Slashdot Mirror
Hiring Developers By Algorithm
Strudelkugel writes in with a story about how big data is being used to recruit workers. "When the e-mail came out of the blue last summer, offering a shot as a programmer at a San Francisco start-up, Jade Dominguez, 26, was living off credit card debt in a rental in South Pasadena, Calif., while he taught himself programming. He had been an average student in high school and hadn't bothered with college, but someone, somewhere out there in the cloud, thought that he might be brilliant, or at least a diamond in the rough. 'The traditional markers people use for hiring can be wrong, profoundly wrong,' says Vivienne Ming, the chief scientist at Gild since late last year. That someone was Luca Bonmassar. He had discovered Mr. Dominguez by using a technology that raises important questions about how people are recruited and hired, and whether great talent is being overlooked along the way."
It's not just that, though. The interviews based around brain teasers or algorithms that very few people use in real life, which are supposedly used to see how the candidate thinks, are generally extremely biased towards people who either just got out of school or spent a lot of time studying for those sorts of questions. Neither of those things have much, if anything, to do with predicting job success.
At my old job, we had a pretty revolutionary strategy for picking someone: We talked with them. You can see who's in over their head very quickly, and the interviews at least seems like a lot less pressure because we shot the shit about programming and past jobs. There was no requirement or bias towards you reading otherwise useless brain teaser books, no requirement that you have to memorize all the terms from gang of four, etc. We had a great track record with our hiring. It amazes me more companies haven't tried of this method.