
Lessons from a year’s worth of hiring data - leeny
http://blog.alinelerner.com/lessons-from-a-years-worth-of-hiring-data/
======
RogerL
So, what are you measuring? I don't get it. You made offers mostly to people
with few typos in their resume. Is this evidence that people with few typos
are good, or evidence that you have some kind of bias against resumes with
typos?

I find the action words particularly disturbing. Every resume that crosses my
desk has people that 'drove' a 'process', and they 'innovated', and so on.
Buzzword crap. I'd bet my company on somebody that "implement an image
algorithm" (all bad words apparently) over somebody that "enabled client
connectivity" any day (all good words).

And what is the actual relevance of worked for a big company? Again, I suspect
bias on your part. Explain how working for Microsoft is a good predictor for
how a person will perform in a 10 person startup?

~~~
itsdrewmiller
There's a difference between action buzzwords and clear explanations of what
you did. "Drove a process to innovate that led to massive KPI improvements" is
very buzzwordy but not at all clear. :-)

If anything I think bias would lead to lower-than-expected scores, as more
resumes would end up in the "to interview" pool. But it would be good to
validate this against the rejected resumes.

I doubt most of the y combinator startups count as "big" companies, and he
said he included all of them. He was trying to model "successfully held down a
high-expectations technical job" and it seems like he chose a reasonably good
heuristic.

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itsdrewmiller
This is awesome! The biggest threat to validity I see is that your process of
filtering from 10 resumes to 1 interview could introduce a lot of bias; if
people ignore other warning signs that would weed out the resume because an
applicant went to a top school, then you're going to end up with more stinkers
with that attribute in your interview pool and undervaluing it in your final
analysis.

I would not suggest that you go through and rate all the unaccepted resumes on
the same scale and then regress against both "got an interview" and "got an
offer" since that seems like a ton of work, but I think it would be the best
way to resolve the threat. :-)

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itsdrewmiller
Also, the stuff about MS degrees totally tracks with my subjective experience
as a hiring manager - it's not a red flag exactly but I don't think I've ever
been wowed by a person with an MS on their resume.

(I'm sure they do exist, don't hate me people with them!)

~~~
digitalzombie
Likewise my experience hiring people.

I was lead and I screen people with masters. They all failed. I swear they
went back to school for master because they couldn't get a job.

One of them was an Indian dude.

So what's your focus?

"Database"

Neat what's your favorite relational database?

"All of them."

.... Ok, what do you think about NoSQL?

"They're neat."

What's your favorite?

"All of them."

In my head, I'm like what the fuck. Did this guy tried ALL of the NoSQL and
all of the relational database?

Anyway, the dude was pretty bad, no real skills just a piece of paper.
Couldn't even solve simple program puzzles (they're just Project Euler
problems).

~~~
azth
I met another guy like this (who happened to be Indian too), when I was
interning at a big 3-letter named company.

So, what are you focusing on for your grad studies?

"Quantum computing"

Oh neat, what exactly are you doing?

"Some quantum stuff, blah blah blah"

I don't remember the exact answer, it was a while ago. But it was clearly just
some buzz words that did not contain any substance; and that he had no idea
what was going on.

There is also another Indian guy at the company I presently work for. Fresh
grad with an MS degree. We were writing a small internal web service, and he
was all over the place about how "we must use a NoSQL data store", because
"scalability", and "flexible and dynamic, no schema" etc.

Thankfully, the final call was not his, and we went with a plain RDBMS --
which naturally suited our purpose pretty well. We had no need for NoSQL just
for the sake of using it.

Disclaimer, I hold an MS degree. I was privileged enough to get admitted to a
top Canadian school with an excellent CS program. Almost all the people I met
during my stay there were brilliant, and definitely did not go back to grad
school because they were not able to get a job. Many of them did internships
at top companies; and a couple of them even came back from the industry 20+
years later, because they wanted to work on something different. So definitely
do not clump all MS/PhD degree holders together. I think the author here is
making the classic correlation vs causation mistake.

~~~
itsdrewmiller
The author answered a related question on Quora:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/05/09/how-
different-i...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/05/09/how-different-is-
a-b-s-in-computer-science-from-an-m-s-when-it-comes-to-recruiting/)

Sounds like we aren't all crazy. :-) Also, the other posts on the blog (at
least that I have read so far) are definitely worth your time if you liked
this one.

------
azth
Correlation vs. causation.

~~~
itsdrewmiller
This phrase is the Godwin's law of discussing data. :-) As a hiring manager, I
don't care about causation; I just want to know what aspects of a resume
actually correlate with someone being competent (or not) so I can waste less
time on pointless interviews.

