He got 1%, we can't hire him

He got 1%, we can't hire him(codingjohnson.com)

835 points by gringofyx 12 years ago | 576 comments

rayiner 12 years 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.

nknighthb 12 years ago | |

> their role is to get resumes in front of the real decision makers

I worked for a while for Company A, which was founded by a team that included senior engineers and senior management from larger company B, licensed technology from B, did critical contract work for B, and at one point was supposed to become the primary manufacturer of B's products.

Company A shut down. My resumé went into company B's HR department, never to be heard from again. Eventually I had to pull a string that led to B's senior management. Suddenly an interview process was setup.

I get there, and the first words out of the HR drone's mouth when we sat down, with a deeply confused look on her face, were "What's Company A?". She'd just suffered severe whiplash when a directive from on high had told her that she would be setting up an interview for a candidate she'd ignored. She wasn't new, she'd been there over two years.

Everyone involved in my hiring except her knew what A was, who I was, and why I was there. The interview process was little more than a check for whether I annoyed the hell out of the people I'd have to work with or not. I was being handed to B on a silver platter, a pre-vetted, pre-trained, instantly-productive candidate. The most senior technical person who interviewed me walked into the room, sat down, and said "I really don't have anything to ask you".

If you insist on using recruiters, do not put them in HR. Embed them with the departments they're hiring for, where they might actually learn something about the work the company does and what it needs.

mathattack 12 years ago | | |

This sounds like a case of bad (Too centralized? Too incompetent?) HR, rather than an issue with having an HR department. You get what you pay for with recruiters, and more broadly HR. If you go to the lowest price resource for Java programming, HR or Accounting, expect to pay the price later.

But you did the right thing too, which is working around HR to get your name at the top of the stack. There isn't anything nefarious about doing this. You're creating your own referral, which is the best source of employees for a company.

jamesli 12 years ago | | |

> their role is to get resumes in front of the real decision makers

For recruiting technical people, it is ideal that the recruiters has relevant technical background. The reality is mostly the opposite. So you never know how many good candidates are filtered out because their resumes are lack of flashy keywords.

If the recruiters don't feel hurt, I prefer to screen the resumes by myself. The worse scenario is that you are scheduled for a phone interview. When you look at the resume, it is full of flashy keywords while lack of experience in "serious" projects. I fully understand the candidates are eager to get a job. But after you spent dozens of hours to talk to these unqualified candidates with flashy resumes, it becomes a negative flag. Well, these flashy resumes are a result of the tech-recruiting industry.

ha-ha-ha 12 years ago | | |

In many places HR is just a dump for unproductive people that can't be fired.

ChuckMcM 12 years 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."

And yet they often do. Consider that for a moment and wonder why it is so common, especially in technical companies.

What I have found over the years is that technical people hire people they think are great without regard to the HR "signals" and then one day they get screwed. Maybe they hire someone with anger management issues, maybe they hire someone whose antics expose the entire company to a crushing lawsuit. Or many they hire someone who, in short order, irritates all of the other employees such that there is a huge morale crash and exodus. Basically their hiring on technical merits and/or interview results in a very bad outcome. And then someone they know and respect says "Gee, an HR person would have spotted that right away, why didn't you listen to them?" or worse "Gee if my HR person had let that person through I would fire them on the spot."

You see in both cases something a bright technical person might be actually unable to see, could be the difference between a "good hire" and a "bad hire." And that is how HR people get into positions of power over hires and fires.

1) The hiring manager has someone else to fire (and blame) when a hire goes badly.

2) The hiring manager has some 'cover' over the things they don't readily see (like emotional issues).

Of course since the whole emotional/psychology thing is so opaque to some folks it is really hard to judge if the person they have providing that visibility is good or not. Sort of like someone who knows nothing about technology hiring a consultant, or someone who knows nothing about cars hiring an auto mechanic. One has to take things on faith a bit that the other person knows what they are doing and try to come up with ways to re-assure yourself that this is true.

tptacek 12 years ago | | |

This sounds good in theory, but in reality HR people are not especially skilled in picking up on the character issues that matter to teams; moreover, when you instruct the HR team that their role in the process is to screen for this kind of stuff, you end up with HR people creating sporadic roadblocks for hiring.

