Automated Job Rejection | Hacker News Reader

Automated Job Rejection

economicpopulist.org

42 pointsrazzmataz40 comments

There is a moderately interesting point to be made here that automated candidate screening software is not a panacea, and while it can do a good job of filtering through the hundreds or thousands of applicants that might materialize for a single post, it might cause you to miss out on a good fit.

On the other hand, this article is laden with so much hyperbolic moralizing that it makes me take almost none of it seriously.

One of SeatGeek's founders (where I work) has written repeatedly about the insane problem of managing job applications [http://jackg.org/screening-with-an-arbitrary-test]. This is not a self-inflicted wound. We're talking dozens to hundreds of actually unqualified applicants for individual jobs, and the idea that a 15 person company is going to carry someone around for 6 months while they're "trained" is ludicrous.

It is absolutely true that there is a skills-gap in some industries. [Software is one of them]

It is absolutely true that a bad hire is more expensive than a non-hire.

It is absolutely true that some HR departments are breath-takingly incompetent, although most have a pretty good handle on their needs and cost structures, to be perfectly honest.

All that said, trying to spin this into a "the corporations are destroying the country!" story is beyond idiocy.

But they're not talking about startups. They're talking about large corporations that could sustain training of new employees.

Maybe it's easier and less costly to find someone who's already qualified than to determine whether someone is capable of being trained, and then train them.

As it happens, big companies already have to train even the most qualified new employees, because they usually have developed complicated internal cultures and systems. Training someone in basic qualifications on top of that is a big ask.

One of the few employers who does that is the military, and they often spend years training people. On the other side of that, officers who receive lots of training are usually legally obligated to serve the military for several years. Though even a basic enlisted man will spend maybe 1/2 to 1/4 of his first four-year enlistment in training.

At-will employment makes that kind of contract impossible in the private sector. So not only is it a big ask for companies to train unqualified people, it's an even bigger ask for them to do so knowing that as soon as those trainees are qualified, they can and often will jump ship to another company.

That might be a risk companies are willing to bear if they're badly in need of qualified folks and can get a competitive advantage that way. I'm generally more sympathetic to an actual business case to that effect rather than vague, entitled complaints about corporate America.

Assuming you're right, who cares? Why must large corporations train employees if they don't feel it's in their best interests?

If you're talking about the social contract... who is supposed to train employees? It's certainly the case currently that the US workforce bears the burden of training itself currently often by taking on substantial debt to afford a college degree.

But to say that companies that operate in the US don't have a substantial interest in ensuring that the US has a trained and skilled work force... that just seems dangerously short sighted.

Companies have an interest in there being a trained and skilled work force -- which is why they lobby for the government to spend tax dollars on education and training.

There's no inconsistency between it not being advantageous for companies to spend their own money training people and it being advantageous for companies to spend everybody's money training people.

Employees could pay for their own training, and receive a wage premium for their trouble? That's what happens now, and it seems to work well.

The only real issue is that the education establishment seems to sell a lot of low quality training that doesn't provide much in the way of job skills. But that's an issue with the educational establishment, not with the purchasers of skilled labor.

(warning: anecdote ahead)

I once had a job at a large institution created, for me, with requirements based solely on my resume.

The automated HR system decided I wasn't a match for the job. It took a month or two for them to be able to hire me after that fiasco.

I hope that they replaced or repaired the automated system. How did it turn out?

Admittedly, this was a few years back, so I'd expect it's been replaced, improved, etc.

But it all worked out for me in the end – I had a number of years of good employment, working for an awesome boss.

I don't know anything about your specific case (obviously) but what you describe isn't necessarily a bad thing. In some organizations, one of the rules of HR is to add a level of corporate sanity-checking to a process which is otherwise driven by individual managers -- by creating additional unstated requirements if necessary.

To take an extreme case, if Bob the VP of Sales decides he wants to create a "Senior Engineer III" position with a salary of $300k/year based on requirements drawn from his 13 year old nephew's resume, it's entirely appropriate for HR to add an unpublished "should have education or work experience suitable for a $300k/year job" requirement and not accept Bob's 13 year old nephew as a match for the job.

No system is perfect, but that doesn't mean that it's wrong to have such systems in place.

I totally get your point – checks and balances are important. However, I don't think anyone is helped by unstated or invisible requirements. It speaks to a high level of mistrust of employees and candidates.

