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Simulators Take the Humans Out of Hiring
Hugh Pickens writes "Ken Gaebler discusses a new way of hiring called 'employment simulations,' which are gaining popularity among high-tech firms that are seeking data from prospective employees that you can't get from sit-down interviews. In a typical employment simulation, candidates participate in online 'video games' that leverage simulation software to determine how well candidates perform in actual job situations. 'There are no questions about your former work experience and office habits. There's simply a computer game. If you win, you get the job. If you lose, game over.' As one example, call centers are very amenable to simulations because the work environment (a series of computer programs and databases) is relatively easy to replicate and the tasks that make up job performance are easy to measure (data entry speed and accuracy, customer service, multitasking, etc). Other employment simulation programs have been written for healthcare, insurance, retail sales, financial services, hospitality and travel, manufacturing and automotive, and telecom and utilities. But skeptics say employment simulators and other computer-based hiring models have some drawbacks. 'Like any technology, the effectiveness of employment simulations is limited to the quality of the software and its accessibility to users,' says Gaebler."
Why would I want to have an employer with that kind of approach and attitude to managing employees?
... that candidate x plays well with others?
Technical skills (as in the technical ability to perform the tasks of the position) are only half the equation, if that. Plenty of people that have the technical chops for a given position just aren't a good fit for the position because either they don't have people skills at all, or they don't fit in well with the corporate culture, or have some other impediment to being a valuable employee that won't show up in a simulation.
As an example, I helped interview a very technically skilled person a few years ago. She really had the technical chops. Nevertheless I recommended against hiring her because she kept cutting me off in mid-sentence during the interview. My boss (and her boss) disagreed with my assessment and the candidate was hired. Technically she did quite well. But the way that she ultimately left the company was filled with the sort of drama that we all could have done without.
Like any technology, the effectiveness of the human interview process is limited to the quality of the interviewers and their accessibility to interviewees.
by Cyphase ( 907627 )
ATC have been doing this for years, but it's part of a multi-layered hiring approach
defending the frontier against Xur and the Ko-dan armada.
"Here's a blank PC, a Fedora DVD. and an internet connection. Write me a 'hello world' powerpc
linux executable. I'll be back in an hour to see how much progress you've made. Extra credit if
it runs on that eval board in the box over there"
If employment simulators are good at judging employment success, then these companies should be willing and enthusiastic about making these simulators Freely available to anybody who wants to use them, and practice with them for the "interview".
This should only increase the quality of job candidates. Somehow I imagine that these Human Resources people would just consider that cheating, or too easy. Like somebody I once met said to me, he has techniques for making the job candidate nervous during the interview. He thought that making an interview a difficult process was a good thing.
A new gaming genre? First Person Recruiter
This is great news for programmers. One less layer of erroneous abstraction to deal with.
Time to work on that aimbot.
it can (and likely will / should) be replaced with the simulator.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Only because you've made your country so inhospitable to self-employment. Quite why you'd want to stifle new enterprise like that, I'm not sure, but there it is.
How do you know these simulations aren't being used to train A.I. replacements today!
If Joe's Employment Resource Company LLC (JERC limited) come up with standard employment tests, an enterprising asshole applicant would only have to learn how to do one thing, and then pass the hire-test, work for 90 days -- the typical probation period, get terminated, and start over again.
Firms have been taking humans out of the interview process for years. You can't seriously tell me that HR staff are human.
This might be better than having HR staff. Let's face it, HR people are failures -- at everything. Nobody ever, ever dreamed of working in HR as a kid. Nobody ever wants to do it. Hence the only people who do have no skills, no ambition, no creativity, not much in the way of brains, and have failed at something else. And thus have a chip on their shoulder with regards to absolutely everyone with any ability whatsoever.
This fact alone, explains why mediocrity exists in most corporations and government organizations. These clowns are the gatekeepers of everything else. This is why corporations lack the creativity and drive of smaller firms that have no HR.
