17 ms·

He got 1%, we can't hire him

• Piskvorrr 13y ago
  Yup, nothing worse than a HR monkey with a meaningless number. "Bow before my all-powerful metric, puny mortals!"
  • cperciva 13y ago
    More generally, there's nothing worse than a social scientist who has illusions about being a scientist.
    • James_Duval 13y ago
      I was going to ask, somewhat facetiously, whether Asimov wrote "social science fiction" rather than science fiction. Fortunately, I googled the phrase before embarrassing myself. Turns out he all-but-invented the phrase to describe his own work. I suppose he had no such illusions.
      • kefka 13y ago
        Yeah.. There was that little Foundations trilogy that dealt specifically with psychohistorical studies.
        • James_Duval 13y ago
          Yes, that was why I thought of Asimov. The thing I was unaware of was that Asimov did actually think of his writing as social science fiction.
    • Piskvorrr 13y ago
      There's nothing scientific in this case - quite the opposite: pure cargo cult. Hence my choice of the word: monkey puts candidate in, a number comes out, monkey checks if number exceeds another number. No science - not even thought - nothing, just blind obedience to whatever process the monkey was trained to follow.
      • cperciva 13y ago
        That's my point -- the HR monkey was a social scientist, and the fact that they were administering a test and getting a number out gave them the illusion that they were actually doing something scientific. An actual scientist would have asked questions -- Do the test results correlate with performance? Is the test biased? What is the margin of error on the test? etc. -- and would very likely have come to the conclusion that the test should not be trusted as a reliable indicator.
• lifeisstillgood 13y ago
  > The problem here is that we didn't have the final say. Yup ... There is going to be a real big shift in the next twenty years. We look at things like Developer Anarchy and say "what let the programmers run the company?" - but that's the wrong idea. It's let those with software literacy run the company - just as 500 years ago those who were literate took over running companies For a while we shall see parallel organisations within one company - the illiterate traditional management model, and a more productive, clearly vital org that consists of all those who "get it" - whatever their job title I wasted too many years trying to join the well renumerated traditional side - and regret the half attention I found I could pay to programming. But I have seen the light Stop working for companies that are not dedicated to software literacy. Schumpter will be round soon enough to have a word with them.
  • nomedeplume 13y ago
    I recently spent a year working for an "elite" Silicon Valley startup company. The VP engineering had read enough Joel Spolsky to get through the door.. but he didn't practice software literacy. I would love to work for a shop, even in an underling capacity, that really gets software dev right. It would be worth delaying my startup dreams just so I can do it right at scale.
    • lifeisstillgood 13y ago
      Count the number of people in senior mgmt and in all positions who can do fizzbuzz. Greater than 50% in all cases - great. Greater than 50 % for all but less than 20% in senior positions - get out. Anything less - run for the hills. It's not saying its important - everyone in Hollywood says the story is the thing - but only Pixar seems to live by it. See any talk by Ed Catmull
      • UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
        Why do people say "doing fizzbuzz" rather than just programming? Fizzbuzz is just a trick question to see if new programmers know how to use the modulo operator or not.
• Aqua_Geek 13y ago
  Where do you work that psychometric tests are required of candidates? It's the first I've heard of something like this (outside of various gov't/military jobs).
  • penguat 13y ago
    Here in the UK, it's not uncommon in large companies.
    • rdl 13y ago
      What would be awesome would be taking a variety of (cheap, painless, ideally totally passive) tests on a control population, your applicant population, your offer population (specifically those who turn you down), your new hires, and your ongoing employees (especially if you can sort your employees once hired into good/bad). It would ideally be descriptive vs. prescriptive, so you could uncover things like "we get mainly recent-college-grads applying, but our strongest employees are those who joined mid-career", or "we have very few minorities who apply, but those who apply and are offered positions tend to be strong and stay with the company a long time". Pretty meaningless unless you are hiring at Google scale, though.
    • calpaterson 13y ago
      Or even in medium sized ones
    • arethuza 13y ago
      In the UK a lot of otherwise sensible organisations seem to include these daft wee tests into their hiring process (including at least one large US tech giant and one fairly successful VC funded startup that I know of).
    • buyx 13y ago
      It's common with big companies in South Africa as well. It may have to do with how difficult it is to fire someone under our laws, but a few months probation is usually good enough, and fairer.
• rdl 13y ago
  I don't get it -- was this at an operating company hiring people, or at the author's recruiting company (which seems to be a depressingly common way to hire people in Europe)? If a recruiting company is so incompetent as to require personality profiling, and worse, enforce it so rigidly, it would explain why Europe lags so far behind the US in tech startups, despite having at least as many (if not substantially more) brilliant developers per capita. If it's an operating company, then it maybe explains why European companies use recruiting agencies so much. Still seems like a huge tax on companies -- having decent internal HR would go a long way.
  • gringofyx 13y ago
    It was at a (large/medium sized) company I used to work at, not the company I work for at the moment (recruiter). To be honest my interview for this position was just a really good conversation - my interviewer started out with a bunch of technical questions and eventually I said to him "Don't you have anything harder?". And then after that we just chatted about tech, it ended with him saying "I'll give the good news to your recruiter"
    • rdl 13y ago
      I wonder if recruiters recruiting recruits for recruiting are substantially better at it than when the same recruiters recruit for clients -- the way real estate agents tend to be substantially better when selling their own houses vs. for clients, and how doctors tend to make better medical decisions (less painful, better holistic outcomes, less cost) for themselves or family vs. regular patients. Maybe part of it is that a recruiter should fully understand the role of a recruiter, but very few really understand the developer/devops/etc. roles they recruit for.
      • gringofyx 13y ago
        This has not been my experience - this is not intended as a slur against my employer (who are fairly awesome). But when you're in a recruitment company you get to see all the processes and the problems with those processes. I would probably recommend that all companies do their own recruitment.
• hrktb 13y ago
  The outcome might feel wrong, but I think it might be actually better for the guy. If he got hired, but would have his pay stuck because HR and higher management would not understand his value(e.g. not boasting his accomplishments everywhere, prioritizing business relevant issues over internal political issues etc), he would end up rage quitting and "wasting" years he could have spent at some more open company.
  • gringofyx 13y ago
    You're right, smarter people who were hired before the introduction of the psychometric test became frustrated and weren't recognised for their abilities. I knew one very anti-social but exceptionally skilled developer that rage-quitted in a spectacular "hissy-fit"
• bdfh42 13y ago
  I was hired as a senior manager into a well known company that used psychometric testing to filter job candidates. To start off with I was happy to go along with it when hiring into my own team - after all the filter had resulted in them recruiting me and I was pretty sure I was a "good hire" - a post testing bias you might think. You would be right. It took me a while but I began to notice that a high percentage of key hires in other areas of the business were notably failing to make the sort of contributions expected of them. They must all have done "well" on the psychometric test of course but was it possible that this was over influencing the selection process and eliminating better candidates - of course we could just have been attracting the wrong applicants. My recruiting was able to balance any psychometric testing bias by only short listing people we thought were likely up to the job technically and who would fit in with the team. Other areas probably did not have the luxury of having the capacity to "test" that someone could probably do the job as well as pass the more dubious psychometric test. After I left that company I was pretty sure that I would avoid businesses that used psychometric testing - in the same way as I would refuse to interview for any business that used something like graphology - more obviously bogus science?
  • mortov 13y ago
    I worked with a UK company which decided to 'professionalise' their HR function which, of course, meant adding psychometric testing. I was doing fleet management software at the time which meant I was also bundled with actually handing cars out to new hires when they arrived. What can I say, they were cheap-asses and I was young enough to enjoy goofing around in cars. Anyway, almost immediately one of the hires was sent to me and I had instructions to give him a car. He had no idea why he was to come to me so introduced himself and the usual stuff before I told him he could choose from a couple of cars I had available. The blood drained from his face and it was obvious there was something wrong. After a few awkward seconds he looked around to make sure no-one else was around and explained he was banned from driving due to multiple drink drive (DUI/DWI in North American) convictions. A car was out the question and I now had a problem I had to go back to HR with. When I spoke to HR, they were indignant and stressed their psychometric tests had guaranteed he was excellent for an on-the-road salesman and there was no problem giving him a car. I then had to point out it would be a criminal offence for me to give him a car so that was not going to happen. I left them still saying, 'but the test is very clear, he is an ideal candidate'. I've never believed in them after that and anytime I see them I know the sort of brain dead thinking which goes along with them is a red flag not to join any organization using them. Sure, the test says give the DUI guy a car - what could possibly go wrong ?
• RafiqM 13y ago
  You may have lost out, but he won big time - any company that lets it's decisions be made in that way is probably a bad company to work for. Metric obsession when applied to people is not good, because unlike your conversion rate, people can't be defined by metrics.
• antirez 13y ago
  Improving a company 101: * Get rid of HR people. * Profit.
  • ludoo 13y ago
    Heh, I agreed with this, clicked on the karma icon, then read the author's name... ofc.... ciao salvo!
