4 ms·

Be careful about the bias in single-metric gatekeeping strategies like this. Contributing to open source projects, having side projects, et al are pursuits of l

Be careful about the bias in single-metric gatekeeping strategies like this. Contributing to open source projects, having side projects, et al are pursuits of leisure. Certificates are possibly the only foot in the door for folks working multiple jobs with kids, etc. and the government often pays the tuition for low income folks. Once you’ve got them, even if you’re more established, it would be crazy to leave them off of your resume, right? Not only could you be bypassing people passionate enough to work their way into the field through pretty adverse circumstances, you could be inadvertently reducing the diversity of your workforce in doing so. I know it’s tough to have to whittle down a list of candidates on paper, but the closer you are to judging a person’s path rather than their capability, the more likely you’ll be to favor people who mirror your cultural identity and experiences. So if someone looks like they’ve got the requisite skills. It certainly doesn’t mean everybody with a pile of certs is worth considering, but it’s probably not a good immediate disqualifier.

bawolff 4y ago
> Once you’ve got them, even if you’re more established, it would be crazy to leave them off of your resume, right? Not necccesarily. Depending on the cert and field it may make sense to. The goal of getting the cert should be to learn skills. If you've done that, the piece of paper doesn't matter. > Not only could you be bypassing people passionate enough to work their way into the field through pretty adverse circumstances, you could be inadvertently reducing the diversity of your workforce in doing so The people with all the certs still got interviewed where i worked last, it was just a consistent pattern that they bombed the interview, usually very badly on very basic questions.
- ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
  If you've got a few certs and two jobs under your belt that you got because of those certs, how would anyone imagine that those certs would prevent them from getting jobs? For people with traditional industry on-ramping, it might seem intuitive that someone would want to hide these certs from people for their lack of prestige. To others, hiding your only officially-recognized qualifications seems absolutely ridiculous.
- mirekrusin 4y ago
  Are you sure those were verified? It used to shock me that people who put on cv “5 years” of programming experience in language X could not write switch statement in it, not anymore. Certifications like CKA can be verified online, cvs should include verification link; CKA/CKAD expires after 3 years, CKS after 2 years so it’s physically impossible to have too many of certificates like this.
zdragnar 4y ago
> Once you’ve got them, even if you’re more established, it would be crazy to leave them off of your resume, right? Recruiters and hiring managers go through so many resumes, the last thing you want is to have someone looking for a programmer to read about your basket weaving skills. My strategy has always been to tailor the bulk of the resume to the job I'm applying for. Bring everything else up during the interview if there's natural time to do so, because that's where they want to see who you are.
- ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
  We're talking about relevant certs, here.
mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
I agree with you in principle, but it's difficult to draw the line when the hiring process needs to be practical. We can't interview everyone and perfect recall isn't necessary. My experience from dozens of interviews has been that many certifications are a rather strong negative signal, at least for our standard software/data engineering roles. I'm sure there are many exceptions to this, but I'll happily miss out on 1-2 good candidates if that means I can filter out 50 bad ones using the same signal. Of course it's never a binary decision and the complete picture of the resume matters. For example, if someone got a bunch of certs 20 years ago when they started their career that doesn't have any negative impact. But more often, people try to use certs and MOOCs to pad their resume and hope use them to hide the fact that they lack real work experience.
- ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
  I hear you and have been in your shoes. Hiring is hard, and the steps to hire people ethically are pretty nebulous, which makes it much harder. Especially when the outcome would be the same in many cases, it does seem awfully impractical. But that's the problem with bias in general, though— It's always a matter of practicality. It's been some time since most discrimination deliberately stymied people with a background or makeup the dominant culture considered objectionable. These days it hides in the subconscious mechanisms governing the purportedly rational generalizations we rely on when lacking time and resources to properly investigate something. I don't think it's anybody's fault— it's a bug in our brains and we can't control that. I do think we're ethically obligated to push back when practical requirements compel us to make those generalizations. If we expect police to do it when someone may or may not be pulling a gun out of their pocket, we should certainly expect ourselves to do it when we've got a queue of resumes to process.
  - Ruphin 4y ago
    I think it's an interesting point to make, and it's important to understand that this type of selection is a form of bias. But I think the comparison you are making here with law enforcement using bias towards people of color is not exactly right. There is a difference in signaling by choice (what to put on your resume) vs signaling by nature (skin color). I think we agree that there are some things we cannot change by nature, and a selection bias based on these properties is (in every case?) ethically unjust. I do not agree that it's ethically unjust to have a selection bias on things that are behavioral. If someone is coming into an interview naked I'm going to reject that candidate. Am I being biased towards unclothed people if I do that? Should I continue the interview and try to find the candidate's fit for the position and disregard that they are choosing not to wear clothes? I think it's no different for a candidate that chooses to list certain things on their resume. Nobody is forced to list all of their certificates on their resume. It is a choice the candidate makes, and what else do I have to judge a candidates fitness than the choices they make in how they represent themselves and their skills? You can certainly make an argument that listing many certificates is a shallow signal and you should invest more time into getting to know a candidate better before you choose to reject. If someone chooses to use this signal you can make an argument that they will possibly miss a few good candidates. But I don't think you can make an argument that it's ethically unjust to do so.