Rayiner is absolutely 100% right about this. The real role of HR people is tax forms and health insurance, and little else.

minor_nitwit 12 years ago | | |

Good post. These HR tests favor extroversion and obedience. In my experience, brilliant people are highly unlikely to exhibit these traits.

I work with a guy who pounds on his desk daily, curses at code, has OCD, walks about aimlessly, is anti-authority, depressed, and is a self-described autistic. In other words, he's the type to score 1%. However, if you have any advanced math problem he can solve it in minutes, whereas most people would either take days or never get the right answer. For me at least, I have no problem interacting with the guy and joke around with him often. But I do notice that with other people things will usually end up standoffish or awkward.

Perhaps, HR would be better served by using the personality profile to train the other workers in how to interact with a new hire and get the most out of them. The idea that a company should have a singular culture built of singular personality types, not only sounds like a flawed plan, but one that in the end is impossible to achieve.

tlianza 12 years ago | | |

I've seen this happen myself as well, in 3 cases at 2 different companies we wound up firing a person due to those sorts of issues. But in my opinion it should not be (and it was not) a big hassle to fire someone. I've also hired some people I was on the fence about from a personality perspective and have been pleasantly surprised at working with some productive, albeit quirky people.

But, underpinning your story is the blame/cover angle which I completely understand, and would consider an antipattern itself. If a few people screen someone and decide to take a bit of a chance on them from a personality perspective and they don't work out, let them go, learn from it, and move on.

jamesli 12 years ago | | |

Technical people also look for "signals" or "red flags" during interview. They ask themselves questions like, if the candidate is a good fit for the team, if I want to work with him, etc.

HR people are not necessarily better in identifying these "signals". They might emphasize on "signals" that are not a big issue for technical people. Some technical people could be a little quirky. As long as it is not serious, it is not a big deal.

guard-of-terra 12 years ago | | |

You basically shift responsibility to HR people (who don't know shit about candidates) and they only hire mediocre bets to avoid blame.

That's because they're not sharing wins from stellar candidates but they take blame for bad ones.

I wonder why blame shifting seems so central to american way of thinking. You'll give talent away to avoid it.

rlu 12 years ago | |

What is "Big Corp" though? I work at MS and they certainly don't do tests like this - and from my understanding neither does Google, Amazon, Facebook (is fb a "bigcorp"? perhaps not yet..). Dunno about IBM - wouldn't be surprised either way I guess.

Perhaps the bigger lesson here is to not do personality tests. With that said, obviously gauging team fit is super important - but you don't need (and should avoid) a test for that.

On a related note, it seems another lesson to be learned from here is to be cautious when searching a technical job at a non-technical company. We don't know whether this is the case in OP, but nevertheless the whole "BigCorp" caution you give is likely more applicable when you look at financial companies or otherwise "companies that don't focus on making software/etc."

But I have no idea why growing startups would model their HR after them. If they want to model their HR after a "Big Corp" then they might as well model it after a technical Big Corp. Let's not compare apples to oranges.

eieio 12 years ago | | |

> What is "Big Corp" though? I work at MS and they certainly don't do tests like this - and from my understanding neither does Google, Amazon, Facebook (is fb a "bigcorp"? perhaps not yet..). Dunno about IBM - wouldn't be surprised either way I guess.

I'm an Amazon employee and I can confirm that I didn't have to take any kind of personality test when I applied here.

I was also encouraged to apply to IBM via a friend of a friend, and while I didn't have to take a personality test for them, I did have to fill out a questionnaire asking me about my years of experience in various topics. I was automatically rejected by their system for not having X years of experience in language/framework Y. I didn't find this quite as bizarre as rejecting a brilliant candidate due to some personality test, but I definitely found it a similarly poor experience. It was weird to run into an issue that seems to be brought up every time developers talk about poor interview/recruiting practices.

The only time I can remember actually filling out any kind of personality test when applying for a job was when I applied to McDonalds as a kid, which echoes the GP's point.

hoka 12 years ago | | |

An anecdote, for sure, but a friend of mine just failed a Google interview for not knowing 'Dalvik' was the name of the Android VM, despite knowing it was stack-based and used, among other things, to avoid licensing fees. The non-technical interviewer saw that his answer to the trivia question was wrong, and that concluded the interview.