    • gringofyx 13y ago
      Same here, humbled
    • tbarbugli 13y ago
      same here :D
  • exDM69 13y ago
    Only once have I had a job where I was interviewed by a HR person. The whole interview made me feel uneasy, but I took the job anyway. I should have trusted my instincts and rejected the job, on the grounds that they put HR people to interview engineers with silly questions. The job, and the working environment in particular, was horrible and I didn't stay after my probation period. On the other hand, I was put on a dead end project and the company, despite being a rather small one, was like a big corporation where you can hide without doing anything and still get paid. I actually read a few thousand pages of Intel programming manuals and wrote not one but two toy operating system projects and got paid for it!
    • jacquesm 13y ago
      There was an article posted about someone that worked for a large corporation and they forgot about him but continued to pay him for years. At the time I thought it was a hoax, after your story I'm not so sure. https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/ https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6087935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6087935
• seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  These psychometric tests are often unscientific and bull sh*tty. If I interviewed with someone who gave me one, I would be highly tempted abort the interview early; this is not a company I would want to work for. This is in the UK; a found a lot of weirdness goes on there that wouldn't be tolerated anywhere else. Its the anti-authority types who are most likely to think out of the box, and are actually praised for by many American companies (at least vocally, implicitly they might not like them so much, of course).
• valleyer 13y ago
  Is "me and X" as the subject of a sentence valid British English grammar? It comes across as really uneducated.
  • robin2 13y ago
    It's fairly common. If one says "X and I" one risks coming across as being a bit Brian Sewell.
    • bencollier49 13y ago
      Yep, this. My wife refuses to use it. It's a form of inverted snobbery and a symptom of the UK's class culture.
  • stordoff 13y ago
    AFAIK, it's very common but still incorrect in British English.
  • aidos 13y ago
    It's normal, yes. Growing up in NZ we were taught that it's impolite and you should always say "X and I." I was surprised to learn that in the UK it's said the other way around.
  • rjknight 13y ago
    It's not really valid, but it's not uncommon either. It's something that would sound unremarkable in speech but looks quite bad when written down.
    • gringofyx 13y ago
      I like to read what I write aloud as a sense check before submitting it - nothing stood out immediately. My wife often tells me my (written) English is terrible.
    • robinson-wall 13y ago
      It's perfectly valid. "X and I" is only valid if the sentence makes sense if you only used "I". This article makes one valid use of "me and X": > in an effort to score extra points with me and Carl. If you changed that to "Carl and I" then took out Carl it would be "to score extra points with I", which is disturbing and wrong.
• icecreampain 13y ago
  I can only speak for tech companies, but my experience is that once a company becomes large enough to hire HR people and middle management, that's a sign that money is being wasted paying for unproductive types rather than creating and improving sold products and services. Hiring HR people because "that's what a serious, large company does" and having a certain amount of mid-tier bosses because "we [the top] need better control over what's happening down at the bottom" (read: "we need detailed control of people that have been self-sufficient and productive on their own for several years"), is an excellent time to start looking for other work.
  • Xylakant 13y ago
    In general, HR and middle management exist for a reason. Someone has to handle all the associated (legal) burden of having employees. There's a lot of paperwork to do, a lot of communication that needs to be handled. Same for management, they exist for a reason. Not hiring HR or management is a waste of productive time: The tasks don't just magically disappear but other people, the ones that you call "productive" will have to take care of them and all of a sudden, we developers do have less time to do productive things, such as having important discussions on HN blaming HR and management for our misery. There's an argument to be made that HR and Middle Management should be supportive functions in tech companies and thus shouldn't have the last call, but I'd be really really careful with calling them "unproductive". I for myself am glad that the paper-shuffling tasks get managed by a dedicated employee rather than myself. I'd go bonkers in a week if they'd pile up on my desk.
• andrewingram 13y ago
  I very much dislike the idea that you can't give special treatment to individual candidates. The job of a recruiter is to find the best candidate for the job, not to treat all candidates equally. Now obviously we can't go around discriminating against candidates based on attributes not relevant to their ability to perform (ie gender, race, religion etc), but that doesn't mean we can't make use of any extra information we might be able to garner about a person. If a particular candidate, who happens to fail part of the interview, still seems like a good choice, by all means look for additional means of evaluation. I once had an interview, where I spoke with a few people very positively for about 3 hours, it was going great. There was no sign of a technical test, so I had assumed by this point that they either didn't do them, or they'd be in a second round of interviews. Then they realised they'd forgotten to give me the technical test, which they then gave me and I screwed up for whatever reasons. Upon learning that I'd aced every part of the interview except the programming test, I mentioned they had an employee who'd worked with me on previous projects and could vouch for my coding ability. But they said they couldn't use that information because it would be unfair to other candidates. This was a long time ago, and I didn't really lose much by not getting the job, but it always felt like the approach they took was wrong.
  • tehwalrus 13y ago
    > The job of a recruiter is to find the best candidate for the job, not to treat all candidates equally. I won't disagree, but I would like to restate that a little more carefully: "The job of a recruiter is to measure which candidate is best for this job, fairly and without bias." As you point out, there are quite a few reasons that people try to weedle out of actually hiring the best person, some of them not so savory (subconscious preference for white, male people - but it depends on the company, and the culture). It should be hard, but not impossible, to override the default procedure - and for exceptional cases only. Certainly, in the Article, the flawed psychometric test should not have been grounds to reject the best-performing candidate in the room. But similarly, personality (or appearance) should also not be a reason to promote someone over their ability to do the job.
    • andrewingram 13y ago
• aes 13y ago
  1. Writing a blog post about this - good 2. Naming and shaming the company - better 3. Quitting your job and letting them know about it - even better
  • gringofyx 13y ago
    If I had the money to fight the lawsuit, I'd be right there. Also, I formally let them know I disagreed with the psychometric testing. Double also... I used to apologise to new hires for the psychometric testing, and tell them "this is not how the real-world works, this is a micro-community"
    • enry_straker 13y ago
      Fight the smart battles - and know the parameters of your influence ie don't be labelled as public enemy no.1 by dis-agreeing visibly. Personally i think hr's role in selectin should simply be one of co-ordination and documentation, nothing more. Selection should be done by the team that needs them, with even the managers of the team playing a supporting role ie team decides not even the project manager. That requires a strong CTO/CIO type person and supporting CEO etc. But, more importantly, by allowing HR to label you as a dis-ruptor and someone who threatens their own influence, it will be tough for you in the long run
• kamakazizuru 13y ago
  HR - particularly recruiting - at most (big) companies is a colossal joke. They´re typically lazy - limited in their understanding of the business and very quick to make decisions that they refuse to change due to the insecurity of knowing that they might actually be superfluous if it wasn´t for all that paperwork that someone had to take care of. They set some random parameters and don´t actually have an understanding of who would really fit the job. At the end of the day - they dont have to work with those people, nor do they understand the current team dynamic - so how can one expect otherwise!?
• amirmc 13y ago
  Thought experiment: For those running companies and hiring people. Would you take the time to occasionally run your interview processes over your existing employees? I'm not talking about involving them, I mean actually putting them through it. It would be one way to sanity-check that the process is selecting for the things you want from those coming from outside. As a company grows, the non-technical systems and policies also need to adapt but without feedback things might get weird (like the OP's example). If an existing high-performer does badly with your interviews/tests at some point then you really, really need to fix something.
  • gringofyx 13y ago
    Here here, I'll second-that. Most management types are disconnected from the processes that their staff are instructed to follow. I've ran through application demos and walkthroughs with senior managers before where at the end they ask "Why do we do that?"
    • alan_cx 13y ago
      Most technical types are disconnected from the realities of sales, marketing, finance, law, etc, etc
      • johnohara 13y ago
        So are most HR types.
        • alan_cx 13y ago
          Enough........ By your logic, no position in a business know about business apart from oh so clever programmers? Oh please. Look across HN at the threads about the psychology, depression, and so on. Programmers and some of the most insular people out there. No problem as such, but don't tell me they have some special ability to cover all bases in a business. That has to be a joke. If you think about it, HR are one of the few departments that are more likely to know about other departments. They have to, its their job. Do you think marketing has more interest in various departments as HR? Developers? Try talking to sales people, they think the idiot developers know nothing about that people want. Try talking to accountants, they think marketing just blows money. And so on. Oh yes, my department is best and every one else is a monkey. Yeah, heard the inter department politics over and over again. Its tired, boring and gets in the way of business. If idiots just grew up, and respected each others job functions productivity would benefit. But, hey..... A lot of the problem with HR is arrogant people in other departments who don't do the hiring job properly, then spit the dummy because they find out their funky programmer got fired for fraud from their previous job, or something, because arrogant programmer didn't want HR to do the back ground checks, because arrogant programmer thought new programmer would be one of the boys. Please, stop this nonsense.
