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Re:Man Posing as Delivery Person Hides Resumes in a Box of D... by csallen on Saturday October 08, 2016 @11:56PM (#12669836)
I don't disagree with your statement that "hiring is broken", but the evidence you use to come to that conclusion is not particularly convincing. It's essentially, "There are multiple hiring channels."
Re:Man Posing as Delivery Person Hides Resumes in a Box of D... by dredmorbius on Sunday October 09, 2016 @12:53AM (#12669946)
What are the mechanisms of those channels?

What the resume-in-pizza-boxes channel offers over, say, the resumes-in-email channel, is a lot fewer resumes. You've got some intention signalling in the RIPB version (it's expensive in terms of time and other committments), but low informational signalling otherwise as to overt qualifications, outside some general concepts (hustle, motivation, time availability / opportunity costs, charisma, confidence, or simply having heard of the trick somewhere).

There are a bunch of selection hueristics whose primary benefit is they eliminate a large component of the choice process. You'd do fairly well in simply randomly sampling from amongst the submissions, or applying some very rudimentary filters to eliminate the most obviously bad choices.

This is why mechanisms such as racial, gender, age, and cultural bias are so common. They're easy to apply, aren't entirely wrong (relatively homogeneous groups tend to operate better than nonhomogeneous ones, though there are many arguments about resilience and creativity/diversity), and hugely reduce the decisionmaking costs of the selector.

Unfortunately, knowledge / infotech / creative work hinges hugely on intangibles which are quite difficult to effectively communicate, especially to someone (say, an HR flunky) not intimately familiar with the field.

Toss in a ton of employer biases and control incentives (e.g., anti-poaching, anti-union, and similar concerns) and the situation starts getting messy quickly. Sure, there might be some alterative opportunities created as a result, but these tend to have far less commercial/financial potential and viability.

Re:Man Posing as Delivery Person Hides Resumes in a Box of D... by ryandrake on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:54PM (#12672738)
> There are a bunch of selection hueristics whose primary benefit is they eliminate a large component of the choice process. You'd do fairly well in simply randomly sampling from amongst the submissions, or applying some very rudimentary filters to eliminate the most obviously bad choices.

I'm reminded of the hiring manager that randomly tosses into the shredder 90% of incoming resumes. "I don't want to hire someone who's unlucky!"

Re:Man Posing as Delivery Person Hides Resumes in a Box of D... by dredmorbius on Sunday October 09, 2016 @10:05PM (#12674590)
If that 90% is selected randomly, it's at least not a biasing selection.

I'd suggest a below-bar elimination check (e.g., spelling, gross formatting), and an high-level check in case, say, Ted Ts'o happens to be applying. Take the bulk of largely undifferentiated but not obviously bad resumes, shuffle them, and select randomly from them. Pick your sample, apply your assessments, and proceed.

The low-cost primary selection, and the unbiased secondary selection, leave the expensive selection process (resume screen, phone screen, interviews, background / portfolio assessment, etc.) with a tractable number of candidates to deal with.

Aeon's "How to Choose" is an excellent article on the use of randomness: https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...

Re:Man Posing as Delivery Person Hides Resumes in a Box of D... by throwaway_415 on Sunday October 09, 2016 @04:34AM (#12670328)
> mechanisms such as racial, gender, age, and cultural bias are so common. They're easy to apply, aren't entirely wrong (relatively homogeneous groups tend to operate better than nonhomogeneous ones, though there are many arguments about resilience and creativity/diversity)

I'll accept cultural homogeneity having worked in different cultures myself. But if you're seriously suggesting that racial, gender and age groupings are correlated with performance and subconsciously okay, you're going to have to provide a very convincing argument.

Re:Man Posing as Delivery Person Hides Resumes in a Box of D... by dredmorbius on Sunday October 09, 2016 @05:59AM (#12670544)
First: I don't think that such biases are OK, for numerous reasons.

On an intellectual basis, I can acknowledge, though, that high-affinity classifiers -- ones with a strong, clear, and generally readily determined distinguishing capacity -- are frequently used. Language, speech, religion, gender, dress, custom, and more. People are inherently clannish. You'll see this not only in tech hiring, but in ethnic conflicts: Iraq, schoolyards around the world, Nanking & Korea in WWII, Syria, prison populations, the Stanford Prison Experiment, Tunesia, the various ape species actors in the Planet of the Apes cafeteria, Columbia, Yemen, England vs. Ireland, England vs. Scotland, Flemish vs. Walloon, Basque vs. Spanish, various subreddits, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Israel-Palestine, and many, many more.

A principle problem of any seggregation regime is that it tends to require oppressive, often violent, occasionally genocidal enforcement to be sustained. Which is a key reason to seek integrated rather than segregated societies.

However that integration is going to have to be sustained against an apparently very-deeply ingrained resistance to doing so. And simply demanding conformance is likely to be at best only partially successful. The record of the US in that effort, well over 50 years after the Civil Rights movement, and over 150 years after the Civil War and just shy 150 years after the 14th amendment, illustrates this.

I'm not claiming homogeneous societies are better or preferable. I'm strongly suggesting they're easier to establish and sustain, and that they tend to self-organise as such.

Re:Man Posing as Delivery Person Hides Resumes in a Box of D... by throwaway_415 on Sunday October 09, 2016 @07:37AM (#12670815)
Distilling the essence of your argument, how is it any different to, for instance, heteronormative gender roles a la women for childbirth and domestic rearing? Are societies "easier to establish and sustain" in this binary configuration purely because they "tend to self-organise as such" for millenia?

I mean you may claim no one can force this heterogenous utopia but it is most certainly the future.

Re:Man Posing as Delivery Person Hides Resumes in a Box of D... by dredmorbius on Sunday October 09, 2016 @08:37AM (#12670936)
I'm not following your question.
Re:Man Posing as Delivery Person Hides Resumes in a Box of D... by choicewords on Sunday October 09, 2016 @10:06AM (#12671225)
Wasn't this the exact premise of another HN article on dating, and how few choices are better?
Re:Man Posing as Delivery Person Hides Resumes in a Box of D... by dredmorbius on Sunday October 09, 2016 @10:53AM (#12671450)