It's possible that trivia question was the straw that broke the camel's back, but since she wasn't sure whether or not his additional information was correct and/or sufficient, he 'lost out'.

rayiner 12 years ago | | |

Facebook has 5,000 employees. Target has 350,000. So when I say "Big Corp" mean the latter. The primary users of these tests are companies like Target, Starbucks, etc, who hire large numbers of relatively unskilled people for jobs where personality factors are more important than anything else.

rybosome 12 years ago | | |

I read "Big Corp" as "non-technical Big Corp" in this sense. I think it's pretty well known that the major tech players have difficult technical interviews, but that the people ultimately making the decision are engineers.

aliguori 12 years ago | | |

IBM uses a test called IPAT for hiring. It's more of an IQ test than personality.

enraged_camel 12 years ago | |

>>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,

Don't forget enforcing dress codes and other such nonsense policies in the "employee handbook."

JonFish85 12 years ago | | |

Don't forget enforcing dress codes and other such nonsense policies in the "employee handbook."

I personally don't have a problem with this. Someone has to be responsible for making sure that the office doesn't look like a sty / homeless shelter. When investors/customers/interviewers stop by, there's a certain level of professionalism that needs to be present. So if there's a rule that people need to wear a top, they should be the ones to enforce that, in my opinion.

tootie 12 years 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.

rayiner 12 years ago | | |

Well there are obviously certain areas where they should have final say (e.g. this candidate is great, but here illegally and not authorized to work in this country).

They should not have final say over a candidate based on personality or communications skills. They should be a source of input (i.e. this guy is an asshole, because he was very rude to the guy who helped him scheduled his callback interview, or perhaps more importantly to inject some company-wide context into what can turn into a group-specific analysis) but it's the technical people who know what kind of communication goes on in a technical team, and thus it's the technical people who should evaluate a candidate on that characteristic. Yes, this requires trusting your technical people and investing them with a greater responsibility to understand the dynamics of their work group. That's a good thing.

wpietri 12 years ago | | |

When groups designed to serve become self-serving control apparatuses, I think a company is deeply fucked. Probably irrevocably so, although I'd love to learn otherwise. It means people have forgotten the mission, and once that happens I think it's slow death by turf battle.

You also see this happen with IT, Ops, and software development organizations, not just HR. E.g., feature X is the company's highest business priority, but the DBAs don't like it and they control all schema changes, so they just say no.

In my view, HR's job is to help hiring managers find the people they need, and then to support those people when they're there. If hiring managers need help with making hiring decisions, then by all means offer them help. And if HR,or anybody, spots something that concerns them, they should speak up. But I think giving HR a veto is a clear mistake. So no, I'd say that tests just make this an obvious problem, rather than a subtle one.

jerf 12 years ago | | |

You explained why they should have input, not why they should have final say.

lambda 12 years ago | |

> There is absolutely zero reason why HR/recruiting people should have final say on a candidate.

I can think of one. If they are responsible for doing a criminal background check, and have found serious criminal activity in the prospective employee's past.

That's not to say that some prospective hires can't be rehabilitated; but in certain cases, hiring someone with a criminal background is just too much of a risk, and it's not unreasonable for HR to have a final say on this.

Other than that, yeah, you're right.

KeliNorth 12 years ago | | |

I used to work for a pre-employment background screening agencies. It's illegal to reject someone based on any criminal history as long as the person has not lied about their background. Unfortunately, it's not illegal (federally, with the EEOC, each state may have their own differences) to discriminate by personality test.

This is definitely something I saw prevalent in the hiring world: if it isn't outright illegal, use it to prevent someone from being hired. In many cases we had clients that'd tiptoe the line and ask if certain reasons would be valid for rejecting a person, and some HR managers were upset when they learned it was against the law to disallow someone who had admitted their criminal history from being hired. So they found another reason.