• naahuc 13y ago
  This reminds me of an article I read a while ago. In essence it warned of hiring people that think the same as everyone else on your team, as you will get stuck with the same opinion almost every time. It advocated hiring different thinking employees to achieve a broader view to any given problem. These psychometric tests seem to go against that advice by only selecting people with very similar personalities and thought patterns, thus stinting the company.
  • yardie 13y ago
    The job interview is the absolutely worst way to find different minded people. I temped at a fairly large electronics corp and they made me take the ridiculous personality test. I answered the questions the way you assume a large corporation would like and got the position. A few years later I applied to the same company again and took the same personality test. I figured now that I've got some experience under my belt and I have references from within I'd be a shoe-in. So I answered truthfully this time and was rejected. I asked my references about what happened and HR told them I didn't pass the personality test. When money is on the line people are quite flexible about their views. If you like ObjC, I like ObjC. If you like Starbucks, I like Starbucks.
• rlpb 13y ago
  I don't understand why HR should have a role in decision making to hire candidates. I'd find them useful in: 1) providing guidance; 2) ensure that all hiring is done legally and ethically; and that's about it. It is the hiring manager's responsibility to make sure his team delivers, so it should also be the hiring manager's decision on who is hired.
• wololo 13y ago
  What was the test, out of curiosity? What tests are the most commonly given?
  • gringofyx 13y ago
    There were two tests - I don't know the names but maybe someone here knows more than I do about them. Firstly: You had to write a personal statement, something to describe yourself Test 1: Involved ticking (agreeing) with a list of statements from two perspectives. The first perspective was how you see yourself. The second perspective was how (you think) others see you Test 2: Involved rotating the letter R many times in a fixed time period. I was given a grid of about 100 R's all at different angles and had to count the number of clock wise rotations for it to be normal. The end-result was basically a bunch of weightings that gave personality traits. Followed by a really well written auto-generated description of that individuals traits. Typically when people had the chance to read their results, they'd say "ooh, actually I agree". But of all the things it said - there was a hell-of-a-lot that it didn't say.
    • petercooper 13y ago
      Involved rotating the letter R many times in a fixed time period. I was given a grid of about 100 R's all at different angles and had to count the number of clock wise rotations for it to be normal. This sounds like a test to see if you're capable of doing boring, repetitive and uninspiring work. I can see how that might be useful to many large businesses!
    • willvarfar 13y ago
      "ooh, actually I agree" is cold reading? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading
    • gringofyx 13y ago
      I think the test was Myers-Briggs based http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator
  • 13y ago
• Confusion 13y ago
  I've taken several kinds of psychometric tests, but have never seen one that produces a single result, whose unit is %. What kind of psychometric test could that possibly be?
  • gringofyx 13y ago
    Even when I saw my own results, towards the end of my employment there, there wasn't a single overall metric result. Maybe she did some kind of averaging, or maybe she was told by management to invent a reason to reject him... since about 96% of the company was of British White origin - I shouldn't speculate though.
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
• mgkimsal 13y ago
  "The psychometric test was supposed to produce a "true" reflection of how someone saw themselves, and I was told it couldn't change over time - i.e. whatever it determined was fixed, immutable and infallable." 20 years ago I took the Meyers-Briggs test multiple times (well, once a year for 3 years). My numbers changed a little bit each time - I was fairly strong I and N, but very weak 'T' and 'J', to the point where sometimes they were 'F' and/or 'P'. I took a similar test again a few weeks ago and 'I' and 'N' were strong, the others were still weak. I had a couple people tell me though that "it never changes". Which is ridiculous because it's obviously not true, and depends totally on how you interpret the questions, and that's based on how you're feeling when you take it. I don't think people administering tests or interpreting the results always understand what they're actually looking at (which probably makes me a stronger J).
  • tehwalrus 13y ago
    remember that MBTIs have no evidence base - they can be helpful in allowing someone to "see" jobs they might be happier in, as they did for me, but they don't necessarily measure anything statistically significant about a personality.
    • Torn 13y ago
      It's obviously pseudo bullcrap; what's astonishing is that the hiring manager in the article is dogmatically following it and ignoring the advice of the senior technical people involved in the hiring process
    • mgkimsal 13y ago
      Sure - they're not the be-all answer to everything, but I've found them helpful in (re)assessing myself lately. I found much more static-ness in my IQ over the last 30+ years. I was actually surprised at how consistent it was over decades and various tests (and, dare I say, slightly disappointed).
      • tehwalrus 13y ago
        I agree about MBTI - until I understood that I was allowed to have a personality preference for perceiving over judging (preferring to live in the moment than plan ahead in detail) I was stressing myself worrying about why I was so rubbish at planning, rather than trying to find a career where it was less important! (the only careers I've come up with so far are stock exchange trading and politics - if anyone has any others I'd be interested to hear. I like coding, especially in sprints, but I am absolutely terrible at estimating how long it will take me to write things.) I find that every time I take an IQ test I get a higher score - I presumed because I'm learning what sort of questions IQ tests ask and how to answer them faster - so when required I just quote the first ever test I took as my IQ (which was a very unscientific one, unfortunately, by answering questions along with a TV program. I also had a score bump for age, because I was only 16.) I was, at the time, delighted that I got higher than my maths teacher! remember too, though, that IQ is heavily biased towards people with a "western" education. IQ isn't very important though, once you get above 130 - the differences don't correlate to greater performance in any real test cases. The difference in performance at those levels is to do with attitude, experience, vocabulary (outside of technical fields I've studied/worked in, mine is awful), and all sorts of soft factors. (apologies if I'm wrong, but I assume that anyone with karma on hacker news is IQ >= 130 or so.)
• kunil 13y ago
  I participated in a similar test not a long time ago. Along with personality test it self, It was basically asking same questions again and again and testing if I am being honest/consistent. They told me in my next interview I was one of the most consistent people that took test. I got a 95%, whatever that means. In reality I just noticed the pattern and gave my answers with that information
• mattbillenstein 13y ago
  The main problem is companies are too afraid of firing people - a "good fit" from an HR perspective is someone they won't have to fire later. They are "risk averse" insofar as they would rather hire a safe and comfortable person who meets their personality metrics rather than take a chance on someone outside of that who is technically sharper.
• Shivetya 13y ago
  too many in authority want the glory of title, they do not want to be responsible, hence they tend not to do. Hence, when they run across people who can think, can do, get it done, they create systems where adherence is more important that work. Those on the other end fail these wonderful HR tests because they all too often have to around the title hounds to keep the business they work in up and running.
• redpola 13y ago
  It's really not my attention to offend/troll, but I found it amusing that whilst reading the blog post I found myself thinking "The grammar of this article is so bad, I wonder if the author's first language is English"... just as I hit the same question in the text. :) To add something constructive to the discussion: I've hired tens of developers over the years. Recruiting is by far the most black art I've ever suffered in the IT industry. I've terminated interviews with the most technically-adept people because their attitude was so risible there was no way they could be part of the company; I've begged interviewees who would barely speak to open up because I had a hunch they were brilliant (I was right); and I've hired promising and smart junior staff over proven yet jaded senior staff. Trying to encompass the delightful diversity which is presented to an interviewer in a few rules is usually folly to appease the suits. You will miss great hires that way. Does that matter? Well, it depends. I spoke to or interviewed one person for every 20 resumes, and hired one in every 20 interviewees. So, miss one through a bunch of dumb rules and think about the 400 resumes you will have to wade through...... The bottom line is that people are diverse and weird- especially engineers!- and a good interviewer with a developed spidey sense will do better for the company by ignoring daft rules regarding recruitment. TL:DR Recruiting is really hard and difficult to define. You will lose good hires by implementing made-up rules.
  • gringofyx 13y ago
    I'm a little offended - I wrote, the community upvoted - is grammar more important than the story? Additionally, it's hypocritical to comment on ones grammar and then use bad grammar yourself.
    • ddeck 13y ago
      The story is certainly more important, which is presumably why the majority of redpola's comments are about it. But to be fair, I actually asked myself exactly the same question and went to your "About Me" page to check. Try not to be offended. He's likely just pointing out what many who read the story may think, but not say. Just take it on-board as constructive feedback for future articles. It's an interesting story. Thanks for taking the time to write it up.
• LukeB_UK 13y ago
  On the topic of technical tests, the company I work for has a good approach. They'll set the technical test for you to do at home (the same one for everyone), then you submit it and they review it. Based on that, you have a phone interview in which you have to talk through what you did and why you did it, being asked questions about certain bits and your choices. They also talk through some other bits to try and gauge your knowledge. If you pass that stage, you then go on to a face to face interview. Might not catch everyone who tries to cheat, but will help.
  • Deestan 13y ago
    That sounds like a sane test. If someone does blatantly cheat, it will be immediately obvious during the interview afterwards. At my company, we ask people to submit some choice prior work if possible. Then we look at that, and try to have a conversation about the tech. The bonus is that it respects the candidates time, and it is easier to get them talking when it's their own projects. The downside is that very few candidates have recent prior work publicly available.
