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You're Only As Hirable As Your Google+ Circles
theodp writes "A pending Google patent for Identifying Prospective Employee Candidates via Employee Connections lays out plans for data mining employees' social graphs to find top job candidates. According to the patent application, the system would consider factors including the performance of the employees at the company whose circles you are in — under the assumption that the friends of top performers are more likely to be top performers themselves. It's the invention of three Googlers, including an HR VP who was quoted recently in an article that questioned the wisdom of certain Google hiring practices said to encourage 'echo chamber' hiring."
Ah, so you won't get a job unless you're in the IT IN crowd.
All of my friends outside of work are mostly non-IT people. Then again, I don't consider myself a top performer - I've known some incredibly talented people and I am definitely NOT one of them. Some of THEIR friends, on the other hand, were strippers, drug users and drunks.
So guys, there's a good chance that Google+ will get that hot chick in your department - she won't code worth a damn, though.
What's Google+?
Give them a yardstick and they think they can measure anything. Lines of code, number of published papers, gene sequence. The clearest result of risk management is that you stop taking risks: You're getting old, Google.
Sounds like technological quasi-nepotism to me.
The work place becomes EVEN MORE of a popularity contest. Linked-in is already there with this bullshit. Google wants to make it worse 3.
...and I don't have connections with top performers, because I've never had a chance to work with them!
All this overhyping and overvaluing is an important stage in the development of any technology, but I can't wait for social media to be just another thing that we do, and not something that has to be commoditised at every opportunity. I hope that in 10 years, data-mining social media is going to be looked down on the way spam and chain-emails are now. I'm not so unrealistic to imagine it will go away, but I hope it will become socially unacceptable behaviour.
Infinite computing power to apply analytics to hiring practices, and they end up with nepotism. Truly garbage in, garbage out. I bet the friends of the HR VP are all top candidates...
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
I deleted my Google+ profile a couple months ago when I posted (what I thought was) a private video to YouTube. It was a demonstration of a new feature I created in a website for a side-job of mine. Suddenly all my Google+ knucklehead friends started posting, "I don't get it - why is this funny?" and other stupid things.
I don't want one company getting all of my data sharing it in ways they want to.
I'm a big tall mofo.
thank you Google, once you have that patent other companies won't be able to use this stupid concept for hiring without breaking the law - and I guess every failed candidate will be first up to call in the lawyers if if becomes apparent this bullshit was used against them.
Well, I can dream that a the patent system has some valid use, can't I?
Not really. Google Plus isn't like Facebook. Anyone can put you in your circle, even if you don't have a clue who they are and don't have them in one of your circles. Also, just because I have someone in a circle or I'm in theirs doesn't mean I am an associate or that I know them or have worked with them or in any way identify with them whatsoever.
Anyway, this only seems relevant to web designers, photographers, and "internet personalities" which is already a pretty incestuous mutual-masturbation club as it is. Everyone else seems to approach G+ with a strong "eh... I don't get it" attitude.
How is this even a patent? Okay, besides the obvious "well they filed it". IT is describing the general practice of investigation for hiring that HR departments do across the country. So now what, when some checks out a person in google+ they have to pay for the license to do so?
The system was broken...now it is defiled.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
Google considers Google Apps a viable replacement for Microsoft Office, so I can see where they would think Googe+ circles are a replacement for real interviewing and hiring skills.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
A week ago, I was logged into Gmail and looking at Youtube when this window popped up asking which name I wanted to use. I didn't look that closely at it, as I was busy. Just quickly clicked on what I thought would maintain the status quo. Now my Youtube handle has replaced my name in Gmail. I didn't want my Youtube and Gmail accounts linked. It seems the actions that one time popup started can't be undone. Attempting to delete the Google+ profile that was automatically created somehow isn't working.
How did you delete Google+ without losing Gmail? Or did you delete everything?
Google made a mess, and I'm not happy about it. Keep hearing all these stories about Google doing questionable things, even slightly evil things, but until this happened to me, I didn't pay much attention. And now they're rolling out this tool that could unfairly affect employment prospects. What are they thinking these days?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
It's a pretty arrogant assumption to assume that the best are where you think they are because that's where you think the best are. I'll go back in time to make my point to a chap named Charles Lindbergh who you might recall was the first to cross the Atlantic Ocean. When he accomplished his feat it surprised many, many people because he was a former pilot for the US Post Office and not a traditional glamorous background. It turned out that flying for the Post Office back then was just about the most dangerous job you could have a pilot with 31 out of the original 40 pilots killed.
The presumption that the only people capable of doing a given thing well work at certain places is called arrogance, and that arrogance has cost entire countries their industry. History abounds with examples from the downfall of the American Auto industry to the rise of giants like Capital Group or Wal-Mart. You can't assume that just because someone didn't learn to do a given thing in a given circle of people that they can't do it. The arrogance of the circles also fails to understand that many people don't live in certain places (Silicon Valley etc) because they don't want to or because they can't. The entire concept of the social circle as being a decider for talent fails the tests of history with outsider after outsider unsurping the arrogant time and again in industry after industry.
"Diversity" [is] different viewpoints and different values that will help question assumptions you take for granted
Ironically that's one of the reasons for age discrimination - the fear that old farts know too much history and have been around the block too many times to buy into the latest groupthink. Don't misunderstand me; it goes both ways. Sometimes the old farts need to be shaken up by younger people with crazy new ideas. The worst thing you can do in this industry is to have a closed mind and not want to try new things. OTOH, the old farts can tell a whippersnapper when his "new" idea has actually been tried 27 times, never worked, and most importantly, why it never worked. That's not always a death knell for a "new" idea, because sometimes the tech has changed such that it will be practical. Usually that's not the case though. At the very least, it challenges the whippersnapper to explain why it will work this time.
Subject says it all.
And I hate that G+ tries to make a mess of my Youtube profile. It won't stop asking.
Reason for leaving last job: Fired for spending all my time updating Google+. And posting on Slashdot.
Have gnu, will travel.
Google has other approaches to hiring. At one time, if you searched for topics associated with mathematical proof of correctness, you got a Google employment ad. I've been contacted by Google recruiting because of things I posted on Usenet comp.lang.c++ about how to improve the language. They do pay attention to who's doing what in computer science.
The striking thing about Google is that they've never developed a second profitable product. Revenue is still over 95% from ads, with 2/3 coming from search ads, and 1/3 from DoubleClick ("AdSense") ads. Google+, Android and Google Docs don't generate significant revenue. They're defensive measures against Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, respectively. All that brainpower, and no new profitable products in a decade.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher, Facebook research scientist