Comment by keiretsu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keiretsu | Hacker News Reader

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it's called probability. It just depends on how you define a good employee and a bad employee and based on that definition, you can prepare a hiring program and test if that program works.

Almost all successful companies have some sort of verifiable hiring programs. facebook has their puzzles as a screener test. It is not a universal test but it helps. If you are able to solve the puzzles, there should be a higher probability that you are a better employee to the company than someone who can't solve the puzzles.

All they need to do is verify if those puzzles are good at screening good hires. If yes, well done then. They've got themselves a great hiring tool.

I'm not asking for the one almighty test that can screen if an employee is good or bad. I'm asking for tests that can help in increasing the probability of hiring good employees. For eg. for a sales job, you absolutely have to do a personality test. If the test indicate that you are introverted and have bad people skills, that you are not likely to be a good hire. Is the personality test a universal test? No, it's not. But it helps.

Here's your fundamental problem. It's a logical fallacy.

You observe that a good employee is likely to have a high IQ. From this, you conclude that a bad employee is likely to have a low IQ, and that a person with a high IQ is likely to be a good employee.

The truth of a proposition does not imply the truth of the converse of the proposition (A - B does not imply B - A) or of the contrapositive of the proposition (A - B does not imply !B - !A).

Further, no company has a verifiable screening program, because they can't evaluate how good the people they screened out were. Suppose a company has a screening program that rejects 90% of candidates completely at random. They then choose their hires from the other 10%, using other means. As long as they get good hires in sufficient quality and quantity, they will believe that the screening program is effective. They have no way of evaluating the people rejected by the screening program.

Do you know what those tests are designed to do? Those tests are designed to narrow 3000 resumes to 300. That's it. After that, you still need to find your person from a pool of 300.

With a hot job market and hiring from (I presume) a no-name startup, you'll be lucky to get 300 hires to sift through. Even more important, those test eliminate some high quality performers. Facebook has a management staff already, and enough money that this is less of a concern.

You on the other hand, would do well to keep every door open. You can't afford to miss that diamond in the rough.

er. that's the point of this topic. i'm asking for tests to narrow down the pool of interviewees and screen out the bad ones so i do not have to waste my time to interview them. why wouldn't they want to join my company when i'm going to pay them 50% above market rate?

Umm, that's exactly the approach that I wouldn't use an IQ or other standardized test for. If you screen based on IQ or SAT or whatever, you will miss out on good candidates, often candidates who might be critical to the success of your business.

If I have 5 candidates who all have the relevant skills, useful work experience, a strong track record, cultural fit, etc, then I might be willing to differentiate them by test score. If one of them scored 1600 on his SATs and the others were 1200-1300, sure, I'll take the perfect guy. They're probably all qualified anyways, no harm in taking the one who's more qualified.

But I absolutely would not institute a minimum test score and only accept applicants above that level. Because too many of the best programmers I know had SAT scores in the 1200-1400 level, and too many folks with perfect SAT scores turn out to be terrible workers. I wouldn't be selecting for anything relevant to my business, I'd just chop out many candidates who might've been a good choice.

If you want to narrow the pool, include a programming problem with the application. Throw out everything that doesn't compile, run, or give the correct answer - that'll cut out most of the chaff right there. Look through the solutions and only invite the people whose code is clean and elegant for an interview. That'll give you far more relevant results. Plus, the very fact that you have an interesting programming challenge tends to attract top developers. One of the defining characteristics of a top developer is that they like challenge.

Hell, you could even make it a part of the application form and check the results automatically. No manual intervention required.

Because they realize that there's more to happiness than money, especially in a job where you spend at least 1/3 of your waking time?

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