Now, if HR were to explicitly add those requirements and be open about it, I'd wager it'd still keep fraud down while also actually improving the hiring process for both HR and the hiring manager.

Fraud is a difficult problem to deal with -- the more open you are about what you're doing to prevent it, the more you speed up the "evolution" of better (aka. worse) fraud.

Whether that effect is large enough to justify the lack of transparency in this case, I don't know; but I'm sure there are some cases where it is appropriate.

(Marginally related: This is why I have some sympathy for Paypal when they say "this payment is suspect" and refuse to provide any more information -- they can't tell me why a particular payment set off alarms without also telling the bad guys how to evade their alarms.)

No, it's really not when you constrain who the possible perpetrators are and consider that they must be long-term, more senior employees. Fraud by higher ranking employees – particularly managers involved in the creation of job descriptions and doing hiring is just not going to be that common.

It certainly isn't going to be common enough that it's worth destroying internal trust and credibility when open (within company) reviews and sufficient internal control mechanisms that didn't include hidden manipulation of candidate hiring could do an equivalent job without reducing the organization's ability to hire stellar candidates (not that I'm biased, given my case, of course =)

I mean, it may well happen, but all sorts of unlikely events may happen and yet would similarly be problematic to keep constant protection for. It's all about the risk/reward analysis and, in this case, I believe you've calculated that incorrectly.

How about the fact that none of these employers even have the courtesy to contact the applicant at all? I'm not talking only about unsolicited resumes sent to H/R managers, but job applications submitted through the big websites like Dice, Monster, and Careerbuilder. Not even a "we'll keep you on file" like the old days.

I'm half-tempted to make a shame board to let applicants tally up how many unanswered candidates each company has.

but but but.... everyone would sue the company because they didn't get the job!

At least, that's the argument I've heard from HR people as to why applicants aren't contacted back. However... whether you contact me or not, I still don't have the job, and if I'm inclined to sue, I'll do it regardless of whether you show me basic courtesy or not.

You're two steps ahead of where I am.

I'm talking about a basic acknowledgement that the resume was received. An email like this would suffice:

"Hello. Thanks for applying to FooCorp. We're currently processing resumes in the order they are received. If you meet our needs and we're interested, we'll be in touch within 4-6 weeks."

The fact that the job sites don't even enable this kind of tracking and behavior is, frankly, very disappointing.

I've had firms contact me to tell me they've passed me over for consideration ... for positions I've never applied for. Apparently even rejecting various pseudonyms I've generated.

Which I suppose is the flipside of your situation.

Wow, that's just bizarre. Are you sure you don't have a resume active on some random job board that's continually getting sent out?

One of me does have a publicly posted resume. I've given some thought to seriously trimming what it reveals.

Others of me have public profiles, sans resume: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/33WYAgFc...

The more I hear about these stupid HR systems, the more I see manipulating them as a matter of good SEO.

It's a system that rewards people that stuff keywords - effectively echoing the job requirements and adding the industry's buzzwords. It's also a system that rewards people who take a shotgun approach to applications, rather than individually crafted responses.

Ripe for exploitation I'd say.

> It's also a system that rewards people who take a shotgun approach to applications, rather than individually crafted responses.

One of the main purposes of these systems is to deal with the massive amount of shotgun applications that companies are receiving. Of course, this means that more targeted applications do not receive the consideration they deserve, thereby incentivising job seekers to use a shotgun approach.

Sounds like a vicious cycle to me.

While any keyword filtering regime can be exploited, as apparent by the SEO cottage industry enabled by Google Pagerank, et al, I still find the underlying question unresolved of whether such filtering is ultimately useful to would-be employers.

That is, are employers wanting appropriately skilled candidates, or are they wanting individuals who happen to exceptionally savvy to the flavor of 'SEO' used by headhunters? One can't assume these groups will always overlap.

I think the automated resume filtering systems are interesting. Previous stories, about how to hire people, have told how the nice people involved in hiring did the exact thing these systems do, only manually. They take a big stack of resumes and filter 95% straight into the trash, based on some arbitrary rules.

I don't like the idea of these automated systems, but I also don't see how this is any different.

I've used an automated resume filtering systems in the past. They worked quite well. I'd absolutely do it again.

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/one_hiring_filter_tha...

It certainly did filter quite a few people straight to the trash, based mainly on an inability to fizzbuz.

Just got hired to make software that ranks candidates based on more dynamic qualities, like the ability to answer basic logic problems or complete a task that the job may require. Could be cool.