• mathattack 13y ago
  "Also, there were some candidates who managed to get 95% and above - but would then just be absolutely awful during the interview - we would later discover that they were paying someone to complete the technical test on their behalf." I wondered about this when I see test scores inconsistent with actual ability. The truth does come out. In general tests (or interviews) for new hires should be tougher than for existing employees. You want each new hire to bring something new to the table. The OP suggests that you can't beat interviews. I believe that even better is seeing someone in action (which they did) and getting references from someone you trust. This is why employee referral programs are so good. Once HR gets into the mix of "Fairness to the candidates" as opposed to "Fairness to the company" it gets a little strange.
• chx 13y ago
  If you fill out a personality test and hand it to someone who is not your doctor in some capacity you have no idea what are you doing. There's a hell of a lot one can read from the quite a few personality tests and it's can backfire you in quite spectacular ways later.
• nicholassmith 13y ago
  It's been a long while since I had to get involved in any HR related business practises, but I've got a vague feeling not hiring a candidate on the basis of a psychometric test might actually fall within hiring discrimination, if it's a case that the test is unsuitable for the candidate. Which in this case, as a non-native speaker, it seems very much like the test wouldn't be a fair fight. They simply cannot complete the testing in the same way a native speaker would.
• amberes 13y ago
  I once failed a test because I wasn't good at abstract thinking. And they decided to be a good developer, you had to be a good abstract thinker. At that time, the test was already more than 10 years old. I didn't get the job, although I had several references that I was one of the best and also most social and motivated developers they had ever worked with. One of the references also stated that I was really good at thinking 'out of the box', finding a solution while everyone was blindly staring at the problem. That is abstract thinking, no? I'm CEO now... And it might be me, but I've worked with some abstract thinkers and whatever they cook up hasn't resulted in anything concrete yet. (except for a huge consultancy bill on occasion)
  • BetaCygni 13y ago
    If you're good at abstract thinking everything is the same. Even being the same is the same as not being the same ;). Really a good skill for software design, as you can build a lot of functionality that looks different on the same base and save a lot of time. Your software will also become easier to maintain and to extend. Thinking "out of the box" is creativity. This isn't the same as abstract thinking, though you can "fake" being creative by seeing things are the same and proposing a solution that worked for the other problem. It is my experience that purely abstract things are not usable in the real world by real people. They simply won't get it or making it do things is way too hard (inner platform effect). A good piece of software has a abstract core and a very concrete interface.
    • amberes 13y ago
      But then, not getting what abstract thinking is about is probably a good sign that you aren't an abstract thinker?
      • amberes 13y ago
        Blah! I just did some abstract reasoning tests and i had an excellent score. Now, the tests on the net might be crap... Bu who says the tests HR uses aren't? People aren't even able to make a good estimate of how long a project will take, or if it will even get finished. So how can they determine which kind of people are a right fit to work on those projects?
• singingfish 13y ago
  Yeah, I have some background in psychometrics. I looked into getting work in these HR psychomestric firms at some point. I discounted it out of hand as I did not want to be involved in such a dodgy enterprise. Corporate psychologists give me th heebeejeebies (wearing one of my hats I'm now a corporate sociologist, which is a much more sensible gig).
• deleted 13y ago
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• lutusp 13y ago
  I'm astonished that this sort of thing still goes on. Who is not aware that this kind of psychological testing has been shown to be utterly subjective, unscientific and sometimes destructive? And who isn't aware that psychologists have recently been forced to abandon the Asperger Syndrome diagnosis, after an epidemic of phony diagnoses of people who are often very successful in spite of the diagnosis, people like Bill Gates, Nicola Tesla and Albert Einstein? The big picture is that society is in the midst of a re-assessment of the role and meaning of psychology, and the future doesn't look very bright for psychiatrists and psychologists. More here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/side-effects/201305/the-nimh-withdraws-support-dsm-5 http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/side-effects/201305/the-...
• Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
  I have no issue with testing as part of a recruitment process but it should be a single input into the overall decision and certainly shouldn't be able to override other more significant factors. In this instance a reasonable compromise would seem to be to have the HR manager state what the specific issues they felt might exist were and call the candidate back to talk through them and see if they could be substantiated. If someone was that bad a fit then I doubt very much it would be hard to surface supporting evidence in a face to face discussion.
• altero 13y ago
  > that a quiet young man of Asian descent Perhaps that could be the problem, HR used test as an excuse.
• BillyMaize 13y ago
  HR should never have the final say in a hire or no hire. I interviewed with a company recently which originally said they wanted me but later took the offer away. I was interviewed by 3 engineers and realized after talking to them that they were all very smart and that I would love working for the company. Apparently they all 3 liked me and I was told they wanted me after I talk to HR and filled out an application. Turns out I had about a 2.9 gpa and they wanted at least a 3.0 so my offer was never official. I still want to work for the company and I might in a few years when my gpa isn't even looked at because I'm sure the engineers will like me again...
• RamiK 13y ago
  So the company you work for is filled with engineers and the best hiring practice they could come up with is to give the final call on staff hiring to a humanities \ social "sciences" graduates... Maybe you should consider Google's old screening logic test. While being completely ridiculous and ineffectual in finding intelligent engineers, they still do a decent job at deterring the anti=authoritarians quite effectively while saving you money and time on HR. Personally, I like the old maniac hiring. You take a complete loon and put him in-charge of the process. Have him do tarot card readings, crystal energy vibes tests, skull measurements... But instruct him to pass any person who keeps his mouth shut during all of this. 100% team player guaranteed!
  • VLM 13y ago
    "Personally, I like the old maniac hiring. You take a complete loon and put him in-charge of the process. Have him do tarot card readings, crystal energy vibes tests, skull measurements... But instruct him to pass any person who keeps his mouth shut during all of this." Um, thats exactly what the original post is doing... well slightly different technique and different carnival barker vocabulary, but...
• chris_wot 13y ago
  The HR guy once called me into his office to ask why I was leaving. To which I said "excuse me?", and then he turned around his monitor which showed my LinkedIn profile. Turns out I had stuffed up a few of the dates for a former job and it looked like I working for another company! I was curious as to what he thought I was doing all day in the office. Even more curious - why the hell was he tracking me on LinkedIn? I suppose I shouldn't have been that surprised.
• aaron695 13y ago
  Interesting article. RE: Nuremberg Defence. Do you really think it would have been smart for the Germans to hire people who wouldn't have followed their orders? But in a profession environment, yep I'd agree you don't want all people who just follow orders, quite different to work environments where you want people to act more like machines aka call centres, sweat shops, army etc.
  • lutusp 13y ago
    > Do you really think it would have been smart for the Germans to hire people who wouldn't have followed their orders? It's not so much an antiauthoritarian outlook, i.e. what a person won't do, as what such a person will do, as in creating ingenious solutions to problems. In the modern military, creative types are highly regarded (and this is a recent change in military culture) -- self-directed and autonomous types like Navy Seals and other special forces are highly prized compared to obedient infantrymen. Consider Wernher Von Braun, the designer of the V-1 and V-2, and later, the designer of the Saturn 5 Apollo booster. He was constantly in trouble with the authorities in Nazi Germany for his impolitic statements, but they tolerated him because of what he could build. After the war, we tolerated him even though he was a former enemy, because of what he could build.
  • wisty 13y ago
    > Do you really think it would have been smart for the Germans to hire people who wouldn't have followed their orders? Have you heard of a guy called Erwin Rommel?
• eplumlee 13y ago
  Some people are hell-bent to kill a deal in order to demonstrate their worth. This happens sometimes with lawyers, and these 'ambitious' deal-killing lawyers are toxic to work with. I hadn't considered it before, but this may be common elsewhere too, such as HRA departments.
  • olalonde 13y ago
    Maybe we should come up with an HR equivalent to the "duck"? Story pasted below: This started as a piece of Interplay corporate lore. It was well known that producers (a game industry position, roughly equivalent to PMs) had to make a change to everything that was done. The assumption was that subconsciously they felt that if they didn’t, they weren’t adding value. The artist working on the queen animations for Battle Chess was aware of this tendency, and came up with an innovative solution. He did the animations for the queen the way that he felt would be best, with one addition: he gave the queen a pet duck. He animated this duck through all of the queen’s animations, had it flapping around the corners. He also took great care to make sure that it never overlapped the “actual” animation. Eventually, it came time for the producer to review the animation set for the queen. The producer sat down and watched all of the animations. When they were done, he turned to the artist and said, “That looks great. Just one thing—get rid of the duck.” http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/new-programming-jargon.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/new-programming-jar...
• alan_cx 13y ago
  This has nothing to do with HR, but everything to do with the power HR was given by the directors, or what ever. Good, well positioned HR staff are invaluable. I wonder how many times technical staff have had hiring lumped on them, and got it horribly wrong?
• androtheos 13y ago
  I don't think this is a company I would continue to work for if I was in your shoes. At some point the strong suggestions from technical advisers and common sense should out weigh their one size fits all test.
• cLeEOGPw 13y ago
  It's actually a natural selection. If the metrics are bad, the company get's a competitive disadvantage and should be on the way to bankruptcy in the long run. If the metrics actually are quite good, producing only few false negatives and few of the opposite, then there's no problem.
