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A decent way to normalize this effect is to take relatively detailed notes of the exchanges, and make the decision a few hours or a day later rereading the notes.

One of the issues we had interviewing very young candidates (like fresh out of college) was how they all looked awkward, even in their outfit, and few had any kind of confidence during the 15~20 min we spent with them, with some saying really weird things (stuff like "I'm really good at the internet"). But obviously non of that matters long term, we assumed they'd probably all fit in fine once in. Putting some distance and picking up the good and bad stuff from the transcript helped a lot to get past the weird impressions, including the order we saw them and how tired we were when we saw them. To some point.

>a few hours or a day later rereading the notes.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.52

>The durability of anchoring effects

>Recent research suggests that judgmental anchoring is mediated by a selective increase in the accessibility of knowledge about the judgmental target. Anchoring thus constitutes one instance of the judgmental effects of increased knowledge accessibility. Such knowledge accessibility effects have repeatedly been demonstrated to be fairly durable, which suggests that the effects of judgmental anchoring may also persist over time. Consistent with this assumption, three experiments demonstrate that judgmental anchors influence judgment even if they were present one week before the critical judgment is made. In fact, the magnitude of anchoring was found to remain undiminished over this period of time.

Thanks, that was pretty interesting.

I didn't get access to the full text, but had a look at other papers from the same researcher [0] on what kind of methodology they use.

In the case of recruiting, I think the main factor when moving the decision further down the line is the change in information ("a selective increase in the accessibility of knowledge about the judgmental target"), in two specific ways:

- we actually remember less about the subject, for better or worse. A candidate might have had a weird look, and the notes are probably impacted by that bias, but we can look back at their coding test without that impression and come out with a slightly different conclusion.

- we get to compare to other subjects in a different order. In particular, that helps catching weird expectations. For instance if every candidates has been falling through the same trap, it helps give them a pass and assume the question was at fault. If we had to do that in real time, only the last few ones would get a kinder judgement.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11394075_The_Mallea...

> Coding test

*shudders

I've never had such a thing but many years ago, not long out of university, in my previous career as an electronics engineer I was asked to design a simple amplifier before the interview proper. The interviewer explained, slightly apologetically, at the end of the interview that he did this just to sort out those who were good at talking but didn't have a thorough grounding in the basics from those who were well grounded but perhaps not so good at blowing their own trumpet. I was pleased to find that I passed that part with flying colours :-)

But I would not want such things to be taken very seriously unless you trying to fill a very narrowly defined post because it is all to easy to create a test that a good candidate would fail.

I think they're very valuable if the position requires any coding at all.

In particular very simple tests (like an API interface, or reversing a string etc.) done in any language they feel comfortable is are usually a trove of info about the candidate. The result doesn't really matter, it doesn't need to run, it doesn't need to be complete, as long as you got to hear a lot about how the candidate thinks, how he moves through the problem, and how much they can write something basic, what they're confident in and what they're not used to do etc.

which makes sense, if someone made an impression on you that impression doesn't disappear in just a few days. At best it may be fuzzier, which could be good or bad.

I think the problem is you are still going to write your notes down with increasing negativity.

Interestingly enough, yes, but you also understand it reading the notes. For instance they become sparser and sparser, or tendencies arise.

I would compare it to reviewing one's code a few hours later. We're still in a similar mindset, but there's a bit more distance, and we also catch the bits that don't make sense when reading back afterwards. That works even better when exchanging notes afterwards.

Did you hire? Did they work out?

Yes, we hired a few that stood out. They were indeed kinda weird for a few months, some got blander afterwards and some stood a lot more, but all in all they were meeting the bar we had in mind, and the ones that really grew weren't those we expected at first.

In particular we had people who's surface personality were completely different from what we perceived during the interview. Not in any way that made it hard to work with them, but moving from university to a corporate environment was just enough of a gap to change their behavior in significant ways. I think hiring fresh graduates is way harder in that respect, and we were happy to have some flexibility in the work culture. One of the guy moved from a super rural area to be thrown into the megalopolis, and it was a real journey, we had the funniest late to work excuses ("couldn't find my bike cause I parked it near the neighbor's house and he moved it in their garage thinking it was his son's" -- later found his house had a bike parking behind the building)

What I learned in my years as proposal manager was that it is always best to get the first slot amongst the other bidders for your presentation and the last for the negotiation.

