Why are the apostrophes and quote marks in this article fake?
I’m quite agree we’re seeing discrimination here, but am I the only one who thought that workplaces and productivity would probably be improved if recruiters used the same metric to hire men as they apparently use for women?
At least with respect to my experience in the workforce (and I’m on the technical side of things), the difference in total productivity (i.e. not just of oneself, but also your effect on one’s peers) between the mastery levels of an A vs. a B student is heavily outweighed by differences in the personal skills that the student might possess.
It most likely has. Software development (Programming and Systems Analysis and Design for us older folk) is a creative process and hiring managers (not HR) will often look for people with an artistic bent when trying to fill a position. Well, the good ones will anyway.
No, I was thinking that as well. But at the same time that only works if you think that people who are clearly letting unconscious sexist biases strongly influence their decisions are doing a good job of making decisions. If they hire men for “competence” and hire women for “agreeableness” I have a strong feeling that they aren’t doing a great job of either.
Still, I think your point that you are better off hiring a B student who has good “people skills” than an A student who doesn’t is, for most jobs, dead on.
2 Likes
Actually, I’m really skeptical that good decisions about hiring can be made at anything but the roughest levels.
It’s been shown in study after study that about the only interesting metric that consistently correlates with on-the-job performance is “has this person performed well before in a similar job”.
Interviews especially have next to no correlation with on-the-job outcomes.
Everything else is our human arrogance that “of course we I can tell who will be a good performer.”
And I’ll admit, I cannot shake the idea that I would be able to tell who would be able to do a job well, even as I read the studies that tell me (statistically) I can’t.
So, I don’t trust anyone to make good hiring decisions. But I trust people who think they can make good hiring decisions even less.
At least as I read the science, businesses would be better served by choosing randomly among all the reasonably acceptable candidates, and have a probationary period that actively weeds out the weaker performers.
(Appropriate caveats for how hard it is to measure on-the-job performance, etc.)
I actually suggested this to my boss. With hundreds of resumes to go through HR is telling them they’ve got algorithms to analyze them. I said what they really ought to do is:
- Decide how many people they want to interview
- Select that many resumes at random
- Read them to see if they are acceptable (not great, just acceptable)
- Replace any that don’t make the cut with more random resumes
It just feels like random has to be better than the algorithm.
(Of course my suggestion was taken as a joke. Jokes are very good for giving you the chance to tell the truth.)
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
