

Ask HN: What does it take to hire for merit, and avoid biases? - kedargj

Many companies and team leaders state that they always hire for quality, first, yet the hiring process starts with a resume even for junior positions.<p>I find it hard to look at a resume and not create associations to university, gpa, name, courses, etc which are not directly connected to merit of the candidate for the job.<p>What techniques do you use to avoid a filtering bias before conducting technical interviews?
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jtfairbank
I'm more concerned about a diversity in hiring channels than biases on an
individual level. Many startups want 'the best people' but only hire based on
a candidate pool already familiar to them: friends and recent alumni of their
school.

This is especially problematic when you consider that most startups are
created by white males who have had a societally positive bias all their
lives. And they tend to associate mostly with people similar to them. This
leads unintentional to sexism, racism, and ageism in our industry, and
prevents many startups from even talking to a large number of talented people.

I'd encourage you to reach out to older alumni, minority coding groups, and
more experienced developers through previous jobs or your board and advisors.
More diverse hiring channels will lead to a more diverse candidate pool.

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thejteam
1)Whatever metric you are looking to determine merit, whether it is University
affiliation, GPA, or performance on a coding evaluation, don't think of the
result as a single number. Think of it as a range. Even a probability
distribution. The mean value of technical merit may be higher but the variance
is so large that the metric may be meaningless unless you have a large number
of applicants.

2)Whatever metric you are looking at, recognize ahead of time that you might
be getting it wrong. So you might want to include a sample of candidates from
the rest of the pile just to evaluate your evaluation methods. Unless you are
the type of company getting dozens of applications from people at top schools
then this shouldn't be a problem.

3)Hiring somebody right out of college is a roll of the dice anyway. No matter
what their ability, you have no idea how well they work with other people, how
well they listen to instructions, or how well they can handle the grind of the
9-5. Once you get to the interview phase I would look more for maturity than
technical merit so long as they meet a minimum acceptable criteria. But I also
suppose this depends on what stage your company is at.

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rnovak
I'm sorry, but how are University/GPA/Courses not directly tied to median
candidate merit?

If you had someone in front of you who went to MIT and had a 4.0, and always
took the most stringent professors for each course in the curriculum, how on
earth do you think they compare to someone from ASU, or some community
college, with a 2.15 GPA?

~~~
lsiebert
They aren't directly tied to merit. They may be indirectly tied to merit;
that's the argument many people make. But we also know college attendance,
especially at elite schools, and GPA are correlated with other things...
things like economic background.

You also have to consider how bias can be self-reinforcing. We know people
with stereotypical African-American names are less likely to be hired then
people with the same resume but names associated with Caucasians. And black
children are much more likely to be suspended or expelled then white
counterparts, and to get lower grades, even if their performance and behavior
is on par with white students. So credentials like a degree at a good school,
and good grades, are not always free of bias.

If you are an employer, you have to consider a number of factors. You may need
to fill the position immediately. You may have a certain pay scale in mind
without flexibility. You want to avoid hiring a weak or bad employee, and you
want to avoid not hiring a good employee who merely looks bad on paper.

In science, we often use randomized samples. You might try taking a random
sample of the people who you wouldn't ordinarily pick, the no pile, and
interviewing them at technical skills. Or better yet, having somebody who
doesn't know who is who interview them purely on technical skills, and not
letting them see the resume.

~~~
duncan_bayne
"You want to avoid hiring a weak or bad employee, and you want to avoid not
hiring a good employee who merely looks bad on paper."

Yes, but the first is a much more serious problem. It's unlikely that a small
company will founder if it misses a good hire, but a bad hire can certainly
destroy it. Better to err on the side of caution.