I remember while hiring for a new team member commenting about the first candidate that we interviewed that if we had seen him later in the sequence we likely would have hired him but coming first, he just seemed “ok.”

Here's a study by someone from Kellogg university on this very subject:

https://www.jcr-admin.org/preprints/chernev-preprint.pdf

>Semantic Anchoring in Sequential Evaluations of Vices and Virtues

>How do people evaluate sequentially presented items? Prior research suggests that sequential evaluations are subject to anchoring biases, such that the values of subsequently evaluated alternatives are assimilated toward the initially considered option. The present research argues, however, that sequential valuations often lead to contrast rather than assimilation effects, whereby values of the subsequently estimated alternatives are distanced from the initially evaluated option. These contrast effects are attributed to semantic anchoring, which stems from evaluating conceptually related options classified into opposing categories (e.g., vices and virtues).

Seems like any mathematician interviewing candidates would know the secretary problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem) and thus going first would be the worst option.

Fortunately real world employers usually don't have to hire on the spot.

The secretary problem only applies if you have to reject candidates before you’ve interviewed them all. Specifically it’s formulated as each candidate needs to be either accepted or rejected immediately after their interview.

That situation obviously doesn’t apply if you’re interviewing many candidates on the same day and comparing them to each other. As a result to optimal strategy for the secretary problem also doesn’t apply.

What's the conventional wisdom for something like a demo day? Try to go first?

Their recommendation was to either be first or last. I guess my own twist is you don't have to be the very first or last—you have to be great and to try not to be right in the middle of the pack.

But above all, do well and don't overthink this stuff as there's no scientific rigor. It doesn't help to be first or last and suck at it.

Seems like you could interview half the candidates and get a lot of time back.

Or none of them because you already had an internal hire ready in the wing anyway.

Kellog, as in cornflakes?

no, as in the Kellogg School of Management

(how) do you (try to) correct for this with interviews?

Someone's bound to mention it in this thread (or I hope they do, because I thought it was great but can't remember the name or the details) - but there's some formula that's roughly like:

  N = total applicants
  1. Interview N/10, decline no matter what 
  2. Hire the next person who's better than everyone seen so far

As I recall it was slightly more complex than that, perhaps only to give it an impression of being rigorous theory, but that was the gist of it.

I think you're looking for the Secretary problem. And the solution is almost what you said, but instead of N/10 it's a bit over N/3.

This only applies if you have to make a hire/skip decision immediately after each interview and can't go back later. (The formulation I usually see is a princess choosing a suitor — for pride/face reasons, she can't pass on a suitor and then go back if it turns out he was the best of the bunch.) That's not typically how job interviews work, though.

I think the magic number is 1/e of the applicant pool (e = Napier's constant, 2.7...)

That mathematical problem (the secretary problem) is often cited, but it's not how real hiring works. The problem defines the only success criterion as hiring the single top candidate, and everything else fails. That's not at all what you're looking for in the real world - there are a spectrum of results, where any one in the top decile will be great and the next decile only slightly lesser and so on.

One-dimensional ranking is one aspect of how it breaks in real-world hiring, but I think almost the bigger might be that the secretary problem assumes you need to decide immediately and can't just wait around until you've seen the whole batch of applicants.

The main difference is that you're trying to solve the problem of turning an interview into a way to choose between candidates, while the secretary problem assumes you already figured that out and is trying to solve something different entirely!

This is the secretary problem [1] from optimal stopping theory, but it doesn't apply to hiring because you can wait until the end to make a decision once you've seen everyone.

The main problem here indicated by OP isn't explore/exploit, it's that the ordering of candidates seemingly distorts their rating of them.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

Aka 37% rule

now to make it interesting, place the middle candidates right after lunch to see if having lunch improves the middle stretch

Interesting.

Do you have any explanation for that ?