• columbo 13y ago
  I used to work for a company that writes and administers these tests. This company broke the cardinal rule. #1 - Only give personality tests in their native language. This is unacceptable, a personality test is NOT a language aptitude test. Personality tests will have questions like this: True or False I am happy when others are taking advantage of me. Non-native speakers may not appreciate that "taking advantage" is a negative term and might read it as "I am happy when others are taking advantage of my abilities". Hell I WORKED for the company and had to double-triple take some of the questions. Some of these personality tests are even written for English / UK-English because of the nuances involved.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • bitwize 13y ago
    The correct answer, in any case is "True". Employees who object to their bosses taking advantage of them are a liability risk and are automatic no-hires.
    • rlu 13y ago
      For the sake of argument though, if the point of the test (in OP's case anyways) is to determine culture fit, should it matter what the "right" answer is if the rest of the team got it "wrong"?
      • jackowayed 13y ago
        Ugh! This comment conveys the all-too-common reality that "cultural fit" is code for "everyone should be like us." To the extent that cultural fit is a defensible hiring criterion, or even a good one, it doesn't mean pure homogeneity. There are a lot of ways where it's obvious that you don't want homogeneity. Take the question above. It may be good for the company if all of the individual contributors like being taken advantage of, as they'll work long hours for bad pay or whatever. But if your upper management or sales team likes being taken advantage of, they're going to let the company be taken advantage of, and now it's not so good. In a lot of things, it's way healthier to have a mix. You want people who like and excel at starting projects and laying good groundwork, and you want others who like refining and maintaining systems that are already defined, because any company that's still building new systems will need people to do both. In most development teams, having all of either will be bad news. And the same goes for personality issues. It may seem great to build a culture around people coming in at the same abnormal time as you and liking the same kind of fun as you. We're all together all day! We can bond through that fun! But there are a lot of problems that crop up as you grow. Once your culture is defined by, say, being a bunch of 23-year-old men who come in at noon and love video games and drinking, people who don't fit some or all of those characteristics might not feel especially welcome. Hiring people for areas other than engineering gets hard. Hiring senior engineers who are more likely to need to be home by 6 gets hard. Hiring women gets hard. You've just boxed yourself into a pretty small corner of your potential talent pool. I've seen great companies built out of beautiful mixes of people. A married foodie who lives in SF working alongside a through-and-through Southerner who thinks In-N-Out is exotic. Fresh out of college video game players alongside parents with two decades of experience who like hiking. People still got along great and had a lot of fun together. There were certainly some commonalities, but I'm sure people would answer personality questions in drastically different ways. That doesn't mean they don't "fit" together. There certainly are some cases where rejecting someone on "fit" reasons makes sense. Say you interview someone who is technically great, seems to be able to generally work well with others, but is terrible at pair programming. Will never cede the keyboard or listen much to their partner, and doesn't seem to be trying to fix it. If your company does a lot of pair programming, don't hire them. If you're a company that doesn't really do pairing, this might be a bit of a red flag, but it's not a deal breaker. There might be some analogs in the personality space. But culture fit definitely should not mean "we have identical personalities." This stuff matters. I'm the kind of person who would pass a lot of "culture fit" homogeneity tests (young, white, male, pretty nerdy, elite university), but I hate the homogenous cultures that often crop up at Valley companies and actively avoid them. A major factor in choosing to intern at Matasano this summer instead of some companies that are filled with very happy 22-year-old men is the much more reasonable culture, and all 'tptacek has written on HN about how "culture fit" is often BS. So if you build a culture where "fit" means "be like us," you won't just cut out a lot of people who aren't like you, you'll cut out people who are like you but prefer communities of diverse people.
• garethadams 13y ago
  Wait, I see the problem! You've sorted by: [hr_score, tech_score] when you meant to sort by: [tech_score, hr_score]
• monkey88 13y ago
  I can see how the candidate conversation with his family was, afterwards. - Did they hire you? - No, mom, I bombed the psycho exam. - But the developers, the liked you? - Oh, yeah, the technical team was ecstatic with me. They even told me that I was their favorite candidate. -So what happened? Did they change their mind? - Oh no, mom. The HR person disagreed with them, so they accepted the judgment of the HR person and dropped me. - And the developers, your supposed team, stayed silent through all this? - Well, they asked HR if I could do the psycho exam once more. And that was that. - Son, you don’t want to work in a place where they keep quiet and silent on things that matter to them. You are better off anywhere else.
• tekromancr 13y ago
  I think the bigger injustice is that these sorts of tests are a sham. It is a bogus product oversold to HR managers for insane prices and no evidence of benefit. As far as I am concerned, if a prospective employer were to put one of these tests in front of me, I would lose interest in working for said company.
• jmadsen 13y ago
  Ok, I'll play the Grammar Nazi Troll (On topic, since native level English was relevant in the story :-) ) Interesting article, but you make a bad impression when you write with high school level grammar. "Me" is a sentence object; "I" is the subject. You did it three times, which is more than just a slip.
• shortcj 13y ago
  My supervisor recently asked that my compensation be increased; so I got a weird phone call from the HR person where she just wanted me to know that she and the senior management knew I had been arrested a long time ago. But she conceded that she did not tell my supervisor; because well I was found not guilty in court. wtf.
• georgemcbay 13y ago
  Oh god, I am shocked and horrified to hear that these sorts of tests may now be making their way into the tech industry. I've never encountered one of these personally, but my then-girlfriend who was a recent nursing school graduate looking for her first job ran into them and failed the first few of them. After reading about them online I'm convinced the only way for you to "pass" these tests is to be slightly psychopathic or to simply know the very flawed theory behind the tests and train yourself to take them in which case they of course test nothing but how good you are at adapting to flawed tests. The specific test she kept running into was the "Unicru" one: http://melbel.hubpages.com/hub/Unicru http://melbel.hubpages.com/hub/Unicru I highly recommend anyone running into this problem with HR in their tech companies do what they can to FIRE HR. This kind of bullshit needs to be nipped in the bud if it threatens to take hold in our industry.
  • tootie 13y ago
    I worked IT at a bank and they administered a test like this (Meyers-Briggs). Not during the hiring process, it was intended to be used by managers to build teams based on personality quadrant. I'm pretty sure the results were ignored though.
    • 1337biz 13y ago
      Myers-Briggs test isn't recognised as being scientifically valid so is largely ignored by the field of psychology just saying ... http://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2013/mar/19/myers-briggs-test-unscientific http://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2013/mar/1...
  • mistercow 13y ago
    I know that it's hard when you want a job, but personality tests should be declined the same way polygraphs should be (if they were legal to administer). Developers have an advantage right now in the supply and demand department, and this is exactly the way that power should be used.
    • ajross 13y ago
• rayiner 13y ago
  There is absolutely zero reason why HR/recruiting people should have final say on a candidate. None. It should be inconceivable, at a technical company, to hand over that much hiring power to a non-technical person. HR people are valuable in a company. But their role is to get resumes in front of the real decision makers, and to take care of all the stuff like W-2 forms and whatnot nobody wants to deal with, not make decisions about who to hire. It seems weird to me that so many tech companies have adopted this particular Big Corp characteristic, because it's certainly not a universal phenomenon. A tech company is not Wal-Mart. Its hiring process should not be structured like Wal-Mart. People are the lifeblood of a technical company. Tech companies should not therefore look to Big Corps who just hire large amounts of unskilled labor. They should look, instead, at how hiring is done at a consulting company or an investment bank, companies that are also reliant on skilled people as their most important asset. At those places, from your screening interview forward, you are only evaluated by someone on the business side of things. It might be a junior analyst or a senior managing director,[1] but it's someone who does the work that makes the business money. HR's job is to get good candidates in front of those people. At least in my experience, start-ups and very small tech companies do this right, out of necessity. Where I used to work, interviews would involve talking with a few line engineers, then the VP of Engineering, then briefly the CEO (who was a technical person). I think as companies get bigger, they feel like they need to adopt the Big Corp model. But this start-up model of hiring scales just fine to companies of 500-1,000 technical people if you're willing to create a culture where everyone, especially the top technical leadership, is personally invested in hiring and devotes a reasonable amount of time to evaluating people. [1] Anecdote: I once had a screening interview conducted by the managing partner of the D.C. office of a major law firm. He flew out to Chicago for a day every year to talk to prospective entry-level candidates.
  • tootie 13y ago
    Well, HR does have final say-so in terms of logistics. Like does the candidate require sponsorship to work in this country, do they have a criminal record, did their reference say they were an asshole, are they asking for more money than we can afford. Even judging personality and communication skills is not outside their expertise. The lesson of this article is to not use personality tests.
