4 ms·
>Given a whiteboard and one hour, determine whether the person across from you is someone you’d like to work with, in the trenches, for the next n years. If we
by ohyes 15y ago
>Given a whiteboard and one hour, determine whether the person across from you is someone you’d like to work with, in the trenches, for the next n years.
If we ignore the requirements of one hour...
Brute force: Hire a random candidate that hasn't been hired by you before. Fire them when you get fed up with them. Hire a different candidate. Repeat.
Greedy Algorithm: Develop the model for an ideal candidate, assign that candidate a numerical model and then compute the distance from the current candidate to the ideal candidate.* Hire the candidate with the lowest computed distance. If a candidate comes along with a lower computed distance fire the old candidate and hire the new one.
Simulated Annealing: As with the greedy algorithm, but instead of hiring based solely on lowest computed distance, include a small % chance that you will randomly fire the candidate and hire candidate that is slightly worse. (Optional extension to the algorithm is to keep the best candidate so far cached somewhere, potentially a transporter buffer).
Genetic Algorithms: From your pool of candidates, select the top candidates. Breed these candidates, randomly introducing mutations. Repeat again with the progeny of the previous pool, until one of the candidates passes a satisficing threshold 'distance' score.
* = Notice that this is the actually the most difficult part of (almost any useful application of) these algorithms but I managed to hand-wave right through it.
- shabble 15y agoDivide and conquer: Assign all applicants randomly to teams. Run competitive coding competition. Reject all but the winning team. Split the winning team into smaller ones, and repeat.
- 0x12 15y agoEpic, really. That's one for the 'best of HN'. I'd hate to work for you though ;)
- Jun8 15y agoTwo more approaches: 1) There's the well-known Secretary (or Marriage, or Sultan's Dowry) Problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem). It has three caveats, though: * Solution assumes that you have a lot of (e.g. ~20) candidates. * It is assumed that you can sum up each candidate's ability in a single number. This is the hardest part, since the human mind works relationally and assigning absolute numbers to anything is hard. * The probability of picking the best candidate is only 1/e. But at least there's a guaranteed bound on the probability of success, that some of the other methods lack. 2) (If possible) Hire the engineer and HR person at the same time and have the HR candidates evaluate the engineering candidates. Then run Knuth's stable marriage algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem) to pick the best candidates for each.
- secretasiandan 15y ago1) The secretary problem does NOT assume a large number of candidates. In fact, your odds go down as the number of candidates go up. 2) The secretary problem DOES assume you can't go back once you've evaluated a candidate. This is not the case for prospective employees. Edit: s/passed on/evaluated/
- Jun8 15y agoI meant the 1/e neat solution (where the summation is replaced by an integral) assumes the large number. Otherwise, the sum can be evaluated directly, but no closed form solution exists. I don't get your second statement, though, what do you mean by the "odds"? The 1/e solution is asymptotic.
- cpeterso 15y ago> Hire the engineer and HR person at the same time and have the HR candidates evaluate the engineering candidates. Demetri Martin's "Important Things" TV show had a comedy sketch about two interview candidates inadvertently interviewing each other, each thinking the other candidate was the hiring manager. :) http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=268664 http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=2686...
- nicklovescode 15y agohave each applicant interview each other. The applicant that gets the most 'hires' wins
- adrianN 15y agoNash Equilibrium: Nobody gets hired.
- praptak 15y agoRecursive: require the candidate to come up with the perfect hiring strategy.
- geoffschmidt 15y agoI'm willing to believe that the ideal candidate is a fixed point under your operator, but I think it's going to be tricky to prove convergence :)
- eru 15y agoAnd there might be other fixed points, perhaps with even greater catchment areas.
- cpeterso 15y agoAs an interviewer, I have asked candidates what questions they like to ask when interviewing and then proceeded to ask them that question. :) Or ask the candidate "when question should I ask you that I haven't?" These are somewhat softball questions, but they let the candidate drive the interview and highlight what they think is important about their experience.
- zephjc 15y agoNow, would the old candidate be pushed down the stack, or would there be some TCO (tailing candidate optimization) going on where only the most recent one exists?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]