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Comment by HeidiWalker | Hacker News Reader

This is why the time has come for blind auditions like GapJumpers offers - helps to avoid all bias when deciding who to interview. Bias for age, women returning from career breaks, education pedigree etc - all avoided if you focus on how a candidate completes a job challenge first. https://www.gapjumpers.me

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Or you could all choose the German solution...

1. A photo on your cv. Or it goes in the bin.

2. Birth date.

3. Marital status and children.

4. Every educational achievement documented officially since highschool.

5. Every working position with an official written reference, in deeply codified form, written mandatorily by your boss, who probably inspired you to want a new job in teh first place. The last company I left had a secret ten factor 5 level numeric rating system, which was then translated into the codified text by the personel department.

1. A photo on your cv. Or it goes in the bin.

I've never understood why this isn't outright illegal. There's literally no reason for it but to discriminate.

Actually there is a practical reason in some hiring processes: you get many applicants, you look at their papers, then you interview them. Being able to map the face to the correct paper helps, particularly afterwards when you are contemplating the results.

At some point earlier in my career I sometimes did a hundred interviews in a week to hire a dozen people. To decide between different people, it was useful to have the pictures attached in application letters.

Of course, in addition it can be used to discriminate.

and what is the practical purpose of marital status and whether you have children?

Those are also obvious things that allow discrimination, but I can't think of a reason why they would be of interest to my employeer.

EDIT: sorry this sounds a bit adversarial, but it was meant as a genuine question.

Some companies collect that data so they can check they're not discriminating. Ideally it's on a seperate sheet or different part of the website; the information is psuedo-anonymised and goes direct to HR and never goes to someone doing hiring.

In the US this is typically collected after they hire you (where it can then go into said statistics).

How do they check their processes pre-hiring? Like selection for interview?

We did not ask marital status and whether people had children (this was in China: most applicants volunteered that information anyway.)

I was referring to the "german solution" a few comments up, I thought you did too.

all of this done in 2 pages as is the accepted "standard"

Nah, the documentation package is about 40 pages. The cv though, yes, is about 2 pages. I included a 1 page resume, and a 3-4 page curriculum vitae, to get around the annoyance of having a wide variety of experience, yet wanting to be terse, and to avoid the whole, "I see you have programmed in C++, but we needed a C programmer" problem.

That's a great method of initial screening and testing technical ability but there's a lot more to the hiring process. It doesn't tell you if the person is good at communicating or fits in with the company culture. You still need to do regular interviews.

Yes, you select who to interview based on the results of testing technical ability, not on the résumé. So you don't ignore the cultural fit, you just make sure you eliminate bias in the candidate sifting process.

And that would be great, if only we lived in a world where everyone was judged purely on technical merit and experience. In reality, social integration with the existing team is exceptionally important. I really wouldn't expect this to change any time soon.

Exactly. Synergies from working together are the reason we build businesses in the first place.

If the only thing that mattered was individual merit and experience, we could all just sell our work to businesses without a hiring agreement.

Why assume that selecting candidates for interview based on the results of a blind audition/technical challenge approach like the GapJumpers model wouldn't also yield fantastic candidates who fit into the culture? The real benefit is increasing the diversity of who you interview in the first place, since getting the interview is usually the hardest part. Since there is so much bias associated with reviewing résumés then the entire process is tainted. At least if you eliminate in the first step you have a chance of eliminating it at the next steps as well.

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