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Comment by klenwell | Hacker News Reader

Well stated. Bookmarked.

One additional bullet point I would add: Hiring.

If an isolated HR unit controls hiring and freezes the hiring managers and team out of the process, or effectively alienates them, you're wasting a huge amount of energy.

This is part of the methodology I try to weave into my organizations:

- A thoughtful and literate job posting, purged of gratuitous jargon, will accurately describe the job and foreshadow the company culture.

- Candidates will be evaluated using a simple quantitative assessment of core competencies (see Ch. 21 of Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow).

- Final decision will be a collective decision of the hiring team.

- After hiring cycle is complete, hiring team will hold a retrospective.

- We will acknowledge mistakes and work to correct them quickly and humanely.

https://wiki.klenwell.com/view/Hiring

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>Candidates will be evaluated using a simple quantitative assessment of core competencies.

I've tried implementing that with a coding take-home task, with "mixed results".

On-paper great candidates often refused.

On-paper good candidates made mistakes because they completed it very quickly, while mediocre candidates invested x10 the time and produced "better objective result".

Comparing code turned out to be much less straightforward or objective than I've anticipated: X handed great consistent well-commented code, but didn't null check inputs, Y covered all cases but left internal class implementation details public, and so on and so forth.

So, what is more effective than a talk home task?

I posit it's still the least bad way to evaluate a candidate. If a 'mediocre' candidate is able to complete the task well, they have still completed the task well.

And, IME, 'great' candidates, even with a storied resumes, can simply be good at self-advancement and job application as much as actual competent at their job.

So...how did you actually do in filling the role?

I don't care how someone looks on paper. Nor should you. Your process should optimize for people who are good at the job. You can look at all the negatives and try and guess "maybe that was a false negative!"...but who cares? What's your rate of true/false positives? That's the only data point you have; optimize for that.

In my case I got zero positives. It's easy to build an accurate classifier if recall is ignored. Not a single candidadte completed the task perfectly. Not hiring would be a failure for me.

If I remember correctly Kahneman said not to do this though and to just go by the quantitative evaluation you mentioned in the previous point. 'Final decision will be a collective decision of the hiring team'

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