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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

They do sound terrible and I hope to never encounter one, but my brother made a good point: the NHS get something like 12k applications per week, they have an average of 25k job openings each month. They apparently can't deal with that manually, which does make some sense.

I personally think they _should_ handle it manually, and if the system breaks we should fix it in another way because this way sucks, but I'm not sure what that would be. More consultancies or temp agencies? Not sure that's a better option.

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If a company isn’t willing or able to commit the appropriate resources to hiring, they should reduce their number of open positions, not look to technology to solve a self-created problem.

Assuming they don’t have the resources to give people a proper interview and vet a candidate, can you imagine the situation once those that do pass actually encounter on the job? I’d never work at a place that makes such kinds of decisions and it’s a good signal that the culture at the top of the company is completely broken.

Any company using one of these AI systems to combat attrition or justify growth is for sure a dumpster fire.

I agree. The AI hype helps with drinking their koolaids and let's hope this will cease soon. I'm not saying that there aren't good problems to solve with AI, but adopting it so readily on people while it is not working properly and while it is amounts to experimenting on people which is a terrible thing to do. I'm not for the AI winter but for the the end of AI hype.

> the NHS get something like 12k applications per week, they have an average of 25k job openings each month

That’s just a couple of applications per job. How can the line managers possibly not have time to review just a couple of applications per person they’re apparently going to be leading?

That's barely two applicants per opening? There is no way that's a technological problem.

12k apps for 25k job openings? So less than 1 app per job per week? Doesn't seem that challenging to deal with.

12k in a week. 25k in a month. So about 2:1.

Which NHS organisations in the UK are using automated video interviews?

I've done interviewing for a couple of NHS organisations, from band 6 positions all the way to very senior leadership, and automated interviews were not used and would not have been used by these organisations.

> the NHS get something like 12k applications per week,

It's not really "The NHS". It's a bunch of different companies. They each have their own corporate structure and boards of directors. They have their own HR teams that advertise and recruit to positions.

There were (in 2017) 207 clinical commissioning groups, 135 acute non-specialist trusts (including 84 foundation trusts), 17 acute specialist trusts (including 16 foundation trusts), 54 mental health trusts (including 42 foundation trusts), 35 community providers (11 NHS trusts, 6 foundation trusts, 17 social enterprises and 1 limited company), 10 ambulance trusts (including 5 foundation trusts), and 7,454 GP practices.

The largest is probably Barts Health NHS Trust, which employs about 15,000 people. The smallest is probably Weston Area Health NHS Trust which I think employs about 1,700 people.

You nailed it. Having encountered some of those kinds of agencies before—the other bad option seems better.

It just seems like we need to incentivize ourselves in the better direction all the incentives currently seem to lie in (at least what is coming to look like) the wrong places.

The answer is simple, but you're not gonna like it.

1) Set minimum qualifications

2) For everyone who passes step one, run a lottery

3) That's it

Most interview processes are about as good as a coin flip at determining if a candidate is a good fit. People are biased (especially people who think they're objective, which describes a lotnof hring managers), and so are the systems built on our decision-making. So, apply similar logic as to the kind that supports index fund investment: cut "people" out of the decision-making, and make the process faster and cheaper by relying on a simple set of objective criteria and the way risk distributes across a population.

> 1) Set minimum qualifications

This is where things will go south for most big organizations anyway. They don't know what they need, or they can't specify what they need, and often this part is done by someone other than the team that actually needs people. So you find jobs where the requirements are 3 years of experience with C# and at least BSc in comp sci while the team needs someone to work on embedded C & Ada and they couldn't give a shit about BSc (or any other degree for that matter), just that you can do the job.

Right, so then the question is if the other processes currently in place serve as mitigating factors to the inadequacy those qualifications present to the selection system's efficacy. I'd argue that they don't, in which case you're spending a lot more time and money for the same results.

If they do, then would fixing the qualification issue be less expensive than interviewing et al.? Again, assuming that you have a choice of similar outcomes at different price points.

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