Here's a crazy thought, mimic small firms. Have managers that actually manage, and use the technology that is available for admin and personnel management. Make decisions -- especially hiring decisions -- at the lowest possible common denominator level. Empower the lowest possible level of employees, make them involved in the quality of everything the firm does. Give them pride in their jobs. Build quality from the bottom up.
I guarantee that firing everyone in HR will increase productivity, profit and employee job satisfaction within 5 years. We simply do not need anyone working in HR in the modern age, they are a cancer at the heart of society.
Another way to keep people that think outside of the box off the payroll.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
this will need to stay away from the pre screening pit fills as the last thing that you need is keyword jamming on both sides or tests that are to wide or ones that test stuff that is not even needed for the job / skills that may only be needed one time a year or stuff that is like if you can do x and y we don't need you to do z.
Or say it's better to have someone that is good at X and y but not z vs some one who is good at just z or poor to fair at all.
When I started in computing in 1964, there were no Computer Science degrees, no certificates. IBM would select their programming staff by aptitude tests. All that was important was the established high correlation between the test and subsequent success in IBM. Since then, I have seen people with various certification who are good at passing certificate tests, but hopeless at real world issues.
The positive side is that simulations are probably a good way of creating a threshold, however they do not supplant training, nor should they be used to support psychopathic bosses.
Will the tests have be safe from discrimination / be able to be modded for reasonable accommodations?
Will they be like the personality tests that some time have poor questions? and are Personality tests poor predictors of job performance http://www.institutobios.org/perstests.pdf
I did one of these for my last call center job. It wasn't the only factor in the hiring process, but was a precursor to getting a face to face interview. Many jobs have an enormous number of applicants. Determining which ones actually have enough of the required skills to move forward is an excellent way to save time.
More competency-based hiring has to be a good thing for employers vis a vis demonstrating compliance with equal-opportunity regulation.
Given the demonstrable bias towards hiring people for reasons completely unrelated to ability (e.g. "attractiveness"), I would think that potential employees must favor this sort of thing as well.
I have always hated interviews because all you are doing in most is trying to make instant friend-like connections with the interviewer, who more often than not will judge the interviewees on things that have no effect on competency to perform a given job description. Many of them even create little lists of "deal breaker" mistakes that have not a damn thing to do with how effective someone will be on the job...like were their shoes shined as well as they could be? Was their tie annoying? Were they wearing a cheap watch, even!
If I am looking for a good technician, I don't care about his or her handwriting for instance - they are going to use an automated reporting system. I don't care about the particulars of what colors they wore to the interview - we are going to provide a standard dress code for field technicians. But in the company I used to work for, the HR people were definitely NOT persons with a technical background, they were geared towards sales and they all hoped to transfer over to sales or customer training positions. As a result, a good many of the candidates that I, as Systems Division Manager, finally got to interview were very nice, polite, cordial, and mostly incompetent for the job they would have to perform.Don't get me wrong, people skills are important for this job, but mostly in the area of keeping your cool and just being patient with stressed-out customers. It took me months of arguing to finally convince the owners of the company to let me do the initial screening prior to our little HR department, once I got the changes I wanted, the HR people could simply not believe that I had chosen the candidates that I did. But, finally, I got people who could actually perform the job requirements.
I would have given up part of my paycheck to have had an automated simulation in place that could effectively test people for the aptitude and skills they possess!
Your name is Ender Wiggin.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Not only that, wouldn't you want to hire a genius with 0 experience? (This is the amount of experience they will leave university with). I have been advocating this for ages. Not necessarily a computer simulation of the job, that seems unnecessary as you can test someone's abilities without one. In a call centre I would for example just get them to work a few hours and see how they do. But the principle of testing seems much more effective than relying on paperwork. I recently moved to Germany where you can't clean a toilet without the proper qualifications. I have an IT degree and while studying I learned that one can pass such a degree without actually being good at any of the skills taught. In addition I knew lot of people who could out program me in their sleep, who taught themselves while being bored of high school. If I was an employer I would want to hire those guys out of high school and avoid the university dilettantes. How? Easy: let anyone who claims to have the skills come in for testing. Give them a task: 'write a program that does this, you have 3 hours'. Read their code. I worked with a company that did this and it really worked. In my current situation I am tempted to simply photoshop my university degree to say that it certifies that I am God. That will (not) teach the Germans to rely on pieces paper.