• westicle 13y ago
  There was an article a few days ago entitled "Bullshit Jobs" regarding how we fill the economy with sinecures (albeit soul-crushing, depressing sinecures) perhaps in some futile attempt to give everyone a job to do (regardless of ability or attitude). I think a real problem arises when people don't realise that their job is a bullshit job, or worse - they start drinking the kool-aid. I'm sure most homeopaths believe strongly in the methods they use and feel they are doing good. Maybe most of the time that's harmless and can be humoured. But on the odd occasion when they believe so strongly that they reject scientific treatments to the patient's detriment, it is actively harmful. Here an HR rep who was given psychometric tests to play with forgot that he was just playing and fucked over a competent job applicant, as well as his own company.
• sys044 13y ago
  Company in question: Kaonix - http://www.kaonix.com/ http://www.kaonix.com/
  • gringofyx 13y ago
    OP here - that's not the company in question
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• darasen 13y ago
  I disdain idiotic psych "tests". The mentality of "here's a few questions and now I know how you think or what kind of person you are" is, frankly, insulting.
  • switch33 13y ago
    The worst is psych "tests" without context. What are we supposed to feel from x sentence, but without a given contextual situation? That is bound to go wrong.
• tokenadult 13y ago
  Wow. The articles about completely idiotic hiring procedures never cease--because the reality of companies using idiotic hiring procedures never ceases--and each new submission is actively discussed here on Hacker News. How to hire good workers is already a solved problem, but most hiring managers don't do even minimal research to find out what best practice is. I'm told that this Hacker News community disfavors repeated posting of FAQ posts as comments, but this is a Frequently Asked Question (what's really the best way to hire good workers) and over the last year or two here on Hacker News I've put together a post with a lot of references to the best research. A recent posting of that here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923 could help companies cure their idiotic hiring procedures. Read the FAQ if you haven't read it before. (Please let me know what you think of it, as I have been doing more research so that I can refine the FAQ and post it on my personal website.) There is no good reason for companies to do anything less than the best when setting up hiring procedures. Protect yourself by knowing what effective hiring procedures look like and how to find companies that use them.
  • badman_ting 13y ago
    > How to hire good workers is already a solved problem Oh? I hadn't heard about that.
    • tokenadult 13y ago
      Read the FAQ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923 linked in the parent comment to yours, and you can learn about the best trade-off among time, expense, effectiveness, and legal exposure among all hiring procedures used by companies. It's low-hanging fruit to improve competitive position for a company to follow the minority of companies that use effective hiring procedures rather than the majority of companies that use haphazard or demonstrably ineffective hiring procedures.
  • wffurr 13y ago
    Surprising and disappointing that the best methods were only barely over 50% correlation with performance on the job. What does the algorithmic whiteboard coding tech interview count as? Does it qualify as work sample and brain teaser combined with interview? I suspect it's too far removed from what software engineering is actually like to be a good work sample, and the prior knowledge required to solve algorithm problems doesn't make it a great brain teaser either.
• noptic 13y ago
  When I was still at the university, our statistics class was used as a sample for a company creating such tests. We had to fill out a test and hand a second form to someone who knew us well enough to judge our social behaviour. The goal of this was to validate that the test. When asked what would happen if the test was not valid, the company representative answered: "There are 2 ways to handle such a proiblem: we can change the test or we can try again with another sample group. We prefer to change the sample group."
• moocowduckquack 13y ago
  Is the HR manager's name Catbert? http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-11-13/ http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-11-13/
• topherjaynes 13y ago
  Just curious if the HR manager took the psychometric evaluation?
• ck2 13y ago
  Sheesh I was hoping for a happy ending. Now I'm depressed for the morning. I hope he ended up working for their competition and cost them money.
• dbuder 13y ago
  I'm surprised that tech companies are like this. Also I assumed everyone just lies, especially since they say honesty is really important. The questions are usually stupid and the "right" answers are not the truth.
• aquadrop 13y ago
  Some tests may be acceptable as early filters, if you have a lot of candidates for one vacancy. But opinion of a reliable employee after personal contact should overpower any test IMHO. It's just crazy how HR blocked the candidate. Also, if they knew he couldn't be with the company, why they even let him into the competition? Strange rules. And that bit about "special treatment" was kinda stupid, he already had disadvantage cause of bad English. By they way, in order to get 1% on any test I think you have to know all the right answers and respond conversely.
• gutsy 13y ago
  Ugh. I had to take tests like that when I was interviewing right out of college. The whole experience rubbed me the wrong way. I ended up telling them I smoked (they were 100% smoke free and you could be fired for testing positive for nicotine) just to get them to leave me alone as smoking immediately knocked you out of the running. Not surprisingly, my company has hired several people from them and absolutely no one has a good thing to say about working there.
• Ceddy 13y ago
  Personality is so difficult to measure, so it is even more ridiculous that HR has not only come up with an ideal spectrum of personalities that would 'fit' the company, but also adjusted it such that candidates can be scored on %.
• DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  I had lots of questions after reading this. So why was the test given, if it wasn't used to disqualify people? And who came up with this test idea in the first place anyway? Why was it important? In general, it's a mistake to substitute technical knowledge for ability to perform. You might be a freaking genius, but one that nobody can get along with. So how well this guy did during his technical evaluation is besides the point. Don't hire people that can't construct normalized data models. End of story. A much more interesting part of the technical evaluation exercise was seeing how people worked in ad hoc teams. Is being mostly quiet, having difficultly with the language, and prompting other people to ask questions a good thing? Probably not. Is it bad enough to disqualify somebody? Probably not. The dirty secret about hiring is that there are no right answers. There is no magic thing that once you have it, you automatically are perfect for a job. It's technical chops, it's personality, it's social skills, it's communication skills, and so on. The best part in the comments looks like more of the membership theory: only hire people that you want on a team, and ignore everything else. Probably works great for small teams. I wonder how that would scale, though. So I didn't get a lot from this. Wish there was more in it.
  • Fomite 13y ago
    The notion behind tests like this is to get a feel for your personality, in order to assess "fit". Not necessarily to disqualify people but, for example, if you're not much motivated by money, but are interested in challenging problems, and you're being considered for a lucrative but dull-as-rocks position...it might not work out. That's the idea at least. In practice, I haven't been impressed by them at all.
    • DanielBMarkham 13y ago
      I think maybe I did a poor job of explaining myself. Yes, I understand the things the tests provide. These kinds of tests have been around forever. Personally I don't like them, most engineers don't, but that's not going to make them go away. My question was about the organization itself. Why measure something if you're not going to do anything with it? So in your example, where you're not motivated by money, but its a job that pays well and is boring, why find that out if you're not going to use it to disqualify someone? The question in general is this: why measure something if there are no consequences to what you measure? I wasn't trying to say the test was great, I was asking the reason the test was given in the first place. The way I see it, it would have to be disqualifying in some cases. Otherwise, there's no reason for the measurement. Unless the goal is just to create a lot of arguing, which it seems to have done very well! I think the problem is we like to wave our hands around and say "well, the test informs the decision, but is not definitive". This is just another way of saying that we don't know what we are doing -- there is no plan. This is probably the root of the author's discomfort. Either he doesn't understand what's going on as far as the evaluation, or there's no reason for it, or both. Don't know. All I know is the guy was smart. That's also not enough information. Lots of smart folks in the world that I'd never want to work with.
• dudurocha 13y ago
  I'm a recent hire in a big company ( for brazilian standards, 600+ people). And my boss told me the the HR recommended the other candidate. But my boss already knew me, and actually, he called me direct to the recruitment process. So, our company value the opinion of the manager, it knows that the best managers know which people are best for their spots.
• m4tthumphrey 13y ago
  I'd love to know where he is now.
• btbuildem 13y ago
  HR are parasites, you have to keep them on a short leash or they infect the operations of a company. Under no circumstances give them any decision power whatsoever -- they're there to do the tax forms, stamp the cheques, arrange the resumes, and make sure the fridge is stocked.
• jmilloy 13y ago
  Sometimes, the vocal majority on hn is highly skeptical, going above and beyond the call of "duty" to point out unsupported conclusions, anecdotal evidence, etc. Other times, they grab their pitchforks and attack the enemy (government, management, corporations, patent law) without so much as a glance at the data. 1. Are you certain that all technically qualified candidates will fit in with every company? Do you have data that supports this opinion? 2. Assuming there are some "poor fits", are you certain that the HR department and its tests are unable to accurately detect poor fits? Do you know what the sensitivity and specificity of the tests are? 3. Given that there will be some false positives (incorrectly labeled as "poor fit"), are you certain that losing these false positives harms the company more than hiring the true positives would (because you don't detect them)? Do you have data that supports this opinion, for various objective measures of harm or success? Consider that these programs may be data-driven, which your anecdote is not, and therefore a) this person might actually be a technically qualified yet poor fit for the company and you just can't tell and b) this person could be an acceptable false positive, and that judging a program due to a specific instance is vacuous. My gut reaction is that, probably, the best hiring program allows several people and departments with various expertise should each have veto power. Finally, hackers are traditionally anti-authoritarian, and that is both good and bad. Failure to realize that, and to admit that authority may have some value that even you, brilliant computer programmer, can't personally vouch for, is one of the aspects of our community that I would love to see change.
