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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 )
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"
it can (and likely will / should) be replaced with the simulator.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
How do you know these simulations aren't being used to train A.I. replacements today!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Same with the guys in the air. Most airlines flying anything from twin props, to A380's do a sim eval. Again, part of multi tiered hiring approach, but still exists. And a lot of the airlines that do not have a sim eval, will frequently go one further, and do it in the real plane.