smoe 4y ago
I think how many certs and how up-center in your cv you put them matters. E.g. if I'm hiring for a junior dev and get some self-taught person having done a couple of relevant online courses and so far managed to get a tech support role looking to become a programmer I'm often interested in talking to them. On the other hand, I have seen cv's from senior enterprise/government engineers, 10 pages long, plastered all over with certs, titles, abbreviations, version numbers, iso standards, etc. and I have absolutely no idea what they actually did or achieved in their prior jobs even when googling a dozen terms. They might be great in the context they are working in, but they are from experience not a great fit for the context I'm hiring for.
- ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
  The problem you describe is a resume design problem rather than a cert problem. Would you know what they could do if they merely left the certs off of the resume? I’d guess not. It sounds like you were looking at a federal resume which are differently structured and much, much longer than private sector resumes. Candidates appreciate feedback letting them know: “Thanks for applying but I can’t suss out what you can actually do based on what you sent. Feel free to reapply with a more concise, descriptive resume.” If they’ve worked in the federal government that long, they might just not realize how inappropriate their resume is for private sector jobs even if they’re qualified. If they can’t course correct and describe their skills in common business language, that’s a good enough indicator of their ability to adapt to the position, I’d say.
_8j50 4y ago
Completley agree with you. My reply was way too harsh/emotional. There are many companies that offer skill based pre-interview tests, tossing out resumes based on qualifications is not just silly but a liability and a sign of incompetence. The worst hiring managers are reductionists that act on instincts and prejudice.
a4isms 4y ago
> Contributing to open source projects, having side projects, et al are pursuits of leisure. This is an old anti-pattern: tests that sound like they're about competence, but they're actually about "culture fit." Example: Speaking at conferences. This sounds like social proof you know something about the industry, and have communication skills to boot. In many cases it actually means you are good at networking, have leisure time available to attend conferences, and get invited back to speak at more conferences because you're likeable and contribute to the conference's social scene. In my own case, I have spoken and even keynoted multiple conferences. But I don't think speaking at conferences means much when hiring, unless I'm hiring an evangelist or community manager. If I'm hiring a programmer, I want to know whether they can program, nit whether they can talk about programming. Anyways, I support your thesis that some (or even many) single-metric gatekeeping strategies that don't measure the actual skill required by the job are bad, and I suggest that many of them test for culture, not competence.
- ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
  Yes. I do think it’s important to point out that folks using these “in my experience, people like this tend to be bad” type of hiring metrics probably aren’t deliberately discriminating and often change their approach after realizing it’s problematic. Obviously grown adults are accountable for their own actions, but not training, supporting, or monitoring folks making hiring decisions is more of an institutional failure than a personal failure.
SecurityLagoon 4y ago
> Once you’ve got them, even if you’re more established, it would be crazy to leave them off of your resume, right? For sure include them if they are relevant to the role or show real commitment to a topic. If you see a string of disperate certs though it's easy to assume the applicant doesn't know what they want to do. Not saying I would discount someone on this alone but it would raise questions for the interview if they were otherwise qualified.
- ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
  And that's totally fine. We all have our own heuristics for determining what we like in a candidate, but we need to be very, very critical of those measures and make sure they aren't masking other less justifiable gut instinct decisions. Bias is generally subconscious— If it really was as cut-and-dried as we like to think, then it wouldn't be a gut feeling metric at all— we'd be able to back up our reasoning with hard facts. As rational as they might seem, 'gut feeling' criteria almost universally favor people we're comfortable with rather than the most qualified candidate. That's a real problem for folks who aren't part of the dominant culture of the industry: Millenial to Gen-X straight white and asian guys. If a qualified candidate only having certificate credentials merely prompts further investigation, then great. However, it's quite often the tipping point between round-filing a good candidate and calling another one in for an interview. While it might seem innocuous on a micro level, on a macro level this affects big swaths of the population. In the 2005 Study Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w9873/w9873.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w9873/w9873...), they responded to 1300 job ads with 5000 equally-weighted resumes with randomly assigned names which were either stereotypically white, like Emily Walsh or Greg Baker, or stereotypically black, like Lakisha Washington or Jamal Jones. Resumes with white sounding names were 50% more likely to receive a callback. Fifty percent! The likelihood of 1300 randomly chosen job ads being run by the KKK is pretty low. Most, if not all of them were probably letting "gut instinct" criteria swing their judgement. If you had a video game where the sole task was getting a job, one race having a built-in buff where the callback was 50% greater without being balanced somewhere else would be insanely unfair. Not only is it not balanced, but we're literally only talking about these folks names— never mind their appearance, manner of speaking, cultural references, etc. We all like to think of ourselves as good people but that's not enough to stop this. We need to deliberately interrogate our MO, here.

