5 ms·
I agree that most companies get it wrong, but what is right? It seems like interviewing and recruiting is a field dominated by "sounds right, common sense" styl
by UnoriginalGuy 12y ago
I agree that most companies get it wrong, but what is right? It seems like interviewing and recruiting is a field dominated by "sounds right, common sense" styles of thinking (like most HR) where there is no post-mortem of how well a candidate did in the next 6-24 months.
Even if you look at most MBA programs, the stuff on recruiting and interviewing aren't as research and evidence based as you would expect, and instead you just get spoon fed a bunch of best practices seemingly out of thin air.
I think programmers and technology companies in particular are very trend-following. For example, Microsoft decided to do some out-of-the-box questioning about circle manhole covers and suddenly tons of other companies had to have their own version. Google did CS algorithm questions, so everyone else had to have them also (even for jobs which use high level libraries like Java, C#, PHP, etc).
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoThey get it wrong because no one knows how to do it right. Actually...evaluating human knowledge and behavior into a bunch of 1 hour interview slots doesn't lead to much accurate information.
- foobarqux 12y agoBut no one seems to spend time on trying to figure out how to do it right or even how well the current methods perform.
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoStudying people is much harder than doing math proofs or experimenting with chemicals.
- foobarqux 12y agoI meant that corporations should be trying to figure this stuff out, not academics.
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoThey have the same problem as academics do, only without the benefit of being able to consistently apply the scientific method and good experimental practices (the only hope of cracking that nut).
- foobarqux 12y agoThe difference is they have lots of funding and a large monetary incentive to do the research.
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoTheir development teams have funding to build products, rarely do they have funding/resources/expertise to do "meta" research on processes.
- foobarqux 12y agoObviously you wouldn't fund it through the development team budget, it would be a corporate level initiative.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]