  • Symmetry 13y ago
    1) Absolutely not, there's no perfect way to figure out if someone is a good fit for the company. 2) I expect that the HR process is evidence towards whether a candidate is a good fit, but not as good evidence evidence as the estimation of future coworkers regarding if they would be a good fit. I expect that written tests by HR regarding personality would be approximately useless, and that the people who created them haven't measured their sensitivity and specificity. 3) I expect that would vary wildly case by case. EDIT: To unpack 2 a bit more, I'm sure there are personality tests that would be fairly useful in these cases, but I also expect that actual researchers who are doing things scientifically and only promise what they can deliver would be at such a huge disadvantage selling to HR departments that I wouldn't expect any uptake even without competition from unscrupulous types who think they've got everything figured out and don't feel the need to scientifically test their methods.
• pnathan 13y ago
  What was the test?
• Steve_Baker 13y ago
  "she later told me that I was anti-authoritarian and more likely to do what I thought was right rather than what I had been instructed to do. I am still baffled to this day about how that is an undesirable attribute" Pretty much sums up everthing that is wrong with Corporate America, American government and American society in a nutshell. Your betters (aka "leaders") want solders, not moral people. This is social Darwinism in action, and it's not going to lead to a good place.
  • omegaham 13y ago
    Military here. One of the funniest things, to me, is that the military is having a lot of problems shifting mentalities. The "Shut the fuck up and do what you're told" model works for a draftee military, but it's complete garbage for a professional military. Today's soldiers are faced with circumstances that require improvisation, creativity, and original thought. Literature on the subject focuses on the "strategic corporal," the squad or even fireteam leader who is forced to make autonomous decisions. Unfortunately, things are pretty slow to change in the military, so basic training is all about the STFUDWYT Model. Then, when it actually comes to promotion time, they have to find the people who haven't been completely brainwashed. It's awesome to find that the kids who were seen as shitbags in boot camp tend to end up doing far better than the kids who wholeheartedly drank the Kool-Aid. I have both in my shop right now. I can use the brainwashed kids, but I can't make them leaders because they have no capacity for original thought. They'll be minions forever. That being said, I also have a kid in my shop who is certainly not brainwashed and is also completely intolerable to work with.
• thewarrior 13y ago
  All the hand wringing aside , can anyone tell me how to game such a test if I encounter the misfortune of having to pass one ?
  • Peroni 13y ago
    Err on the side of psychopathic. Seriously. This post sums it up well: http://melbel.hubpages.com/hub/Unicru http://melbel.hubpages.com/hub/Unicru
• hosh 13y ago
  You know ... if the employer doesn't want a candidate like that, then he's fair game for poaching for your personal network.
• tibbon 13y ago
  I love companies like this! With tests and bureaucracy they are able to give me a clear signal that I shouldn't work for them, as my work will be mired in paperwork, false metrics and needless hoops to jump through.
• sthommes 13y ago
  I love this. I not only illustrates the concept of the false negative (which is presumably as likely as the false positive)- it also showcases that disciplines and best practices, even policies hr, finance, sales ops and yes, even product are not absolute. every case is unique and can be quantum- not binary right or wrong, but every infinity in between
  • PeterisP 13y ago
    By the way, in hiring you typically are ok with a reasonable number of false negatives, but you really want to eliminate false positives - so a strict filter is actually appropriate. For example, if you're interviewing candidates with "true objective fit optimalities" of 31%, 52%, 84%, 91%, 94%, 96% - then your process must ensure that there is no way that the bad candidates get hired because they got lucky, even if it means that sometimes the top one gets thrown out by the filter. The delta between best and second best candidates is likely to be narrow (certainly much smaller than any margin of error of your interviewing/'measurement' process), and insignificant compared to the delta between a good candidate and a shiny-looking bad apple - except if your job market is starving and almost noone good applies.
• consultant23522 13y ago
  I had kind of the opposite happen at my last 9-5 job. They were considering using this type of test for potential candidates. The managers got together and came up with the metrics they felt would make the best team members. To get a baseline they gave the test to all current employees in the department. The test was a combination personality and IQ test. The test was determined to be a failure and wasn't used, one of the primary reasons was I scored highest/closest to the benchmarks that the managers had set forth before we took the tests. I quit that job and am a lot happier.
• tankbot 13y ago
  Not to be nitpicky, but rather to help: You are using 'me' and 'I' backwards. It's really distracting and made it difficult to get through the beginning of the post to the actual story. The rules are simple: Take Carl out of the sentence. Would you say "Me made myself available"? No. Then why "Carl and me made ourselves available"? Would you say "score extra points with I"? No. Then why "score extra points with Carl and I"? If you are in the subject of the sentence, then use I: "Carl and I went to the movies." If you are in the predicate, or are the object of an action, use me: "The students handed their completed tests to Carl and me."
  • ripter 13y ago
    Thank you! I was hoping that I wasn't the only one bothered by this.
  • ajross 13y ago
    Amusingly, exactly this characteristic -- being "really distracted" by things like grammar errors, or in general annoyed by other people for minor/nonessential reasons -- would get you dinged like crazy on the test being discussed. It marks you as a non-conformist and "hard to work with".
    • tankbot 13y ago
      Hah! Well, usually I can get past things like a lack of apostrophe or incorrect use of there/their/they're, I wouldn't consider myself a "Grammar Nazi". But for some reason this one causes me to lose my place when reading. I kept having to go back and find where I was in the paragraph and re-read the sentence to be sure of who is involved and what they were doing.
• adultSwim 13y ago
  Me != I
• joshdance 13y ago
  We don't have HR at my company. What does HR do in a well run company? What is their role?
  • aestra 13y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_resource_management#Business_function http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_resource_management#Busin...
  • mahyarm 13y ago
    To protect the company from employees.
  • muhuk 13y ago
    I've implemented a new rule some time ago. If my first contact is an HR person or recruiter, I give it up. They can't even spell my name right most of the time so I don't really hesitate.
• bengrunfeld 13y ago
  Honestly, even technical tests have their limits. Personally, my memory is digital, meaning that I'm rubbish in "sit down and remember 100000 facts about tech" tests, but if you give me time to research a project and put together a solution, it comes out gold. Technical tests do not mirror your working routine, because you have time to discuss, ask advice, and scan Stackoverflow. Poor kid.
• droithomme 13y ago
  The key to all this is HR refuses to identify the test or what it measures or allow anyone outside HR to examine it or question its empirical validity. This test is probably not even graded and it's unlikely that it is accepted in psychology, or even heard of. What is happening is the new hire was the wrong race, so he got "1%". Because he questioned the system, the author then was forced to retake the test and told he failed based on some mysterious new "antiauthoritarian" aspect of this single-dimensioned 0-100 metric not because the test showed that, but because HR is using the test as a prop to make sure the wrong races, looks, and attitudes don't show up on the payroll. A discrimination lawsuit subpoenaing HR's test and information about its validity and scoring will be extremely instructive in ferreting out what is really going on here.
• bitwize 13y ago
  It's well known that if you want to get a sales job you must first pass a Unicru test. The way to pass a Unicru test is to answer "strongly agree" to statements your boss would want to hear, and "strongly disagree" to statements he would not. One or two wrong answers get you demoted from "green" to "yellow" on the Unicru. Significantly more than that gets you "red" (no hire). Oh, and "agree" is a wrong answer to a question which should be answered "strongly agree". The personality type the Unicru test selects for is bizarre and paradoxical; I doubt any living human could have these characteristics without wearing a cap (from The Tripods). You have to be a self-starter but have no mind of your own; you have to take initiative but only on things of which the company approves. Nice to see this practice trickling into tech. I'd say "welcome to fucking America" except apparently this is in the UK.
• techdragon 13y ago
  Just read it. Utterly disgusted. If I had more than a few months savings in the bank I probably would have just quit. A company that lets exactly THAT kind of HR person make any decision, has succumbed to the PHBs.
• bsbechtel 13y ago
  This comment will probably get lost in the noise on this thread, but this one line says it all: "The psychometric test was supposed to produce a "true" reflection of how someone saw themselves, and I was told it couldn't change over time - i.e. whatever it determined was fixed, immutable and infallible." Any HR person that believes humans are immutable, fixed objects should be fired on the spot. Humans beings are adaptable organisms capable of far more than we can ever imagine. Any person who has the power to hire and fire other people who fails to understand this is not qualified for the job they have been asked to do.
• rlu 13y ago
  While this is pretty shitty, and overall I completely agree that personality tests should not decide a hiring decision, I certainly don't think that we should lose sight of one thing: It is 100% legitimate to not hire someone because they don't fit in with your team. They might be really smart and ace your interviews, but if they simply don't fit in then they don't fit in. This advice is given countless times in basically every single "how to give interviews" post I've read, and they come up on HN quite often. Remember the one a few days ago about how Stripe (?) uses "the Sunday test" on candidates? I thought that was pretty brilliant. So, while the company in this story did something most of us agree is bad, they at least had good intentions. I'm not defending them, just reiterating that it's valid to reject someone based on how they fit in with your team. Just try to not do that by using a test... [edit] also, the "fits in with team" decision should obviously be made by the team itself and not by HR. But I'm definitely not in the "abolish HR" camp, lol.