Companies are only now figuring out that desk monkeys actually have to *do* something? Performance based evaluation is the norm in skilled trades. I have to pass practical test to retain my welding certifications. I will be asked to do something fairly complex when I start a new job (which all have trial periods akin to extended interviews) just to see what I can handle. Hopefully this type of evaluation eventually gets applied to management.
If you want cheap, automated screening, you can use simulation software, and enjoy the results of your new hiring strategy. For a while.
That was exactly what the British advanced City and Guilds programming exam consisted of: A defined program space for which you had three hours to design a program. I imagine it cost a lot more to mark that a multiple choice questionnaire.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
You say "employment simulation?" I say "crowdsourcing!" What's a better simulation than the real thing?
In fact, let's get rid of the whole "we might hire them" thing entirely (but don't remove that text from the website).
... some real progress in the improvement of the usual IT HR.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I seem to recall that some of these tests are strange or written badly, to my expense. I remember taking such tests to assess my knowledge of, for instance, MS Office, but the software specifically required that I accomplish a task in one way and one way only. If I knew a perfectly valid way of accomplishing the task, but it wasn't the (presumably more common) way that the software wanted I got the question wrong. (Worse yet, they did this in a simulated MS Office environment...the only way to get the question right was to choose all the correct menus the first time. If the correct answer was to do something with File:Properties but I went for the Edit menu first, it was wrong immediately.)
In 2008 or so I was at a temp agency and they tested my abilities to do PC break/fix work. They asked the question which IRQ # is associated with COM1. I was furious to know that I was being graded on my knowledge of things that I hadn't had to worry about in at least 10 years.
Anyone with the mindset of a hacker can learn how the software draws its metrics and game it."multitasking"? Make sure there is activity on each line of communication at least every x minutes. "data entry speed"? enter sparse data where optional.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
As a manager that has needed to hire technical employees AND also an unemployed technical worker desperately looking for a job, I have seen both sides of the hiring process - and I can say without question that it is completely broken. The recruiters have no idea what skills are needed or how to match a technical job description to a technical resume. HR believes that they need to use systems like Taleo, Kenexa, Brassring, etc to collect a huge amount of data from every candidate - and that data is not used by *anyone*. Why does the company need to know the phone number of the boss I had in 1991 *before* I have even gone through the first screening? It is a huge waste of time for the candidates and useless collection of data. Meanwhile, the thousands of 3rd party recruiters are copying and reposting job descriptions all over the internet, so that 1 job opening at 1 company results in hundreds of job posts at Dice, Indeed, Monster, etc. The hiring manager is often not allowed work with recruiters he knows can provide good candidates - he can only consider candidates provided by the "approved" recruiters that have an agreement in place with the HR department. The result of all this nonsense is that the HR department is buried in useless data from unqualified candidates, the hiring manager sees a tiny percentage of the total candidates, the vast majority of the resume the hiring manager does see are NOT a good fit, and your hours of work to craft a resume and complete the online application data entry ultimately goes absolutely nowhere.
The entire HR recruiting process is designed to be a filtering process. They are not looking for the best candidate, they are looking for a reason to NOT hire each candidate. If your resume makes it through all the filter screens, then they assume you must be the best candidate. This is a critical concept - it means that if you are looking for a job, your primary goal should be to NOT be excluded. You need to get past the key word match filters, past the simulators, past the technical tests, past the personality tests, past the phone screens and finally past the in-person interviews. If your resume is still in the stack, you will probably get the job offer - but at any step you could be stopped and excluded from the rest of the process. You MUST think about this on every job you apply for - know what step you at, and try to figure out how to survive the current step's screen.
There has to be a better way!!!
Have gnu, will travel.