bawolff 4y ago

> Once you’ve got them, even if you’re more established, it would be crazy to leave them off of your resume, right? Not necccesarily. Depending on the cert and field it may make sense to. The goal of getting the cert should be to learn skills. If you've done that, the piece of paper doesn't matter. > Not only could you be bypassing people passionate enough to work their way into the field through pretty adverse circumstances, you could be inadvertently reducing the diversity of your workforce in doing so The people with all the certs still got interviewed where i worked last, it was just a consistent pattern that they bombed the interview, usually very badly on very basic questions.

ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
If you've got a few certs and two jobs under your belt that you got because of those certs, how would anyone imagine that those certs would prevent them from getting jobs? For people with traditional industry on-ramping, it might seem intuitive that someone would want to hide these certs from people for their lack of prestige. To others, hiding your only officially-recognized qualifications seems absolutely ridiculous.
mirekrusin 4y ago
Are you sure those were verified? It used to shock me that people who put on cv “5 years” of programming experience in language X could not write switch statement in it, not anymore. Certifications like CKA can be verified online, cvs should include verification link; CKA/CKAD expires after 3 years, CKS after 2 years so it’s physically impossible to have too many of certificates like this.

zdragnar 4y ago

> Once you’ve got them, even if you’re more established, it would be crazy to leave them off of your resume, right? Recruiters and hiring managers go through so many resumes, the last thing you want is to have someone looking for a programmer to read about your basket weaving skills. My strategy has always been to tailor the bulk of the resume to the job I'm applying for. Bring everything else up during the interview if there's natural time to do so, because that's where they want to see who you are.

ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
We're talking about relevant certs, here.

mudrockbestgirl 4y ago

I agree with you in principle, but it's difficult to draw the line when the hiring process needs to be practical. We can't interview everyone and perfect recall isn't necessary. My experience from dozens of interviews has been that many certifications are a rather strong negative signal, at least for our standard software/data engineering roles. I'm sure there are many exceptions to this, but I'll happily miss out on 1-2 good candidates if that means I can filter out 50 bad ones using the same signal. Of course it's never a binary decision and the complete picture of the resume matters. For example, if someone got a bunch of certs 20 years ago when they started their career that doesn't have any negative impact. But more often, people try to use certs and MOOCs to pad their resume and hope use them to hide the fact that they lack real work experience.

ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
I hear you and have been in your shoes. Hiring is hard, and the steps to hire people ethically are pretty nebulous, which makes it much harder. Especially when the outcome would be the same in many cases, it does seem awfully impractical. But that's the problem with bias in general, though— It's always a matter of practicality. It's been some time since most discrimination deliberately stymied people with a background or makeup the dominant culture considered objectionable. These days it hides in the subconscious mechanisms governing the purportedly rational generalizations we rely on when lacking time and resources to properly investigate something. I don't think it's anybody's fault— it's a bug in our brains and we can't control that. I do think we're ethically obligated to push back when practical requirements compel us to make those generalizations. If we expect police to do it when someone may or may not be pulling a gun out of their pocket, we should certainly expect ourselves to do it when we've got a queue of resumes to process.
- Ruphin 4y ago
  I think it's an interesting point to make, and it's important to understand that this type of selection is a form of bias. But I think the comparison you are making here with law enforcement using bias towards people of color is not exactly right. There is a difference in signaling by choice (what to put on your resume) vs signaling by nature (skin color). I think we agree that there are some things we cannot change by nature, and a selection bias based on these properties is (in every case?) ethically unjust. I do not agree that it's ethically unjust to have a selection bias on things that are behavioral. If someone is coming into an interview naked I'm going to reject that candidate. Am I being biased towards unclothed people if I do that? Should I continue the interview and try to find the candidate's fit for the position and disregard that they are choosing not to wear clothes? I think it's no different for a candidate that chooses to list certain things on their resume. Nobody is forced to list all of their certificates on their resume. It is a choice the candidate makes, and what else do I have to judge a candidates fitness than the choices they make in how they represent themselves and their skills? You can certainly make an argument that listing many certificates is a shallow signal and you should invest more time into getting to know a candidate better before you choose to reject. If someone chooses to use this signal you can make an argument that they will possibly miss a few good candidates. But I don't think you can make an argument that it's ethically unjust to do so.

smoe 4y ago

I think how many certs and how up-center in your cv you put them matters. E.g. if I'm hiring for a junior dev and get some self-taught person having done a couple of relevant online courses and so far managed to get a tech support role looking to become a programmer I'm often interested in talking to them. On the other hand, I have seen cv's from senior enterprise/government engineers, 10 pages long, plastered all over with certs, titles, abbreviations, version numbers, iso standards, etc. and I have absolutely no idea what they actually did or achieved in their prior jobs even when googling a dozen terms. They might be great in the context they are working in, but they are from experience not a great fit for the context I'm hiring for.

ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
The problem you describe is a resume design problem rather than a cert problem. Would you know what they could do if they merely left the certs off of the resume? I’d guess not. It sounds like you were looking at a federal resume which are differently structured and much, much longer than private sector resumes. Candidates appreciate feedback letting them know: “Thanks for applying but I can’t suss out what you can actually do based on what you sent. Feel free to reapply with a more concise, descriptive resume.” If they’ve worked in the federal government that long, they might just not realize how inappropriate their resume is for private sector jobs even if they’re qualified. If they can’t course correct and describe their skills in common business language, that’s a good enough indicator of their ability to adapt to the position, I’d say.

_8j50 4y ago

Completley agree with you. My reply was way too harsh/emotional. There are many companies that offer skill based pre-interview tests, tossing out resumes based on qualifications is not just silly but a liability and a sign of incompetence. The worst hiring managers are reductionists that act on instincts and prejudice.

a4isms 4y ago

> Contributing to open source projects, having side projects, et al are pursuits of leisure. This is an old anti-pattern: tests that sound like they're about competence, but they're actually about "culture fit." Example: Speaking at conferences. This sounds like social proof you know something about the industry, and have communication skills to boot. In many cases it actually means you are good at networking, have leisure time available to attend conferences, and get invited back to speak at more conferences because you're likeable and contribute to the conference's social scene. In my own case, I have spoken and even keynoted multiple conferences. But I don't think speaking at conferences means much when hiring, unless I'm hiring an evangelist or community manager. If I'm hiring a programmer, I want to know whether they can program, nit whether they can talk about programming. Anyways, I support your thesis that some (or even many) single-metric gatekeeping strategies that don't measure the actual skill required by the job are bad, and I suggest that many of them test for culture, not competence.

ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
Yes. I do think it’s important to point out that folks using these “in my experience, people like this tend to be bad” type of hiring metrics probably aren’t deliberately discriminating and often change their approach after realizing it’s problematic. Obviously grown adults are accountable for their own actions, but not training, supporting, or monitoring folks making hiring decisions is more of an institutional failure than a personal failure.

SecurityLagoon 4y ago

> Once you’ve got them, even if you’re more established, it would be crazy to leave them off of your resume, right? For sure include them if they are relevant to the role or show real commitment to a topic. If you see a string of disperate certs though it's easy to assume the applicant doesn't know what they want to do. Not saying I would discount someone on this alone but it would raise questions for the interview if they were otherwise qualified.

ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
And that's totally fine. We all have our own heuristics for determining what we like in a candidate, but we need to be very, very critical of those measures and make sure they aren't masking other less justifiable gut instinct decisions. Bias is generally subconscious— If it really was as cut-and-dried as we like to think, then it wouldn't be a gut feeling metric at all— we'd be able to back up our reasoning with hard facts. As rational as they might seem, 'gut feeling' criteria almost universally favor people we're comfortable with rather than the most qualified candidate. That's a real problem for folks who aren't part of the dominant culture of the industry: Millenial to Gen-X straight white and asian guys. If a qualified candidate only having certificate credentials merely prompts further investigation, then great. However, it's quite often the tipping point between round-filing a good candidate and calling another one in for an interview. While it might seem innocuous on a micro level, on a macro level this affects big swaths of the population. In the 2005 Study Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w9873/w9873.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w9873/w9873...), they responded to 1300 job ads with 5000 equally-weighted resumes with randomly assigned names which were either stereotypically white, like Emily Walsh or Greg Baker, or stereotypically black, like Lakisha Washington or Jamal Jones. Resumes with white sounding names were 50% more likely to receive a callback. Fifty percent! The likelihood of 1300 randomly chosen job ads being run by the KKK is pretty low. Most, if not all of them were probably letting "gut instinct" criteria swing their judgement. If you had a video game where the sole task was getting a job, one race having a built-in buff where the callback was 50% greater without being balanced somewhere else would be insanely unfair. Not only is it not balanced, but we're literally only talking about these folks names— never mind their appearance, manner of speaking, cultural references, etc. We all like to think of ourselves as good people but that's not enough to stop this. We need to deliberately interrogate our MO, here.