There is still a massive amount of hiring discrimination. It's just not the "official" reason anymore since that'd be illegal. That job was soulbreaking.

dragonwriter 12 years ago | | |

Even in that case, HR can identify the risk paramters (likelihood of risk manifesting, expected cost if it manifests, overall expected cost taking all of that into account, etc.) but they can't weigh the cost against the expected benefits.

smsm42 12 years ago | |

I think appearance of this kind of voodoo in the hiring practices is a sign that the company has jumped the shark. It may still have many years of good earnings and still be a lot of fun and profit to work for, but once these symptoms appear, it is not on the way up anymore but on the way down, since it is no longer rules by common sense but by black magic of "we do not need to think, we have policies, policies don't have to make sense, they are there to be followed".

hkmurakami 12 years 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.

Welcome to the world of Asian Bigcos, where HR not only has the final say on the candidate hire, they also have enormous influence on what department/team that candidate ends up in.

lettergram 12 years ago | |

I've read a few business related books/taken several courses and it's actually taught that HR should have the largest role in hiring.

The rational: 1) HR is the manager of the human resource. 2) HR should determine and screen employees for possible risks. 3) HR is at fault if the screening is not achieved.

Relying on a test such as personality is pretty B.S. though. Most tech guys compared to the general populous will receive low scores for being social or extroverted. Which should directly translate into being a lesser productive team member (by being unable to communicated his/her ideas). In actuality, introverted individuals often can communicate well or in a manner which is suitable to completing a task such as the man who was not hired in this example.

What HR really needed to do was to just talk with him, clearly he didnt' seem like a threat and was capable of working with a team so it really shouldn't have mattered.

kenrikm 12 years ago | |

At the previous company I worked for I was given one of these tests in the interview process. Later I asked the HR Director about the test and she told me "Well you did crazy good 100% accurate, however the software also factors in when people give answers that we want to hear you failed that because and it said you were not being honest, however I ignore that one because I think that if you're smart enough to know what the right answers are then you're most likely smart enough to know what would be best for the company given the chance"

Smart HR Directors will get it right however I feel sorry for any company that uses the results of those tests to actually make a decision.

HelloMcFly 12 years ago | |

I understand why you think that way, but there are reasons HR-related folks get involved in these types of things. Note that I cannot speak for this particular company or their processes, but I can speak generally.

Properly validated psychometric tests are valid predictors of job performance (by which I mean objectively and factually correlated with actual work performance), and a properly constructed work-relevant test will be on the whole will be more valid than subjective judgments from most technical professionals. Of course there will be hits and misses, but the consistent application is the key to its use. If you don't consistently apply it, it becomes worthless.

But, let's throw that out of the window for a second because in this particular anecdote I don't think it's relevant. This test they were using seems more like a cultural fit, specifically a person-organization fit test. These tests are less about predicting job performance than they are about predicting organizational commitment and ultimately tenure [1]. Surely we can agree that those things are important too.

But, let's again say that this candidate's aptitude is so impressive that we don't mind an increased statistical chance that his or her tenure may short. The real issue is that legally you are obligated to apply the same set of criteria all of your employees for a given role (not necessarily the exact same position, but comparable positions). If the company is applying cognitive testing, personality testing, drug testing, person-org. fit testing, etc. to one group of applicants, you now cannot fail to adhere to that criteria because it is an invitation for legal liability, however seemingly-spurious.

Having said that, it's important that your selection processes have been validated previously, or at least are in the process of being validated (which provides some protection). I also have a big concern with the linked situation because: 1) it's a cultural-related test, which means the possibility to show cultural-related bias is high and 2) they were unwilling to make language accommodations, which seems unnecessarily rigid when native-level English skills are likely not a core component of the job. Point #1 can be accounted for in some shape or form (at a minimum through a low cutoff score), but Point #2 is more problematic.

Anyway, there is a reason companies adopt "Big Corp" characteristics as the scale. The primary reason is for legal compliance through standardization of process, and the other is that data is supportive of the validity of objective predictors of job success relative to subjective judgments.

I realize I may be opening myself up to some criticism and scorn from HN crowd for seemingly representing "Big Corporate" or acting like a Bob from Office Space, but so be it. Despite what it may seem, there are often smart people using evidenced-based processes driving seemingly asinine HR processes that drive you crazy. And sometimes there aren't, and it's just a big pain in the ass for poor reasons.

