Frankly, the logistics of hiring make this a reality. I remember helping my boss hire interns, and picked a few out. Later on, they found out that they weren’t able to go to all of the schools that they wanted, they could only choose 2. Where did all the people from other schools go? Straight in the trash. Same deal with hiring full-time employees in my experience. Random, usually understandable circumstances preclude a huge swath of applicants from even being evaluated. And for many places, it doesn’t even matter, because they have so many candidates that they can’t distinguish between them at that level. But from a personal POV, it can be disheartening to get rejected from job after job if you don’t know that like 75% of the time it has nothing to do with you.
The current large tech company I work for had a recruiter posting messages on LinkedIn like “we’re hiring like crazy in <my town> for people with <my background>!” I had already applied on their careers site and got no response. Messaged this recruiter and got no response. Applied again to a similar position maybe 2 months later, got a response, got an interview, and now I’m working there. Guess my point is there’s clearly a lot of randomness in the screening process.
This is why I always laugh when someone trots out the tired "shortage of engineers" excuse about why they can't seem to hire. For any tech job posting, the employer needs a super-aggressive filter just to get the list of applicants down to some manageable double-digit count, and this filter is not always going to be nice or fair unfortunately.
They mean qualified engineers. There are a lot of completely clueless applicants for every programming job out there. The lack of formal certification sure doesn't help with that.
There are resumes you're going to see today that are a terrible fit, but might be exactly what you're looking for in three years. It matters how you go about rejecting those people. Charity is contagious, so is indifference. Disdain, on the other hand, is virulent.
You don't want people to delight in the prospect of working with one of your competitors. That's far, far worse than just missing out on hiring them and never getting a second shot.
There is also, I think, a false economy in having one person talk to an individual on their own. There is no one to see how that interaction goes. If I were in a protected class, you've also created a liability for yourself by having nobody to corroborate an exchange.
We are trying to make an inherently expensive process cheap and we are breaking everything in the process. We didn't fix deployments by doing fewer of them. Why do we think we're going to fix the onboarding process by avoidance? Finding and training people is part of building a team, which is necessary to build a product. If you have a bunch of people pushing back on the obvious parts, they're probably pushing back on the rest of it too, making little empires for themselves at the expense of their peers, the product, and the company.
We used to use referrals instead of cattle calls to fix this problem, but we don't like the kinds of hiring biases this brings in and so we threw the baby out with the bathwater. Now we have all of the worst, dehumanizing attributes of a lottery system, and not really many benefits from doing so.
Probably what we are all not learning from this decades long experiment is that if you haven't solved your diversity problem before you are famous enough to have an embarrassment of riches in your inbox, then you never will. Everything that comes after is a series of rear-guard actions trying to replace bad decisions with less bad ones, failing as often as succeeding, and justifying your arbitrary decisions as more merciful than the alternative, when in fact you mean more merciful for yourself.
Right now, for instance, I've been keeping my eye on José Valim (Elixir), because I have a suspicion that his team may have cracked that nut already, or soon will.
This is such a common story that a lot of people have actually witnessed it. I mean you might as well do that with a stack of CVs, so people actually do it. A friend of mine witnessed this, and clearly the boss hadn't thought of it himself.
Variations:
"The way we hire traders is we don't hire unlucky ones."
"The most important thing in sales is selling yourself."
This always annoyed me, because it's almost certain those candidates were in some kind of order.
It'd be either based on the file-name when they were all printed, or the order they came in, or based on some weird method the printer uses, but they'd be some implicit order.
So the candiates were unlucky, it's just the hiring manager couldn't be bothered to think about the biases... oddly relevant when talking about managers out-sourcing their racism/classism/agism/sexism/elitism/whateverism to AI.
It's more typical to fire the bottom 10% but that's derisively called rank and yank. Microsoft, HP and others have allegedly used it at one time or another. The assumption is if you do your job well you'll rank well. The reality is your job becomes ensuring you rank well, which may not 100% align with doing the job you were hired for well.
It also neglects that you'll always have a bottom 10%, even if those people are absolutely amazing: hire 10 Harvard PhDs and one of them will be at the bottom.
Yeah defenders of the institution hand wave and say well once you get enough people in the mix, the math works out. I'm skeptical when you're asked to force rank people into a bell curve no matter how small the population. People who are on the bottom due to forcing it into a curve tend to stay there or near there.
Your bottom-most Harvard PhD is unlikely to find himself in the top 10% when mixed into a general population because other human factors come into play, not the least of which is it's incredibly time consuming to review and re-rank every person. So managers tend to leave people where they landed because fatigue eventually sets in.
This in turn inspires other behaviors that are not really what the designer envisioned. For example one manager used to carry around a book of every mistake other teams made: if anyone challenged the ranking of one of his employees he'd start firing off potshots at the other manager's org. Needless to say his rankings were left alone. The irony is not lost on me that this manager eventually left to start a company that allegedly uses AI somehow to help people identify the best candidates. He spent his days subverting a system meant to measure employee performance and now claims expertise in finding the best performing employees.
If the ranking system is accurate (that's a huge "if"), then it doesn't really matter what the bottom x% look like on paper.
The question is whether it's ever possible to devise an accurate measure of value quantitatively. Even if your job is press the red button, a person with low numbers might be such an inspiration to the team that everyone else works 15% faster, more than making up for their shortcoming. And you can't possibly anticipate all such factors in advance.
And even if the evaluations are perfectly accurate and retained staff are equally or more motivated, it's still quite possible that interviews, training and slow productivity ramp up for replacements results in more of a productivity hit than retaining relatively unproductive staff.
> If the ranking system is accurate (that's a huge "if"), then it doesn't really matter what the bottom x% look like on paper.
Unless every employee does the exact same work your ranking system will never be accurate. The difference in the difficulty of jobs will dominate the difference in competence.
It also means that if you're doing a bad job of supporting certain groups of employees, they'll get laid off instead of fixing the problem. You'll winnow out anyone who disagrees with you along with the people who just aren't good at their jobs.
The secretary problem says that once you pass on a CV you cannot go back and latter decide you want that person. I don't think that is a restriction that exists in real life hiring.
It is possible to review all the CVs and then decide which one to pick.
When I was involved in hiring, we received a steady stream of CVs and then had to decide if we want to interview and eventually hire or reject a candidate (typically we decided right after the interview or programming task).
While there is a short time window in which multiple candidates might be evaluated, this approach is pretty close to the assumptions of the secretary problem.
I assume that's pretty typical. It's certainly my experience. We interview someone and have a call and it's usually either an enthusiastic yes. Or an OK I guess (or just no), in which case we keep looking. I'm not sure I can think of a case where we were "I guess they'll meet our needs if no one better comes along."
> I'm not sure I can think of a case where we were "I guess they'll meet our needs if no one better comes along."
You may not have been at an organization with a policy that unfilled positions after X time get removed. When you get close to the end of the time, there's pressure to hire someone, even if they're not great, because otherwise you'll lose the position.
On the other hand, I have had a case where someone was not hired for a position, and then later was asked to interview for a different position with the same hiring manager, and was hired for that.
He divides the stack in half, and tosses the top half in the trash. "We don't want to hire those people. They're terribly unlucky."