Poor Predictors: Job Interviews Are Useless and Unfair | Hacker News Reader

Poor Predictors: Job Interviews Are Useless and Unfair

psychologytoday.com

33 pointsudev409640 comments

Interviewing is important. That said, I've worked at small companies (4 people) and large ones (30K+ people), and in my experience the overwhelming majority of candidates can be screened effectively by going through their resume with them and asking them simple questions, like:

1. What was the problem you were trying to solve? Why did you solve it this way?

2. If you were the decision maker, why did you choose this technology stack?

3. I see you have a lot of Python/Java/... experience. What do you like and dislike about about Python/Java/...?

No need to get into your hobbies and how you would invert a binary tree. Generally, neither of those are relevant questions.

Unless you're at FAANG and there is a line of amazingly qualified candidates out the door and around the corner, the above will effectively screen for competent software developers, assuming the interviewer is technically competent.

> No need to get into your hobbies

I know you are trying to be 'one of the good ones' by saying this, but my hobbies are significantly more interesting and reflective of my ability than the work I did collecting a paycheck by appeasing the frontend framework gods for some crapp that is long dead now.

And the people in charge of hiring with this "resume first" mentality will likely keep it that way.

Why does "previous employment" even play into the calculation of how my collaboration will help you achieve your goals?

If you think that your hobbies are a significant contributor to the role you are applying for, put it on your resume.

I'm sure that OP meant discussing things that are not directly on your resume or are tangibly related to the application/role and don't have any real merit in being discussed and/or add any real value in being discussed as most people's hobbies have nothing or little to do with their professional life.

As the article points out, we think we are making rational decisions, when in fact we are heavily influenced by subconscious biases. In particular, we favor people we like. That gives an edge to candidates that are friendly and attractive.

Since I am an introvert and on the autistic spectrum, traditional interviews are an uphill battle. Even reasonable ones like you describe.

>Since I am an introvert and on the autistic spectrum

Unfortunately interviews are a way for companies to also screen out people on the spectrum without committing legal discrimination.

A lot of employers are looking to hire more than just a silent machine that takes Jira tickets as input and outputs code to git, but people tend to hire other people who are similar to them in culture, behavior and personality (humans gonna human, tribal mentality is still deep in us) hence the semi-bullshit "culture fit".

Any kind of disability, especially the non-physical ones, are gonna work against you in most job interviews.

"Culture fit"

I am doing my PhD in Organizational Psychology so let me add here:

The title is misleading a bit. The predictor power of an interview changes as a company gets better at doing interviews.

What do I mean by getting better? (1) Asking the same questions (2) Having a BARS scale for scoring, which means you define the characteristics of a good response versus bad response before interviewing anyone (3) Interviewers received training to do this job impartially (4) Everyone on the interview panel agrees they don't make decisions just based on gut feeling! or saying I have a good feeling about this person!

To summarize, Interview is okay if it's done correctly - It's not great though but not doing interviews have its problems/biases too :)

"Interview is okay if it's done correctly"

IMHO and experience, it is rarely, if ever, done correctly. Most of the interview process now is a popularity contest, including how attractive you are, whether or not the team likes you, if you're physically fit, and a bread basket of other criteria that has very little to do with the actual job. And if you have a disability, it can be a dehumanizing and discriminatory process. It reminds me of orchestra selection, and how separating judgement of personal traits of a person (age, race, gender, etc.) from the "interview" process led to more diverse people selected for the orchestra.

Would it be better to move the interview process away from the team and the managers involved, and instead have a separate department do all of the interviewing and hiring? I think that could cut down on the popularity poisoning, but maybe also give people who have a disability but otherwise excellent skill set, a chance.

https://jamesboldin.com/2011/07/27/malcolm-gladwells-blink-p...

No. I have specific behavioral and technical traits I’m looking for when building a team. I want to be able to do the interviews

Popularity contest can be very rational though, when unpopular candidates that are winning in other metrics lead to your existing team looking elsewhere. Or worse: only the subset of your existing team that easily finds other employment.

That's how large corporations in non-knowledge work areas used to hire for decades. For knowledge work the results were not great, hence the new approach. It doesn't seem to be perfect either, so let's iterate. I have no clue how...

