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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...