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Comment by hogFeast | Hacker News Reader

Describing your recruiting process as a random variable...wut? Does the hiring manager make decisions randomly? Someone calls up, the hiring manager gets out the lucky 8-ball, and it comes out "give a 29th percentile recruiting interview", and the manager just straps on the Biggles goggles to bomb the candidate. Why even say that to someone who is pissed off with your recruiting process? Just don't say anything.

As you say, it is very hard to attribute a bad recruiting process to something that is non-structural...no matter how many thousands of people you hire.

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>Describing your recruiting process as a random variable

Anyone who can do anything with zero variation should definitely drop what they are doing now and make it their new business.

I think what GP is trying to say is that your hiring process is within your control (especially this far in the pipeline), so even the worst candidate experience should fall above some baseline. You don't get much sympathy if you say "that baseline turns out to be absolute gobshite at the first percentile, sorry."

The other reply explained this but imagine you bought a soda, and you drank it and it turned out to be rat piss. You call up the company: my soda was full of rat piss. Their reply: "Oh yes, we sell lots of sodas, you couldn't possibly understand how much soda we sell so rat piss soda is a seven sigma event...bye".

If you are in software, recruiting is your business. You have no other real assets. So categorising your hiring process as a random variable makes no sense. You should have processes in place that ensure non-randomness...again, is Coca-Cola out there selling tons of rat piss, and just saying: "Tough luck guys, this is a hard business"...no. If you don't have processes to ensure that outcomes in the core parts of your business are not random, you don't have a business (I used to work as an equity analyst, I have heard this kind of thing from CEOs over and over...I never recommended investing in such business, I have never seen a company that was run that way succeed).

People report even more clear cut events regarding food products than your example, even. You know, like rat parts. Sometimes they may be hoaxes or urban legends. Not necessarily all the time.

I've seen odd things first hand with processed food from the grocery store. I've bought sealed packages of food that were all dried out and stale. Or that looked fine but gave me...indigestion. The weirdest thing I've seen recently were some mints where some of them randomly were solid chocolate, no filling. Oh, and a frozen dessert had a sealed cardboard box, but the plastic covering inside was open.

How does that sort of variation happen? I'd imagine that the better your process is, and the less variation you have, the larger proportion of your failures will be "unknown unknowns" that are just weird.

I acknowledge the conclusion that the interview process is f-ed up could well be correct.

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