Lots of the big tech companies do interviews with randos first and then do a “team match” round if the candidate passes. I don’t see how it helps with disabilities.

I always hear job interviews are useless but do people really stand by that? If you had an interviewee with a bad interview and one with a good interview, you would feel confident hiring the one with the bad interview? If someone refused to interview, would you hire them because of their refusal like the article recommends? I don't know a single real life person that would consider this a good idea. This seems like a strange virtue signaling if people are going on the internet saying things and then doing the opposite.

No matter the structure of the interview, it will always come down to things we cannot control in the end.

1. You will have shit days and your brain will actively work against you, no matter how qualified you are for the job. If your interview happens to be on that day, well, it's just unfortunate.

2. Your interviewer also has shit days that actively work against them, no matter how many interviews they've given in the past to calibrate their expectations. If your interview happens to be on that day, well, just the one tiny slip-up, or mistake, or forgetting one simple test case, could mean they wrote you off, no matter how strong the rest of your interview went. When they leave feedback, it will frame your other interviews too. So yea, that's just unfortunate.

3. You were 1 day behind another candidate, who was interviewed and loved, after the company spent weeks searching for them. No matter how amazing you do, even hitting it out of the park, they likely already know they want the other person, and you are being interviewed as the backup should they reject the offer.

All we can do, is keep at it, practice interviewing, keep studying and try to sleep well the night before. We can clean up our appearances too, looking like we care to be here. There's definitely a difference between someone who walks into an interview, looking smug and uninterested, versus someone passionate about the role and excited to be part of the mission of the company. Those are the things we can control. Hopefully, with enough preparation, luck and timing, you get the job.

> The task is rendered even more difficult by the fact that most people lie in job interviews.

Woah what? Seriously?

Back when I was starting my career, I had an acquaintance tell me that "everyone lies" and to feel free to pad my resume, because "everyone does it" and if I didn't do it, then my overall impression will be discounted anyways down to below what my actual capabilities were.

I always chalked that up to him being a sales guy, so of course he's going to lie cheat and steal his way to the top, and insist that everyone should do the same.

When I have interviewed candidates, I can tell when someone has lied about something, because they can't talk through their process for doing the thing they claimed to have done. The details won't be there, and/or will be wrong. It's not common.

I don't put stuff on my resume that I can't speak to. Things I don't remember that well, I remove - no point in putting down stale skills that you're going to get dinged on.

On the other hand - Psychology Today as a source of such things has been known to post articles like this on topics which have been roundly debunked in the field. So this could also be one of those bad opeds.

Seems like an obvious case of "shades of grey" vs a binary thing.

Most people don't blatantly lie and claim they were the CEO of Apple. But does a random mid-level engineer at Apple slightly exaggerate their role on a team during an interview? Subjective, but likely very common.

Plus, many jobs are almost intractable to appropriately assign value to. If you were one of 5 people pitching a deal to a company, and it works, who's to say which person was the key to success? All 5 people might truly believe that they were the reason the deal closed and take credit for it in future interviews.

This is apparently what was cited.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0021-9029....

Interesting stuff.

I have taken a course in interviewing when I was trying to get jobs. The techniques presented were all but asking to be deceived as all of the signs of trustworthiness had nothing to do with actual trustworthiness and had to do with playing them off, subtle mirroring of mannerisms, and similar. When you start asking for things that like or things that people can't truly control like "enthusiasm" or "confidence" regardless of your stated intents what you are really selecting for is bullshitters, as natural chance of a match up is the distant competitor

Companies invest so much time and resources in screening because the of a suboptimal or unqualified employee is far greater than the benefit of a good employee. A poor fit employee is a major drag.

Sorry no, that's why you have a trial/probation period even in Europe, ranging from a month to a couple of years when you can fire them without any cause or severance.

It's precisely so you can gauge their performance on the job without any risk to the employer.

So what's the issue here?

But companies are being needlessly pedantic about only wanting to hire "the best of the best" and nothing else will suffice as if they're all working on problems the scale of Google or Astra Zeneca.

Here's a recent article saying that "EU jobs crisis as employers say applicants don't have the right skills"[1].

Well then, train them or be more flexible since people can also learn and train themselves if you give them the chance. No candidate will have 100% math to the skills you want.

