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Comment by rudolf0 | Hacker News Reader

Well, for one, you can hide contact info from a resume (which is still stored in a system somewhere, with a unique ID).

And you can also make the early stages of your interview email or text-chat based (or just a Google Doc, like some companies do), to eliminate any potential bias in things that can be inferred from voice like accent, region, and gender.

Obviously once they're on-site for an interview, you can't anonymize much anymore, but anonymizing every stage before that seems like a win-win to me (excluding potential costs of implementing the system).

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It's difficult. I remember coming out of school, employers tried to anonymize for various things, especially with respect to things like race. Black students would, in an anonymized resume with contact info removed for example, state that they were "Treasurer for the Black Students Association" or "NAACP Volunteer", or things to that effect.

My point is that I think that an Asian person, applying to a company known to be favorable toward Asians in hiring, would signal their ethnicity somehow in their resume. At least, that would be the smart play for that person.

Build a loop into the workflow for "You're insufficiently anonymous, resubmit", with a special way to enter "significant award/position/membership with deanonymizing title, X level of prestige/selectivity/membership"? Might be valuable anyway so you don't accidentally get peoples' personal biases into play - different people will weight "NAACP award" very differently.

If you anonymize it and make it completely chat based how do you make sure that the person you are chatting with is really the applicant and not someone else?

You'd need a third party that you both trust. If you both don't trust anyone, there are ways around that too...

Blockchain for hiring/interviews?

Blockchain + machine learning

http://www.experian.com/decision-analytics/identity-and-frau...

Well, I can tell the way sentences are formed in many cases if I'm dealing with a native speaker or not.

Would you kindly do the willingly and explain how? :)

You mean do the needful?

Maybe add </s> next time, although the smiley should have been a dead giveaway.

It's pretty easy, but also pretty rough - if you're good, you can certainly distinguish between an American, a British or an Indian English-speaking person writing.

I could be missing the mark here, but I'm pretty sure you were replying to satire. Based on the grammar used and smiley face.

Explaining the human brain's ability to pattern match will take more than a few sentences.

But whether someone is a native speaker is a trait that someone can legally and rightfully discriminate over. It's perfectly reasonable to reject someone if you think their English skills aren't sufficiently good. It's not reasonable or legal to reject them just because they were born in a different country.

I find it pretty easy to distinguish between people educated in the US and those not educated in the US after a fairly small sample of writing.

Interesting. Any telltale signs? I'm assuming it's not the difference between native English speaker and ESL, but specific words or grammar patterns? Can you tell from my comment history whether I was educated in the US?

I spent <5 minutes on it. I'd guess that you're not US educated (or at least not a native US English speaker).

The "tell" that I'm primarily relying upon is that you often drop articles where a US-native speaker would use them. Just one example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13197570 (that was as far back as I went) I think most native US speakers would use "the gun industry" and "the film industry". Several later comments drop an "an" or "a" article as well.

You also have a habit of using a comma splice rather than a semi-colon to join sentences, but that one is harder to place geographically, as it's a somewhat common trait within the US as well. In my experience, it is often a trait of European native speakers who learned English as a second language, but is less reliable than dropped articles.

Dropped articles is a good indicator of (most) Slavic language speakers, but not of most European languages. E.g., French would not have dropped those definite articles either.

Definite article rules do vary a little bit, though, so extra definite articles would be a good indicator of European native speakers...

Correct on both counts, although it's not quite clear how much of the difference is from place of education rather than native language. Math is the same no matter where you study it, at least in theory. Probably need a bigger sample.

That was an incredibly obvious example. My favorite telltale sign for native English speakers is the rampant misspelling of trivialities like it(')s, you(')r(e), etc. I've seen so many well educated peers fail at basic grammar, or misspelling common words (e.g. electrisity, from a CS undergrad) that I'm comfortable making this generalization.

My favorite sign for native English speakers is "could of" instead of "could have"/"could've".

I have never witnessed that mistake with non native English speakers.

The question was not whether I'm a native English speaker (obviously not), but whether I was educated in the US. I believe the latter is a much harder question.

communication skills and personality can be really integral to the hiring process. many would rather have a good communicator than a slightly better engineer. your way removes this.

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