I don't want to be mean or anything ( and probably it will go against the HN crowd) but you're part of the problem. Basically it's the reliance on computerized system to assess somebody's skills that is at the root of the problem.

I know it seems horrendous to a lot of people that thinks that computers are the solution to every problem but as of the current state of technology, it just does not work. I have been in the position of an applicant recently and the tests are just plain ridiculous. From the "IQ-Test" at Bloomberg for engineers to the automated "solve our problem and get hired" websites the system is just bloated with these cheap ( and shi* ) solutions.

It's time for companies to put some money on the table to hire real people doing real interviews to candidates. Any company that don't involve somebody at step 1 of the recruitment process to assist you and that claims that "Employees are first!", I say: bullshit!

I disagree that there is a problem. The problem is that you are choosing to apply at places that employ hiring mechanisms that you personally object to.

So I think that you're the problem. Some people appreciate the rigorous screening. If you don't, apply somewhere else.

Well we'll see, but we're designing this specifically to eliminate people who DEFINITELY can't do the job specified and then let the rest of the process be done by actual humans. If you don't let people who can't do the job BS you into an interview, you can afford to do more interviews with a higher confidence of actually finding a suitable candidate.

If I desired not to be civil I'd say "you're part of the problem assuming a tough problem can't be solved for some abstract reason" but since I want to be civil I won't say that.

One (optimistic) takeaway from this article for folks here is that this should show exactly how much of an advantage they can have in recruiting people (although obviously this isn't great news for people looking for a job).

Not to say that every big company has this sort of hiring inefficiency, but it seems like it's definitely a predisposition as you increase in size.

Most people seem to say that hiring is arguably the most important thing you do as a company. This shitty system can absolutely work to your advantage in trying to recruit talent.

Automated resume rejection makes a lot of sense.

If there are 200 applicants for a position, software which eliminates all of the candidates only has 0.5% error.

That's pretty good AI.

I know that was a joke, but in situations like this there are two separate measures of error; precision and recall. Precision is how many of the results marked as relevant really were (measure of false positives), recall is how many of the actually relevant results were correctly considered relevant (measure of false negatives).

Any system can trivially have perfect precision by saying all results are not relevant, or perfect recall by saying all results are relevant. Your system would have 100% precision and 0% recall.

That only works so long as the rules given to the filtering program are accurate and feasible, and if a single failed requirement DNE complete rejection. Management drawing completely overboard reqs for the filter means the filter becomes meaningless.

I was reading a book recently that called getting arrested, "being put on the electronic plantation". This was just getting an arrest too, not even a conviction. The logic was that all the good jobs do background checks nowadays and won't even interview someone with an arrest. So someone working retail with an arrest wouldn't be able to move up to bank teller, for example. Now throw in that you can be arrested even in cases where you are innocent or in cases of identity theft...

The interview and the article state that "In some cases employers do not want to hire anyone at all, they think it's cheaper to leave positions unfilled!". If it is cheaper to leave a position vacant, why bother listing it as open? Wouldn't it make more sense to eliminate it?

My guess is that it's a device that an employer would use to manipulate the employees who are filling in "temporarily" -- so that the employees feel something is being done and they'll only be doing the extra work for "a little while." So they can say, "we really are trying, but the work you do is so valuable, just not that many people can do it."

Sometimes there is an internal candidate that will get the job, yet it still has to be posted for some arcane rule/law... Or so I hear.

I hear this excuse often, but in ten years at a large company I never met anyone I never met anyone who was the beneficiary of such a thing.

Both the article and the interview say that employers "think" that it's cheaper to leave the position unfilled, typically because of lousy cost accounting systems that do not give an accurate picture of the reduced system throughput (and thus the foregone revenue). Most companies optimize locally, which results in de-optimizing the whole system -- a department saves some money by not hiring a new systems administrator until the next fiscal year, and the whole company suffers decreased effectiveness.

Some positions advertised may be, in fact, better eliminated. But that's not the point that the article and interview are making.

This reeks of principal-agent problems. HR departments at large firms are notoriously concerned with 1) folk knowledge about not getting sued (with a very tenuous relationship to reality, eg mgkimsal's comment), and 2) checking boxes. Since their actions have almost zero connection to outcomes, it's no wonder they play it safe / easy in hiring, and both firms and workers see shortages.

One way to start solving the problem is to make the department with the position responsible for filling it, either with their own man-hours, or via their own headhunting budget.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com