[1] https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/04/08/eu-jobs-crisis-...

This would be great. It's odd to me that we in the US get the worst of both worlds: despite at-will employment laws and almost no employment contracts, it's difficult to get hired because companies are so afraid of bad hires, and companies don't exercise their right to fire people who don't work out.

We hire like it's hard to fire people!

>We hire like it's hard to fire people!

I think you're quite mistaken here.

Come to Europe and see, the job market is basically frozen, while people on HN say in the US they have so many jobs options right now that they can be picky about only choosing the ones with 100% WFH, while here I can't even get replies to jobs demanding commute to the office every day.

You don't know how good you have it over there.

Things are rapidly changing in the US. Getting a high paying 100% WFH job only a very small percentage of folks can land. The rest are sitting in (hours of) traffic or on a dangerous underfunded pub trans system to get to work every day.

>Getting a high paying 100% WFH job

Who said anything about high pay? A lot of people, me included would trade pay for the ability to 100% WFH which si much more abundant in the US than in some of EU.

And in US employment is at-will, no? What exactly is the risk for a company? Rogue employee stealing IP? Any employee can do that already. Can't fire a low performer? We just saw more 300k people in the industry let go in 2022/2023/2024. And at-will, trial period already exist.

If anything the risk is for the employee. But if companies stop trying to be Google and stick to their actual level of prestige, employees wouldn't have to do a multi week/month interviewing marathon just to get a foot in the door, and it balances out, easy to get your foot in another door.

I don't know if it's cargo culting, ego, or what, but non of the hiring practices so many companies carry out make sense. Pick top 10 resumes, spend 2h interviewing each, offer 3 month trial or at-will hire/fire your top pick. Saved you 50-100k in recruiter costs.

>What exactly is the risk for a company?

Maybe getting sued if they fire candidates fitting DEI or other protected class?

That's a reasonable assumption. I wonder if it's really going to hold up in court though. Basically wouldn't that imply once a non-white, non-male is hired you're basically with a high probability asking to be sued if you ever terminate their employment? That seems too broad to hold up in court. Couldn't the company say this person failed to meet expectations, so we decided to part ways? But, yeah, sure that's a risk, but idk if that's the real reason companies have all these hoops in their hiring process.

Most cases are resolved out of court, for a multitude of reasons. One being damage to public reputation and employee morale.

There is a lot of harm:

1. In order to get a job, a person need to quit one. If there is a risk (in form of trial period), why to accept such an offer? As result, best candidates pass, or at least stick to existing positions longer. Or pay raise must be more significant.

2. Reputational harm: read about Amazon's hire-to-fire practice. And try to guess, why a lot of people do not consider employment with Amazon.

3. Work harm: any new employee is investment. It has to be onboarded, and it is a heavy load for the accepting team.

Of course, it heavily depends on the job market segment. I know software eng. only. If most candidates are unemployed, trial period could be a blessing. In the current market, why would I even apply (and spend my time on the interview?

I think both sides bear responsibility here. If you can't work well with someone you dislike, then _you're_ the one with a gap in your professionalism.

Make a contract with probation time (from 2 weeks to 3 months) and bam, no major drag.

Don't all contract already have probation time by default?

No contract has anything globally "by default" unless it's written or strictly imposed by a law of the location.

Nobody has mentioned ATS yet. For one, it's totally opaque to the applicants. Second, it's an egregious from of discrimination for the sole purpose of laziness. If a company won't even look at your resume if it's missing some silly programs. It eliminates all critical thinking and causes non traditional background applicants to be ignored. Not to mention that whoever sets the ATS rules could share them with select people to give unfair advantage.

Title is clickbait.

Tldr of the article: don't do unstructured interviews, do structured ones.

Out of interest, do any companies review the people they have hired 6/12 months later vs how they did on the interview?

And not interviewing is worse than useless and extremely unfair.

Isn't much of the unfairness just because most not-interview recruitment they skip it in favor of people who they know through connections? How would interviewing be less fair than say, using a civil service exam or similar?

What more appropriate technique could you want, when you need to screen for a position that is itself useless, in an unfair employment environment?

"In ten years, I see myself living in a world without job interviews."

lol, not gonna happen.

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