Is Blind Hiring the Best Hiring?

[eridani]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/is-blind-hiring-the-best-hiring.html

To try to combat these biases, Iyer and his co-founder Petar Vujosevic devised a way to screen job applicants without showing employers any biographical information. GapJumpers and its client create a list of skills required for the job, then design a relevant test that the applicant completes online. The first piece of information the hiring company sees is applicants’ scores, and, based on those, it selects candidates to interview. Only then does it see their names and résumés.

GapJumpers has conducted more than 1,400 auditions for companies like Bloomberg and Dolby Laboratories. According to the company’s numbers, using conventional résumé screening, about a fifth of applicants who were not white, male, able-bodied people from elite schools made it to a first-round interview. Using blind auditions, 60 percent did. ‘‘Employers say, ‘If you can show me your skills in this role, I am willing to interview you, regardless of where you come from, what you look like or who you are,’?’’ Iyer says. A new study from Harvard Business School backs up this line of reasoning. It found that when service-sector employers used a job test, they hired workers who tended to stay at the job longer — indicating that they were a better match. When employers overruled the test results to hire someone for more subjective reasons, the employees were significantly more likely to quit or be fired.

GapJumpers is just one of a handful of Silicon Valley start-ups peddling technological fixes for hiring practices. Gild, for example, has proprietary software that finds candidates based on code they have published online and strips out biographical information before recommending them to employers. Textio, a start-up with clients that include Starbucks and Microsoft, scans job listings and highlights language that data have shown to turn off certain candidates. For example, saying a job requires a ‘‘rock star’’ will draw more men than women; saying it requires a ‘‘passion for learning’’ attracts more women than men. Textio’s research has found that while most people dislike corporate jargon — ‘‘synergy,’’ ‘‘push the envelope’’ and so on — applicants who are not white dislike it even more and are less likely to respond to job listings that use that sort of language.

[Recursion]

1. "Rock star" is always a red flag for me

First off, great article, and thanks for posting it. As a side point, from a tech person:

"Rock star" is always a huge red flag, almost as bad as "ninja". It means they want someone who will work too long for too little money. Part of me thinks some of the difference is that most women have more sense than that.

One of the best experiences I've had in tech was hiring people, because I was somehow given a free hand to ignore HR's bullet lists and could actually just pick people with good problem-solving and improvisation skills (I'm in ops, though, which is different from dev, and dev seems to need the checklists more; they're absolutely ludicrous in ops, though).

Another red flag is "full-stack", which means "we have no idea what systems we are running anymore". But that's not a deal-breaker, it just makes me look sideways for a bit.

[bemildred]

2. +1.

Most of the time HR does not really know what is wanted, all they have is a list of jargon terms, and bleats like "rock star".

I think constructing small relevant test to see how they go at a relevant problem is a good idea and I've done it myself.

[surrealAmerican]

3. k & r

I wondered how well this approach would work. It's good to have the data.

[Brickbat]

4. HR is on the cusp of a major change as these data-driven insights are becoming more

accessible to a wider variety of companies. It will also change the way smart companies manage employees, often for the better. The problem is the work we do is changing more quickly.

[RobinA]

5. The Hiring Situation

needs to become a whole lot more reality-based. Everyone wants a "rock star" but they neither pay rock star wages nor recognize a rock star if one landed in their lap. I have been involved in a few hiring decisions and certainly seen the results of countless others, and the basis for the hires and the non-hires have been ludicrous at best.

Nowadays with all this nonsense about what can you bring to this job that no one else on the planet can, we only hire the best or the best, why do you want to work for our unique company among all the companies out there... It's a job assholes, get over yourselves.

The best hiring would involve a dart board with names and some darts.

[The2ndWheel]

6. "technological fixes for hiring practices"

Any time you can take a subjective human being out of the equation, it makes the situation better. It's not just black or white, or male or female, but also American or some other country, human or machine.

You do not matter. Who you are doesn't matter. What you think doesn't matter. The job being done is what matters.