[1] PDF of meta-analytic findings about person-job/org fit: http://nreilly.asp.radford.edu/kristof-brown%20et%20al.pdf

foobarbazqux 12 years ago | | |

The problem with psychometric tests is that they're easy to game by answering them with the values the company is almost certainly looking for. Any company issuing a psychometric test is looking for obedience, hard work, discipline, profit orientation, civility, non-threatening creativity, etc. etc. etc.

So what you get by discouraging a broad diversity of personalities is a mix of people who actually have those specific characteristics and sociopaths. The latter group ends up running the company, and of course they issue utterly sociopathic "psychometric evaluations", which are basically just encoded discrimination against entire classes of people, regardless of job fitness, because the people up top are such incompetent leaders that they need subservient workers to obey their crazy orders without question.

scott_s 12 years ago | | |

Do you have any support for this where the employees are both technical and creative? I'm obviously thinking about software development, but it should apply to any kind of engineering or technical job where the employees need to have a deep technical knowledge, know how to apply that knowledge practically, and have to use that knowledge to create new solutions to new problems.

gbog 12 years ago | | |

> If you don't consistently apply it, it becomes worthless.

Why?

Having read Thinking Fast and Slow and been convinced by this book's many useful views, I would agree that a simple questionnaire-based ranking is actually better than any subjective assessment of candidates. And it should be as neutral as possible, ie not letting one's "first impression" influence the ranking (because it is almost always based on irrelevant physical features).

But even then, there is no reason for this neutral evaluation to become worthless if not 100% consistently applied. There is the broken leg case: If you want to evaluate the probability of someone going to see a movie tonight, you just base yourself on simple statistical facts (how frequently people go to the movie in this country), and should not try to infer more from subjective context, except if the guy in question broke his leg this morning.

These tests and evaluations help much in reducing system bias due to halo fallacy, framing effect, and even time of the day for the evaluator (it has been proven juges are more lenient after lunch!), but they still are only helpers, they do not need to be decision-blocking.

rayiner 12 years ago | | |

> Anyway, there is a reason companies adopt "Big Corp" characteristics as the scale. The primary reason is for legal compliance through standardization of process, and the other is that data is supportive of the validity of objective predictors of job success relative to subjective judgments.

I can't speak to your second point, but as to your first point, I should note that law firms themselves definitely do not use such HR-driven hiring processes.

ScottBurson 12 years ago | | |

Huh. Hewlett-Packard is as BigCorp as BigCorps come, and we don't use psychometric tests -- at least not here in the software division, and not anywhere else that I've ever heard of.

aidenn0 12 years ago | | |

Here's a very oversimplified model of people that would allow a test to strongly correlate with job performance, but still be wrong.

Let's assume for a moment that when a person is told to do something, and they disagree, 90% of all employees are typically wrong when they disagree and 10% of all employees are typically right when they disagree.

We are considering now just engineering type jobs (since that's what the article is about).

Now consider anti-authoritarianism: 90% of the people who are anti-authoritarianism will perform terribly worse than the typical population (since they will tend to go with their mistaken belief of what is right, or be obstructionist when poeple want to do it differently, etc). They will be your least valuable employees.

The remaining 10% of those scoring high on anti-authoritarianism are among the most valuable of your employees, as they won't allow their teammates to go down a dead-end.

So anti-authoritarianism is highly correlated with poor performance (even trouble-makers) but rejecting all applicants based on this will keep you from getting some of the most valuable employees.

smsm42 12 years ago | | |

>>> Properly validated psychometric tests are valid predictors of job performance

Here I have a problem - which job performance? Different jobs are obviously demanding different qualities - highly creative but impatient person may be an asset in job requiring instant creativity but a liability in a job requiring steady repetitive tasks and constant attention. So the test has to be matched to a position. But in the original article not only HR gave the same test to everybody, people who decide on positions don't even seem to have information or input on any correlation between position and test results. Given this, I highly doubt such application of testing can have any meaningful correlation with job performance.

hexagonc 12 years ago | |

In regards to the role of HR in hiring a candidate, I think it is a bit more complicated then you make it out to be. The problem is that a candidate won't just exist in isolation on the team he/she was hired to. There needs to be some representative of the rest of the company, outside of his/her project team and managers, to vouch for him/her. After all, this is a person that may be given building access, that will interact with other employees at company events, the cafeteria and the hallways.

