Blind Auditions Could Give Employers a Better Hiring Sense
npr.org
npr.org
“In the 1970s and 1980s, orchestras began using blind auditions. Candidates are situated on a stage behind a screen to play for a jury that cannot see them. In some orchestras, blind auditions are used just for the preliminary selection while others use it all the way to the end, until a hiring decision is made.
“Even when the screen is only used for the preliminary round, it has a powerful impact; researchers have determined that this step alone makes it 50% more likely that a woman will advance to the finals. And the screen has also been demonstrated to be the source of a surge in the number of women being offered positions.”
http://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/b...
Eg. Moss-Racusin et al (2012) which found that female students applying for jobs were seen as less competent than male students with identical application materials.
re: the post on gapjumpers, I'm not sure about asking someone to do (what appears to be) a 1-2 day programming exercise on their own time to prove themselves for a job. That favours people with the most time to put aside - and it's a heck of a lot of wasted effort for the candidate who gets rejected. I don't think that's as fair as it should be.
We're using anonymous interviews for all our positions (not just development), and it's great to get a sense of personality without thinking about gender, age, race or anything else irrelevant. When we turn people down, we don't even know who they were. I _think_ that's a good thing for both sides.
I'm not going to pre-judge what's happening with our process, but so far we've got through a load of interviews without stress, and got very strong impressions from these 30 minute initial chats. Second interviews will start happening the week after next & I'll write about it once we've got this batch of recruits through the door.
One of my standard statements is that the ability to do a job is not a guarantee to get the job - it is just the base requirement to even be considered.
Is it? I fail to see how preferring Dr Who over BSG is relevant to becoming a great employee, or more seriously, how hiring managers selecting for "cultural fit" doesn't end up as 'I prefer to work with people who put work ahead of family, health, and sanity.' With maybe a tinge of discrimination bias.
IMO, the right place for cultural fit isn't in the hiring step, it's in the recruiting and application steps, when you broadcast what your workplace environment is, what the priorities are, and then applicants choose to work within that culture or not.
It's code for "just like us". "Cultural fit" is important for workplaces which contain a number of people already who couldn't work with someone different; at that point, you look out over your homogenous banks of identikit employees, and wonder how vulnerable you've become because you all think the same, and how many excellent applicants you've turned down because they weren't just like us.
If anything, you should hire for NOT cultural fit. You should hire for people who think differently, who will bring new ideas, new perspectives. Who will see the gaps in your current products because they're bringing a different perspective. Instead of hiring the same person over and over, duplicating existing ways of thinking and reinforcing the same mistakes, the same vulnerabilites, the same blind spots, hire people who can fill in those gaps and actually bring something new to the table and see those mistakes and those vulnerabilites.
People do work differently. They have their own communication styles, leadership styles, and working styles. Some of those styles work better together than others. That is is not a judgment call of saying any one style is better or worse, it is just saying that mixing incompatible styles can build a dysfunctional team. So knowing who you have on board, and how they work and communicate, lets you hire compatible styles.
This has nothing to do with diversity of people. Very diverse people can still have compatible working styles.
I genuinely believe that you believe everything you say. That you think you're objective, and really very fair indeed, and that deep down, you believe you're probably actually more objective and more fair than average.
But when I look around, I see company after company after company that hires people just like them. It's impossible to tell what someone's working style is from an interview. Impossible to tell even from one of those hip auditons that the kids like these days, asking someone to take a day's holiday and waste their time in a potential employers office. It's impossible. So people tell themselves "cultural fit", just like you do, and they hire someone who looks like them, dresses like them, thinks like them.
That person almost certainly does have a compatible working style, because that person is the same as the other employees, so now you can pat yourself on the back and tell yourself you had some good intuition there about working styles, and that applicant with the accent who has a very different background probably never would have worked out.
You're right, it's nothing to do with diversity. That's just something that doesn't happen when you hire for "cultural fit".
