This makes me think of the (most likely apocryphal) story of the hiring manager faced with a huge stack of resumes.
He divides the stack in half, and tosses the top half in the trash. "We don't want to hire those people. They're terribly unlucky."
He divides the stack in half, and tosses the top half in the trash. "We don't want to hire those people. They're terribly unlucky."
Therefore, they're mostly luck.
They mean qualified engineers. There are a lot of completely clueless applicants for every programming job out there. The lack of formal certification sure doesn't help with that.
You don't want people to delight in the prospect of working with one of your competitors. That's far, far worse than just missing out on hiring them and never getting a second shot.
There is also, I think, a false economy in having one person talk to an individual on their own. There is no one to see how that interaction goes. If I were in a protected class, you've also created a liability for yourself by having nobody to corroborate an exchange.
We are trying to make an inherently expensive process cheap and we are breaking everything in the process. We didn't fix deployments by doing fewer of them. Why do we think we're going to fix the onboarding process by avoidance? Finding and training people is part of building a team, which is necessary to build a product. If you have a bunch of people pushing back on the obvious parts, they're probably pushing back on the rest of it too, making little empires for themselves at the expense of their peers, the product, and the company.
We used to use referrals instead of cattle calls to fix this problem, but we don't like the kinds of hiring biases this brings in and so we threw the baby out with the bathwater. Now we have all of the worst, dehumanizing attributes of a lottery system, and not really many benefits from doing so.
Probably what we are all not learning from this decades long experiment is that if you haven't solved your diversity problem before you are famous enough to have an embarrassment of riches in your inbox, then you never will. Everything that comes after is a series of rear-guard actions trying to replace bad decisions with less bad ones, failing as often as succeeding, and justifying your arbitrary decisions as more merciful than the alternative, when in fact you mean more merciful for yourself.
Right now, for instance, I've been keeping my eye on José Valim (Elixir), because I have a suspicion that his team may have cracked that nut already, or soon will.
Variations:
"The way we hire traders is we don't hire unlucky ones."
"The most important thing in sales is selling yourself."
Followed by unceremonious dump into bin.
It'd be either based on the file-name when they were all printed, or the order they came in, or based on some weird method the printer uses, but they'd be some implicit order.
So the candiates were unlucky, it's just the hiring manager couldn't be bothered to think about the biases... oddly relevant when talking about managers out-sourcing their racism/classism/agism/sexism/elitism/whateverism to AI.
"This will go down in your permanent record" comes to mind.
I can't believe stack ranking ever caught on.
Your bottom-most Harvard PhD is unlikely to find himself in the top 10% when mixed into a general population because other human factors come into play, not the least of which is it's incredibly time consuming to review and re-rank every person. So managers tend to leave people where they landed because fatigue eventually sets in.
This in turn inspires other behaviors that are not really what the designer envisioned. For example one manager used to carry around a book of every mistake other teams made: if anyone challenged the ranking of one of his employees he'd start firing off potshots at the other manager's org. Needless to say his rankings were left alone. The irony is not lost on me that this manager eventually left to start a company that allegedly uses AI somehow to help people identify the best candidates. He spent his days subverting a system meant to measure employee performance and now claims expertise in finding the best performing employees.
The question is whether it's ever possible to devise an accurate measure of value quantitatively. Even if your job is press the red button, a person with low numbers might be such an inspiration to the team that everyone else works 15% faster, more than making up for their shortcoming. And you can't possibly anticipate all such factors in advance.
Unless every employee does the exact same work your ranking system will never be accurate. The difference in the difficulty of jobs will dominate the difference in competence.
The fact that the practice is immediately visible as stupid does not stop real companies from adopting it.
Given a pile of CVs
Read approximately 40% of them (actually 1/e, or ~0.368)
Dump that 40%
Select the first candidate that is better than the ones you have just dumped
It is possible to review all the CVs and then decide which one to pick.
While there is a short time window in which multiple candidates might be evaluated, this approach is pretty close to the assumptions of the secretary problem.
You may not have been at an organization with a policy that unfilled positions after X time get removed. When you get close to the end of the time, there's pressure to hire someone, even if they're not great, because otherwise you'll lose the position.
On the other hand, I have had a case where someone was not hired for a position, and then later was asked to interview for a different position with the same hiring manager, and was hired for that.
1. Should always insist on a first phone interview
2. Ask the hiring manager why he believes that you are a good match for the position.