I don't know anything about the details of the test in the article, but I can imagine someone doing well in their technical interviews, but failing miserably on company fit. Maybe he (settling on a 'he' in this case) is a brilliant programmer but showed serious misogynistic tendencies when interviewing with a female HR person. Maybe something came out of his HR interview that revealed him to be a borderline psycho who could code well but was a troublemaker. Considering that it is HR that will have to deal with this person in the future if there are complaints against him, I think it is only fair that they set some baseline level of acceptability for candidates.

columbo 12 years 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.

bitwize 12 years 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.

parennoob 12 years ago | | |

(Assuming this is not sarcastic, though I suspect it is)

I have no idea what sort of company hires only people who answer, "I would be perfectly happy if my boss took advantage of me, but it sounds like an extremely insipid place full of yes-men that I would not want to work at.

rlu 12 years 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"?

extra88 12 years ago | | |

You're only thinking about the smallest cogs. Do you want a middle manager to be taken advantage of by those under him? Do you want someone in Sales to be taken advantage of by customers?

codygman 12 years ago | | |

LOL, I have always answered no to this. I guess it's more than coincidence that led me to applying to places that don't administer these tests.

jfriedly 12 years ago | |

Would you care to send me an email? I'd love to ask someone who worked at one of these companies a few questions.

joelfriedly@gmail.com

Thanks!

brosirmandude 12 years ago | |

If you don't mind me asking, where would one begin searching for employment at a company such as the one you used to work at?

georgemcbay 12 years 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

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.

amirmc 12 years 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.

Lerc 12 years ago | |

How many people trust their employer to take a negative result on such a test as a sign of a poorly functioning test rather than a poorly functioning worker.

ajuc 12 years ago | | |

But if you work at the company for some time your employer has much better metrics to grade you than hiring process.

gringofyx 12 years 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 12 years ago | | |

Most technical types are disconnected from the realities of sales, marketing, finance, law, etc, etc

ctdonath 12 years ago | |

The author addresses this:

She also told me that if I was re-interviewing at the company then I likely wouldn't get the job based on my psychometric profile, which was actually ironic since I was highly respected in my role and was one of only a handful of people that could convincingly debate technical alternatives with Senior Management.

legedemon 12 years ago | |

I think I was in a really fortunate position when I was able to negotiate this at my second company. Interestingly, at my first company, asking an existing employee to take the written tests in the specified time-frame was a standard practice. They were also encouraged to provide subjective evaluation.

On a very positive note, our HR director was someone who had removed psychometric tests at a number of organizations before he came to us.

jackalope 12 years ago | |

Why start with the interview? Try to find the job listing and submit a resume. Then ask yourself if that was a good use of your time. This part of the process is horribly broken for a lot of employers and they don't even know it.

lifeisstillgood 12 years 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.

antirez 12 years ago |

Improving a company 101:

* Get rid of HR people.

* Profit.

andrewingram 12 years 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.

tokenadult 12 years 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

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.

mgkimsal 12 years 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).

seanmcdirmid 12 years 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).

rdl 12 years 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.

hrktb 12 years 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 12 years 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"

tankbot 12 years 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."

ajross 12 years 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 12 years 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.

ripter 12 years ago | |

Thank you! I was hoping that I wasn't the only one bothered by this.

redpola 12 years 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 12 years 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 12 years 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.

RamiK 12 years 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 12 years 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...

monkey88 12 years 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.

bdfh42 12 years 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?

RafiqM 12 years 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.

LukeB_UK 12 years 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 12 years 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.

mattbillenstein 12 years 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.

westicle 12 years 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.

droithomme 12 years 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.

jmadsen 12 years 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.

Piskvorrr 12 years ago |

Yup, nothing worse than a HR monkey with a meaningless number. "Bow before my all-powerful metric, puny mortals!"

cperciva 12 years ago | |

More generally, there's nothing worse than a social scientist who has illusions about being a scientist.

James_Duval 12 years 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.

Piskvorrr 12 years 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.

amberes 12 years 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 12 years 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 12 years ago | | |

But then, not getting what abstract thinking is about is probably a good sign that you aren't an abstract thinker?

rlpb 12 years 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.

bsbechtel 12 years ago |

This comment will probably get lost in the noise on this thread, but this one line says it all:

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.

shortcj 12 years 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.

