Algorythmics Hiring

boomzilla

Claire Cain Miller: \

The indomitable Claire Cain Miller is back in the NYT to promote various startups for nominals reasons that are about 179 degrees askew from the real reasons the firms exist. Can an Algorithm Hire Better Than a Human? JUNE 25, 2015 Claire Cain Miller Hiring and recruiting might seem like some of...

That's a blog post discussing a NYT article:

A new wave of start-ups — including Gild, Entelo, Textio, Doxa and GapJumpers — is trying various ways to automate hiring. They say that software can do the job more effectively and efficiently than people can. Many people are beginning to buy into the idea. Established headhunting firms like Korn Ferry are incorporating algorithms into their work, too.

What could go wrong?

Another potential result: a more diverse workplace. The software relies on data to surface candidates from a wide variety of places and match their skills to the job requirements, free of human biases.

But what if it does the opposite?

@iSteve said:

> At Twitter, for instance, just 10 percent of technical employees are women, and at Facebook and Yahoo, it’s around 15 percent. Some women and minorities in tech describe an unwelcoming culture, and in response to the criticism, tech companies have begun publishing their diversity data and pledging to make changes. …

Thank goodness these new hiring analytics firms have come along so that Google and Facebook can finally start hiring the kind of people who will make them real money.

Now...there definitely seem to be some good ideas there. Looking at GapJumpers, they have a "blind audition" thing. Textio seems to try to help you write better ads, which is never a bad idea. I'm not sure what Doxa is trying to do. Seems like a company rating site. Entelo seems to be aimed at affirmative action. Gild appears to be a system for managing your hiring process.

Bort

My guess is this won't help diversity much if at all.

Human biases are reflected in who is available for hire, not just who the hiring managers are choosing.

Eldelshell

My hiring algo is quite simple:

 return girl && girl.isHot();

wft

Do you shoot porn?

RaceProUK

@Eldelshell said:

My hiring algo is quite simple:

 return girl && girl.isHot();
```</blockquote>
What about if someone snuck in an earlier line like `girl = boy;`? :trolleybus:

boomzilla

Depends on the implementation of isHot().

wft

He's shooting some shemale porn then.

antiquarian

@Eldelshell said:

My hiring algo is quite simple:

return girl && girl.isHot();

You forgot:

Filed under: this thread is sexist

boomzilla

@antiquarian said:

@Eldelshell said:
My hiring algo is quite simple:

return girl && girl.isHot();

You forgot:

Filed under: this thread is sexist

Nah, it's just another global warming troll.

flabdablet

@RaceProUK said:

What about if someone snuck in an earlier line like girl = boy;?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IkE-Vs_X5k&t=2m32s

HardwareGeek

@boomzilla said:

>They say that software can ~~do the job~~eliminate qualified applicants who don't have exactly the right buzzwords on their resume more effectively and efficiently than people can.

Wait, it already does this. Let's extend this efficiency to the rest of the process. What could possibly go wrong?

dse

@Eldelshell said:

return girl && girl.isHot();

This is not thread-safe, between checking girl and invoking isHot it could have been changed to boy, with obvious deviation from the original intent.

.

ben_lubar

If you have problems with a variable name changing at runtime, you also have worse problems.

dse

variable name does not need to change here, the question is about immutability. Recently a step-dad became a mom so I would say it is mutable.

ben_lubar

It's a variable named girl, so obviously it either holds the value of pi accurate to 37 decimal places or the password of the CEO.

Maciejasjmj

@ben_lubar said:

the password of the CEO

Well duh, where would you keep it, in the variable named password? That's the first place the hacker would look at!

immibis_

@Eldelshell said:

My hiring algo is quite simple:

 return girl && girl.isHot();
```</blockquote>

In what language do booleans have an `isHot()` method? And why are you interested in only hiring booleans you shot anyway?

Maciejasjmj

Overloaded cast-to-bool operator? Null/undefined check?

RaceProUK

Boolean.prototype.isHot = function () {
    //implementation
};

darkmatter

@immibis_ said:

In what language do booleans have an isHot() method?

javascript. we went over this in some other topic earlier this week.

darkmatter

ing bastard

Buddy

Yeah, hr is a really hard thing to try and automate. As I understand it, the market is very fragmented, with Oracle (PeopleSoft) and SAP each having a moderate slice of the market, a bunch of smaller fish, and then something like 30-40% of the rest lumped together in the ‘other’ section of the pie chart. So if you can try and imagine what getting any kind of reasonable data set out of that mess would be like, lets just say I'm skeptical about having algorithms actually processing that data in any useful way in the foreseeable future.

I suppose the good news is that none of those companies seem to be doing that.

That textio one is pretty lol, though, if you think about it: having an algorithm that tells you if your job ad sounds too buzz-wordy and inhuman.

I found the most interesting but to be the article on Korn Ferry, partly because of my enthusiasm for assessment-based hiring (though, to be clear, that was specifically for programming tests, which can reliably be auto-genned; standardized testing is no magic bullet), but mostly because they've somehow managed to obtain assessment results from over two million CEOs and other high-level executives like holy shit, how did you manage to scoop that? Isn't that kind of sensitive data?

Buddy

I don't know exactly what gild's uvp is, but the way I see it, improving hr people's productivity is probably the best way to improve the hiring process. Shit, this is sounding like a tautology again, what I mean is that there are a lot of boxes that need to get checked, a whole lot of ‘process’ that needs to be completed for each candidate, which makes them not want to put too many CVs in the ‘yes’ pile because each unsuccessful candidate just feels like so much wasted time. So by taking some of the busy-work out of the process, a good tool could increase the number of candidates that make it past that initial keyword filter.

Doxa sounds quite interesting; that's certainly something I've been thinking about: how nice it would be to have some insight to a company's culture or whatever before applying there. But I have concerns regarding how ~~easy it would be~~ much incentive companies would have to game it.

Unixwolf

Select all text in advertisement.
Copy.
3, Move to end of cover letter.
Paste in ad (leave it selected);
Change font colour to white.
Change font size to 1 pt.

Gets an interview every time!

gleemonk

ssht, don't tell everybody!

redwizard

@Unixwolf said:

Select all text in advertisement.
Copy.3, Move to end of cover letter.
Paste in ad (leave it selected);
Change font colour to white.
Change font size to 1 pt.

Gets an interview every time!

+1, because a like isn't enough to validate that epic genius!