Well, it worked for Kirk...
For a lot of jobs, this is all the consideration it's worth. Call centers, clerks at most chain stores, someone moving pieces of paper around an office, you just need a literate piece of meat in a chair. You don't need an outside the box thinker or a cunning strategist, or even anyone with training in any special field. You need a warm body who can follow a flow chart and count. A game can figure that out better and faster than a human being.
Not your job of course. You were hand picked from the billions of people on earth to be the one special person who does your job and are irreplaceable.
It seems like most of the things they're talking about with computer-automated simulations are only likely to be effective for grunt work, though. Myself, I'd rather work on software to run robots than software to test how robot-like people can be. :P
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
and your'e hired! Well, it's a kind on intelligence test, I guess - for cheating. You'll filter out all but the best cheaters. Yup, that's the kind of company I/i want to work for
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Dell is well known for having done this for several years. I did a call simulation and testing routine when interviewing with them about 7 years ago. The Microsoft brain teasers were legendary when they became common knowledge 12 or so years ago. Both are methods of accomplishing a variety of different hiring criteria.
First, every company hiring for some form of technical position has a legitimate business need for assessing both a potential employee's current intellect and their learning curve, but testing these things directly will run one afoul of the law. Second, simulations of real world job situations not only give you a baseline of their ability to perform the job, but completion times and such demonstrate how trainable, motivated, and focused someone can be when given monotonous but business critical tasks. You put 30 people in a room (as Dell did) and have them do a series of tests which concludes with a vocational simulation, would you really want to hire the guys who finished last versus first given equivalent execution scores.
evaluating an employee's personality mesh goes out the window and we get to work with even MORE assholes?
Sounds like another step by HR to insulate themselves from reality. Problem with simulations is that they are simulations -- someone's warped idea as to what constitutes real life. (The map is not the territory...) So to hire or not based on how someone responded to the HR simulation of work is probably an instance of 'the punishment fits the crime'. Personally, if I were confronted with a video game as the evaluation for my potential to be hired by a firm I would turn and run. I doubt that any simulation can properly evaluate the cynicism engendered from 50 years of IT and management work. Damn glad I don';t have to put up with this anymore...
Excessive aggressive tendencies detected!
I, for one, would relish the opportunity to simply PROVE that I can do the job, rather than trying to schmooze the interviewers into liking me more. In my experience, those who are great at schmoozing interviewers are also the sorts of people that I hate having as co-workers: the ladder-climbing, butt-kissing, co-worker abusing, sorts who are more interested in making those in charge like them (for promotions, raises, etc.) than actually doing a good job. Of course, if they can take credit for other people's work, such people are apt to do so--which, in my mind, makes them the worst employees to have, since they can't make themselves look good based on merit.
If they can make these simulations accurate to the jobs at hand, then the more "human intervention" they take out of the interview process, the better, I say.
So, if they use this, they can get rid of all HR people, who are 95% incompetent, with no knowledge at all of what they're hiring for, and no desire to learn (even if it would help them do their jobs better)?
Ho-rah! Let them all take tier 1 call center jobs, and get paid, and treated, as they deserve.
mark
I'd expect to see all sorts of people getting hired that formerly had great difficulty even getting an interview.
Myself, I've never been hired through an HR department. It's always the interview with those who will be the managers above me that closes the deal. They know what they are looking for in an employee far better than HR. I've always avoided HR as much as possible, until AFTER I've been hired.
This strikes me as a tool HR will use to try to make up for their own shortcomings. As an exclusionary tool, one that's utilized to remove potential employees from the applicant pool, it's not going to necessarily be effective.
However, as a tool to look at potential employee shortcomings, and as a specific point of discussion during the vetting process, it could be very handy.
Point being, the data about an applicant gleaned from such a program is just data. That data is only as useful as the intelligence, creativity, and bias of the person attempting to interpret it. If HR is doing all the interpreting, your company is going to suffer.
Your employer is a sociopath and you're a wage slave if he is not sharing % of profit with you.
Casteism