talent. Surely you believe there’s a correlation between going to the best schools and toughest companies
by Moodles 5y ago
That honestly sounds like an awful strategy to attract talent. Surely you believe there’s a correlation between going to the best schools and toughest companies and being somewhat productive? To ignore all those sígnals to avoid some bias is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Let’s try the experiment. Two startups short on cash. One hires your way and one does not. Which one do you think is more likely to survive?
- hammock 5y ago>an awful strategy to attract talent That's not the point though. The point is to remove bias.
- kerneloftruth 5y agoThat's single variable thinking, for sure. We've been living through a lot of that these past 2 years. It's easy to solve for one variable; beyond that, one has to balance things so that primary goals (hiring capable and personable talent) are still achieved.
- pawelmurias 5y agoYou can just avoid looking at the resume altogether. A fair roll of the dice removes a lot of bias.
- arnoooooo 5y agoIs removing bias more important than finding the right person ?
- KarlKemp 5y agoBias is, by definition, not finding the right person.
- Moodles 5y agoWhat? Ok? This was a pointless circular tangent then? "We want the best talent." "No we don't. We want the to remove bias." "Isn't talent more important?" "Removing bias is finding the best talent." That was like reading a conversation with an AI chatbot. We all agree we want the best talent then, yes?
- handoflixue 5y agoOne can argue that bias is a mistake, so removing bias improves decision-making. So asking whether removing bias is "more important" than improving decision making is a non-sequitar: removing bias is a tool towards that goal. In a sense it's "less important" because other tools might do the job better, and in a sense it's more important because simply desiring to improve decision-making does nothing without tools to implement that desire.
- Moodles 5y agoBut I want to bias towards attracting talent?
- handoflixue 5y agoSociety has interests that conflict with your personal desires. If you believe men are better coders than women, society already prevents you from acting on your ideas. I don't see how this is significantly different, especially given how much "protected" classes clearly affect your odds of getting in to prestigious institutions.
- lucaspm98 5y agoIt’s quite the opposite, being in “historically oppressed” segments of protected classes directly and openly helps your odds of getting in to prestigious institutions.
- handoflixue 5y agoSo you agree that looking for prestigious institutes on a resume is unfair and disadvantages a number of groups? I never said which way the privilege swung, merely that it's clear that "attending a prestigious institute" has never been the meritocracy it claims to be.
- KarlKemp 5y agoAny bias in your hiring is also a needless waste of talent that you should have hired but didn’t. And that has been going on for quite a while, and hurts you, the candidate, and society as a whole. That said, I wouldn’t blank out schools and employers. Discrimination by school and employer may or may not be wrong for the business. But those aren’t protected categories. The problem is that those institutions aren’t perfect in their hiring/accepting either, and some initial mistake by the college is propagated and amplified by subsequent decisions deferring to it. No idea how to solve this. Maybe the data could be coded into some numeric or ordinal value. I bet the actual terms like “Harvard” and “MIT” are more impressive than a completely equivalent abstraction such as “Ivy League” or “top tier”.