Aqua_Geek 12 years 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).

dmar 12 years ago | |

My current company do this, we've around 600 employees across Europe and every candidate for an IT position in the UK takes the same test at a 1st/2nd level interview.

Unlike the OP it's at the hirer's discretion how much weight they put in the score and it's made clear to us there's a definite pattern that more nervous candidates & those without English as a natural language score less well. We ask them to come into the office, only in rare occasions does someone do it remotely.

Most of my candidates in software positions score 40-70% and have done well in the company, I've had a number in the 0-20% bracket of whom I took 1 based on his good performance in other aspects of the interview - he's not turned out to be a great hire relative to the others. A handful in the company get the 95%+ scores and they've all done well - I think many are among the best performers in our department suggesting some kind of particular capability.

The output of the test is a % score with breakdown in a few catagories plus a 2-3 page personality profile. I showed mine to a few ex colleagues, it said probably 8 things like "will have days where he's uncommunicative or seems unfriendly and days he's warmer" which everyone pointed out as eerily true about me (and the negative aspects I can therefore work on!) but it read a little like a horoscope in that you can probably find truth in it and it's up to you to what extent you forgive the paragraphs that are very untrue, although presented in a scientific way.

Honestly, I think it's pretty helpful as accompanying information and would use it again at another job

colanderman 12 years ago | | |

"will have days where he's uncommunicative or seems unfriendly and days he's warmer"

Yeah, I think that describes approximately 1 of out every 1 persons.

penguat 12 years ago | |

Here in the UK, it's not uncommon in large companies.

rdl 12 years 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.

arethuza 12 years 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).

kunil 12 years ago | | |

HR must do something to got paid, let's do a stupid test to each candidate!

buyx 12 years 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.

rmc 12 years ago | | |

That's big companies for you. Enterprise!

calpaterson 12 years ago | | |

Or even in medium sized ones

willvarfar 12 years ago | |

I recall hearing - I think it was an article posted to HN a few months back - that handwriting assessments are common in France.

Alterlife 12 years ago | |

In India, it's very common to have fresh graduates take psych tests.

I don't know if the results matter.

Confusion 12 years 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 12 years 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.

joe_the_user 12 years 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

valleyer 12 years ago |

Is "me and X" as the subject of a sentence valid British English grammar? It comes across as really uneducated.

aidos 12 years 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 12 years 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.

robinson-wall 12 years 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.

gringofyx 12 years 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.

robin2 12 years ago | |

It's fairly common. If one says "X and I" one risks coming across as being a bit Brian Sewell.

bencollier49 12 years 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 12 years ago | |

AFAIK, it's very common but still incorrect in British English.

chris_wot 12 years 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.

naahuc 12 years 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 12 years 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.

aes 12 years 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 12 years 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 12 years 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

ignostic 12 years 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.

jmilloy 12 years 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 12 years 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.

BillyMaize 12 years 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...

alan_cx 12 years 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?

switch33 12 years 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.

noptic 12 years 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."

gutsy 12 years 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.

ryguytilidie 12 years 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.

rlu 12 years 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 12 years 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.

kunil 12 years 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

wololo 12 years ago |

What was the test, out of curiosity? What tests are the most commonly given?

gringofyx 12 years 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 12 years 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 12 years ago | | |

"ooh, actually I agree" is cold reading?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading

gringofyx 12 years ago | | |

I think the test was Myers-Briggs based http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator

kawsper 12 years ago | |

I got a test that tested my math skills, problem solving, my understanding of a text, and word associations. They ended with a test for a Myers-Briggs personality type.

My math skills (without calculator) were pretty bad, but I was reassured that it didn't matter, I was applying as a software developer not an accountant.

I got the job, and in my time there I also heard about people that "failed" the test.

singingfish 12 years 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).

bitwize 12 years 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.

Fomite 12 years 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.

lutusp 12 years 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-...

stocktradr 12 years 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.

mathattack 12 years 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.

eplumlee 12 years 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 12 years 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-jar...

rsiqueira 12 years 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

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

nraynaud 12 years 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)

kamakazizuru 12 years 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!?

consultant23522 12 years 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.

bougiefever 12 years 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.

aquadrop 12 years 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.