Don't waste your time reasoning with me, I have you on the one hand, and on the other hand company after company after company of homogenised employees. Who am I going to believe? You, or the evidence?
We need 1) skilled people who can 2) learn and 3) work in a team. That's it, and that's one of several reasons we're interviewing anonymously, through IM - no names or CVs.
Maybe none of us will disagree with it. Few of us have a problem with a "no asshole rule", for instance.
Precision is important here, because it needs to be communicated to everyone who interviews, lest "culture fit" assume its inevitable role of "escape hatch for allowing interviewers who are having a bad day to neg anyone who doesn't jump out at them as someone they'd enjoy having a beer with".
In any case, this thread is starting to feel toxic to me, so I'm not all that interested in getting even deeper into it by answering your questions, even though I do appreciate the respectful and helpful way in which you asked. Thanks for that.
But this may be a topic better addressed another day, using a different venue.
I understand it means you want people just like you. I understand it means that there is a total lack of diversity at your place of employment. I understand you have chosen to write this because you are not able to express what you need clearly enough and perhaps not in legal, professional terms.
So, it's a very easy filter for me. Thanks :)
That's fair, but I think the issue is that some people with the ability to do a job are being rejected out of hand, often due to assumptions and biases that folks might not even be aware they possess. For example, the community college candidate.
I've watched folks with non-conventional backgrounds struggle to even get that first phone call, even for jobs it's clear they are fully capable of doing. Once that's established, sure, culture fit and other things have to come into play (can they function in your kind of company? do they have a passion for the space? and whatever else you hire for).
As an ATS it removes photos and names, just shows candidates side-by-side allowing managers and team members to quickly rank-sort the applicants without gender or nationality bias.
Combine that with our "gig-to-hire" process and the result is lower time to find higher quality candidates.
I wish I was better at press.
Honestly, after reading this, it really makes me wonder about why she wasn't getting hired. A bootcamp in coding isn't going to really give you enough skills to do the job.
Superficially, you might be able to get a few things to work and mash together some frameworks, but to truly understand, it takes many more years of learning and discipline.
I wouldn't hire someone that only went through a bootcamp for a developer position.
I wish I knew more about this space - Video is super interesting and a problem I would love to work on.
Depending on where she's interviewing, that dress code may not match what they're after.
That said, my last several jobs I landed, I went in blue jeans and conference swag (startup tshirts).
That's the implicit dress code. It's just hard to notice because it's converged on standard male developer attire.
Conversely, a female interviewee is caught in the paradox of (a) appearing "too informal" by social standards for feminine attire if she dresses the way described above, or (b) appearing "too formal" if she does conform to social expectations for her gender. Never mind that women have an inordinately hard time finding non-unisex conference swag in their sizes in the first place.
Look smart, feel smart, and a clear separation for me between dressing for work (and thus being in professional work mode - this would be advantageous to my employer), and dressing for not work. As it is, at my current place, I can dress like this, which is nice.
However, the majority of tech places seem to have strict dress codes (brilliantly, hidden behind protestations that there's totally no dress code, no no no, although last week we [1] didn't hire someone because he wore a suit to the interview, but that's not for violating the dress code at a job he didn't even work at, no no no), and someone dressing smartly rather than the uniform of jeans/chinos and t-shirt, would cause uncertainty and unsettlement amongst the workers, many of whom would not be able to effectively work with someone who is not just like them.
[1] General case "we". If I ever hear someone come out of interviewing a candidate and suggest that dressing smartly was a negative, I go absolutely. Nuts. Hasn't happened for a very long time.
That's the reality for this industry.
Eg. Moss-Racusin et al (2012) which found that female students applying for jobs were seen as less competent than male students with identical application materials.
Eg. Heilman et al (2004), which found that women who succeed in male-dominated fields are percieved as not likeable.
It also sounded like she showed up to job interviews with loud and gaudy clothing. Interviews are a show, you need to appeal to the audience.