  • r00fus 13y ago
    > So, while the company in this story did something most of us agree is bad, they at least had good intentions. Road, hell, paved... you know the rest. If I were ever subject to such a test I'd walk out of that interview pronto. If I were ever in the hiring manager's role I'd raise this to the CEO and fight like hell to get the situation changed or the HRbot repaired. I've worked for a lot of software corporations (either as an employee or contractor/consultant) and I've never heard of anything like a psychometric evaluation. Please tell me this isn't becoming popular.
• cupcake-unicorn 13y ago
  Is there something I'm not getting here about UK Law? I've never run into something like this in the US, and wonder actually if it would be legal (especially taking into account the language barriers, as that'd be discrimination). I would surely hope that anyone offered such a test could opt out. It sounded like these guys were high up in the company, if not the founders, so why didn't they fix the problem themselves?
• sbilstein 13y ago
  what kind of bullshit company is that? I've never seen anything like this. This is awful.
• svachalek 13y ago
  I think this story is a great example of sometimes being rejected on an interview can be a fantastic outcome. With the impressive score of 1% this guy was clearly either going to be miserable in the kind of company that thinks this sort of test is of paramount importance to the hiring process, or deliberately chose answers that made sure he wouldn't end up in such a company. Bravo.
• jacquesm 13y ago
  Pity the story doesn't end with a double resignation.
• rsiqueira 13y ago
  I was horrified by the Milgram experiment (psychological test to test obedience to authority) that the author cites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment And (but not related to the article) I was amazed to find out that Milgram is the same researcher who created the first "six degrees of separation" experiments, that lead to the creation of the first global-scale social networks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_world_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_world_experiment
• joe_the_user 13y ago
  This: "Often what would happen is the first ten minutes or so would be socially awkward for the candidates since they would soon realise that they're technically all working against each other, but they also had to work together." is quite as bad as this: "As a young man, in the late 1920s or early 1930s, the narrator lived in the South. Because he is a gifted public speaker, he is invited to give a speech to a group of important white men in his town. The men reward him with a briefcase containing a scholarship to a prestigious black college, but only after humiliating him by forcing him to fight in a “battle royal” in which he is pitted against other young black men, all blindfolded, in a boxing ring." [1] But it's getting "up there". The complex technical interview and the "do stuff for us for free" thing is bad enough but "start cooperating with your opponents in a 'there no right answers but we'll be failing you for some answers' situation is pretty despicable just to start. Part of me hope they wind only with only really bad candidates, serves them right for putting on such a circus. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Man#Plot_summary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Man#Plot_summary
• n11 13y ago
  This is beyond ridiculous - you can't tell a person's personality & potential culture fit based on a few questions.
• nraynaud 13y ago
  At my last job, we decided to do a little recruitment test. My co-worker set up a php file (and a mirror python file to let the candidates choose), with a blank in a function and a bunch of unit tests for the function. We needed someone to try and debug the test, so I volunteered. Seeing that the team manager was about to take a development literacy test, the whole development team got up and rounded around my screen. It was the most stressful 20 min of my career, I prefer having the website down, at least everybody is focused on work and rooting for success. (I passed the test and I we ironed the last wrinkles doing so)
• Fomite 13y ago
  I've taken these tests - they're terrible. You're told not to try to game them, and this is just trying to get a feel for who you are...but there's often clearly a "right" answer. And even when there isn't, there is to the person reading it - if your "type" rejects their values, you must be broken somehow.
• asdkl234890 13y ago
  she later told me that I was anti-authoritarian and more likely to do what I thought was right rather than what I had been instructed to do. I am still baffled to this day about how that is an undesirable attribute Ugh.... I have some bad news about the world you live in.
• redschell 13y ago
  If anyone wants to see HR done right, you should read about People Operations at Google: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/01/google_people_operations_the_secrets_of_the_world_s_most_scientific_human.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/01/... I know it's a bit demanding to ask what are usually a bunch of unskilled supporting staffers to become proficient in analytics, but you can't expect to solve a problem without putting in some work.
• Ellahn 13y ago
  Why the heck do you still work there, anyways?
• ignostic 13y ago
  Most of the top comments are restating a common belief among technical workers: HR managers (or all of HR) is worthless, especially when they try to be more than paper-pushers. Lumping all HR people into a single category is foolish and unfair. I admit that most HR managers are just paper pushers who are simply not knowledgeable enough to make hiring decisions. And shame on the manager who allowed such a useless position and department to persist. If these people are not qualified to help make hiring decisions, why would you even trust them to find and filter candidates? I've worked places where the HR personnel understand the business, know the team, and were aware of heaps of research on hiring and keeping people happy. Their feedback on hiring processes was extremely valuable, and they made contributions to the culture and environment. They were the first to attack "corporate bullshit" as it sprung up. In short, they knew how to build and foster a productive, creative environment better than anyone, and we listened. That, in my opinion, is what HR should do.
• stocktradr 13y ago
  I'll throw my hat in the ring on this one. Just applied to a job and got a response saying: "Thank you for your interest in the ! Your resume appears to have many of the relevant skills we are looking for in our open * position. Please tell us more information about yourself and attach your resume. We look forward to scheduling an interview." I reply back and this is what I get: "...We have had an impressive response to our ad for our open position. At this time, candidates with backgrounds closer matching our job description are being considered." So, got approved by one HR rep, then rejected by the next. It really frustrates me knowing that I have the qualifications and yet, for whatever "undisclosed" reason, I can't even just get an interview. The world of getting hired.... Edit - blanked out company name so that is why it reads odd.
• ryguytilidie 13y ago
  Recruiter here. I cannot imagine working in an organization where this is reasonable. The idea that I would EVER tell an engineering team that they can't have the candidate they love is just mind boggling. This is exactly the type of HR people that the industry needs to be rid of. We should be helping teams get the people they want, not hurt it. If this was my role in a company I would resign immediately.
• freejack 13y ago
  We run a psychometric test on every candidate that walks through the front door. The ones that get hired get their test results in a sit down with HR and the option to share the test results with their colleagues. I don't get to see them unless the hire shares them with me. The purpose of the test and its results is to start the new hire down a road of self-discovery and awareness (if they so choose) that we can leverage into ongoing development and improvement together (again, if they so choose). Its worked brilliantly so far.
• shmerl 13y ago
  This is pretty weird. What kind of places take psychometric tests? Astronauts programs or something?
• iamleppert 13y ago
  Someone else posted it, but it's here: Company in question: Kaonix - http://www.kaonix.com/ http://www.kaonix.com/ Can we please blackball this company into oblivion from ever hiring any smart, capable, or talented developers?
  • gringofyx 13y ago
    OP here. That's not the company in question, and if they ever read this it could cost me my job - it was a previous employer - a travel company. For the record, my interview at Kaonix was probably the best conducted interview I've ever had. Me and the CTO sat down and basically just chatted about technology - he had some technical questions but soon gave up on them when he realised they were a peice of cake for me. Kaonix should be praised for their approach - the other company, not so much.
• TeeWEE 13y ago
  Please leave that company. Ugh
• aercolino 13y ago
  I think most of the problems come from how much money companies spend on HR people's salaries. You can't really expect a good job done when you pay very little for it. It's not that they don't do their best, but they simply can't be better than that.
• bougiefever 13y ago
  At one company, they gave a personality test in two sessions. The test gave everyone a color, green, yellow, blue or red, that determined if you were better in sales, management, tech, or whatever. Techs were supposed to be green. Well, the first group took the test, and we were able to figure out how to game the test so that the score would come out exactly centered. Everyone in the second batch of tester scored exactly in the center. Boy was the HR manager pissed! He was fuming! It was so hilarious. They too used those kinds of tests to determine whether people would be promoted or fired.
• robertschultz 13y ago
  Wow this is absolutely ridiculous and a horrible way to recruit people.
• switch33 13y ago
  People really need to start realizing not everyone is specializing in communication/social-interaction or business writing. And that does NOT make them horrible candidates for being more professional in other aspects of their work. These tests the HR departments keep making are not helping and detering very skilled and productive people who should have otherwise been hired. And this is coming from someone who is from US and natively speaks English. Social awkwardness is in a sense showing intelligence, however it is hard to convey speech articulate for some people. Some people are much more wrapped in the news of now and what is going on the world than others. And people all have different ways of jumbling facts in their head and through speech, so it's not exactly fair to say one person is smarter based on them using cleaner and more syntactic language. But generally companies do need to hire people that they can at least get along with. That I can understand, because if you can't stand a person who is there by your side for 6 hours or more then you can't really work with them. Companies that are looking to hire people based off of speech and writing are looking at it as a communication issue. This could be good or it could be much worse. They need to realize the trade-off between communication and talent being there.