Tyrannosaurs 12 years 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.

freejack 12 years 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.

redschell 12 years 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/...

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.

nicholassmith 12 years 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.

Steve_Baker 12 years 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 12 years 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.

cupcake-unicorn 12 years 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?

svachalek 12 years 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.

garethadams 12 years ago |

Wait, I see the problem! You've sorted by:

  [hr_score, tech_score]

when you meant to sort by:

  [tech_score, hr_score]

dudurocha 12 years 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.

sthommes 12 years 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 12 years 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.

DanielBMarkham 12 years 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.

tekromancr 12 years 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.

btbuildem 12 years 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.

chx 12 years 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.

aercolino 12 years 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.

asdkl234890 12 years 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.

joshdance 12 years ago |

We don't have HR at my company. What does HR do in a well run company? What is their role?

muhuk 12 years 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.

aestra 12 years ago | |

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_resource_management#Busin...

mahyarm 12 years ago | |

To protect the company from employees.

Ceddy 12 years 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 %.

iamleppert 12 years ago |

Someone else posted it, but it's here:

Company in question: Kaonix - http://www.kaonix.com/

Can we please blackball this company into oblivion from ever hiring any smart, capable, or talented developers?

gringofyx 12 years 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.

altero 12 years ago |

> that a quiet young man of Asian descent

Perhaps that could be the problem, HR used test as an excuse.

tibbon 12 years 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.

techdragon 12 years 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.

androtheos 12 years 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.

darasen 12 years 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 12 years 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.

moocowduckquack 12 years ago |

Is the HR manager's name Catbert?

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-11-13/

jacquesm 12 years ago |

Pity the story doesn't end with a double resignation.

Shivetya 12 years 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.

hosh 12 years ago |

You know ... if the employer doesn't want a candidate like that, then he's fair game for poaching for your personal network.

n11 12 years ago |

This is beyond ridiculous - you can't tell a person's personality & potential culture fit based on a few questions.

thewarrior 12 years 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 12 years ago | |

Err on the side of psychopathic. Seriously.

This post sums it up well: http://melbel.hubpages.com/hub/Unicru

sys044 12 years ago |

Company in question: Kaonix - http://www.kaonix.com/

gringofyx 12 years ago | |

OP here - that's not the company in question

ck2 12 years 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.

shmerl 12 years ago |

This is pretty weird. What kind of places take psychometric tests? Astronauts programs or something?

robertschultz 12 years ago |

Wow this is absolutely ridiculous and a horrible way to recruit people.

topherjaynes 12 years ago |

Just curious if the HR manager took the psychometric evaluation?

Ellahn 12 years ago |

Why the heck do you still work there, anyways?

m4tthumphrey 12 years ago |

I'd love to know where he is now.

sbilstein 12 years ago |

what kind of bullshit company is that? I've never seen anything like this. This is awful.

TeeWEE 12 years ago |

Please leave that company. Ugh

pnathan 12 years ago |

What was the test?

adultSwim 12 years ago |

Me != I

icecreampain 12 years 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 12 years 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.

cLeEOGPw 12 years 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.

bengrunfeld 12 years 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.

aaron695 12 years 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 12 years 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 12 years 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?

T * My mother is a good woman. F * Evil spirits possess me at times. F * There seems to be a lump in my throat much of the time. T * At times I feel like swearing. T * My hands and feet are usually warm enough. F * Ghosts or spirits can influence people for good or bad. F * Someone has been trying to poison me. F * Everything tastes the same. F * Someone has been trying to rob me. F * Bad words, often terrible words, come into my mind and I cannot get rid of them. F * Often I feel as if there is a tight band around my head. F * Peculiar odors come to me at times. F * My soul sometimes leaves my body. F * When a man is with a woman he is usually thinking about things related to her sex. F * I often feel as if things are not real. F * Someone has it in for me. F * My neck spots with red often. T * Once in awhile I laugh at a dirty joke. F * I hear strange things when I am alone. F * In walking I am very careful to step over sidewalk cracks. F * At one or more times in my life, I felt that someone was making me do things by hypnotizing me.