

Automated Job Rejection - razzmataz
http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/automated-job-rejection

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acslater00
There is a moderately interesting point to be made here that automated
candidate screening software is not a panacea, and while it can do a good job
of filtering through the hundreds or thousands of applicants that might
materialize for a single post, it might cause you to miss out on a good fit.

On the other hand, this article is laden with so much hyperbolic moralizing
that it makes me take almost none of it seriously.

One of SeatGeek's founders (where I work) has written repeatedly about the
insane problem of managing job applications [<http://jackg.org/screening-with-
an-arbitrary-test>]. This is not a self-inflicted wound. We're talking dozens
to hundreds of _actually_ unqualified applicants for individual jobs, and the
idea that a 15 person company is going to carry someone around for 6 months
while they're "trained" is ludicrous.

It is absolutely true that there is a skills-gap in some industries. [Software
is one of them]

It is absolutely true that a bad hire is more expensive than a non-hire.

It is absolutely true that some HR departments are breath-takingly
incompetent, although most have a pretty good handle on their needs and cost
structures, to be perfectly honest.

All that said, trying to spin this into a "the corporations are destroying the
country!" story is beyond idiocy.

~~~
Apocryphon
But they're not talking about startups. They're talking about large
corporations that could sustain training of new employees.

~~~
natrius
Assuming you're right, who cares? Why must large corporations train employees
if they don't feel it's in their best interests?

~~~
knowtheory
If you're talking about the social contract... who _is_ supposed to train
employees? It's certainly the case currently that the US workforce bears the
burden of training itself currently often by taking on substantial debt to
afford a college degree.

But to say that companies that operate in the US don't have a substantial
interest in ensuring that the US has a trained and skilled work force... that
just seems dangerously short sighted.

~~~
cperciva
Companies have an interest in there being a trained and skilled work force --
which is why they lobby for the government to spend tax dollars on education
and training.

There's no inconsistency between it not being advantageous for companies to
spend _their own_ money training people and it being advantageous for
companies to spend _everybody's_ money training people.

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incongruity
(warning: anecdote ahead)

I once had a job at a large institution created, for me, with requirements
based solely on my resume.

The automated HR system decided I wasn't a match for the job. It took a month
or two for them to be able to hire me after that fiasco.

~~~
cperciva
I don't know anything about your specific case (obviously) but what you
describe isn't _necessarily_ a bad thing. In some organizations, one of the
rules of HR is to add a level of corporate sanity-checking to a process which
is otherwise driven by individual managers -- by creating additional unstated
requirements if necessary.

To take an extreme case, if Bob the VP of Sales decides he wants to create a
"Senior Engineer III" position with a salary of $300k/year based on
requirements drawn from his 13 year old nephew's resume, it's entirely
appropriate for HR to add an unpublished "should have education or work
experience suitable for a $300k/year job" requirement and not accept Bob's 13
year old nephew as a match for the job.

No system is perfect, but that doesn't mean that it's wrong to have such
systems in place.

~~~
incongruity
I totally get your point – checks and balances are important. However, I don't
think anyone is helped by unstated or invisible requirements. It speaks to a
high level of mistrust of employees and candidates.

Now, if HR were to explicitly add those requirements and be open about it, I'd
wager it'd still keep fraud down while also actually improving the hiring
process for both HR and the hiring manager.

~~~
cperciva
Fraud is a difficult problem to deal with -- the more open you are about what
you're doing to prevent it, the more you speed up the "evolution" of better
(aka. worse) fraud.

Whether that effect is large enough to justify the lack of transparency in
this case, I don't know; but I'm sure there are some cases where it is
appropriate.

(Marginally related: This is why I have some sympathy for Paypal when they say
"this payment is suspect" and refuse to provide any more information -- they
can't tell me why a particular payment set off alarms without also telling the
bad guys how to evade their alarms.)

~~~
incongruity
No, it's really not when you constrain who the possible perpetrators are and
consider that they must be long-term, more senior employees. Fraud by higher
ranking employees – particularly managers involved in the creation of job
descriptions and doing hiring is just not going to be that common.

It certainly isn't going to be common enough that it's worth destroying
internal trust and credibility when open (within company) reviews and
sufficient internal control mechanisms that didn't include hidden manipulation
of candidate hiring could do an equivalent job without reducing the
organization's ability to hire stellar candidates (not that I'm biased, given
my case, of course =)

I mean, it may well happen, but all sorts of unlikely events _may_ happen and
yet would similarly be problematic to keep constant protection for. It's all
about the risk/reward analysis and, in this case, I believe you've calculated
that incorrectly.

------
joezydeco
How about the fact that none of these employers even have the courtesy to
contact the applicant at all? I'm not talking only about unsolicited resumes
sent to H/R managers, but job applications submitted through the big websites
like Dice, Monster, and Careerbuilder. Not even a "we'll keep you on file"
like the old days.

I'm half-tempted to make a shame board to let applicants tally up how many
unanswered candidates each company has.

~~~
dredmorbius
I've had firms contact me to tell me they've passed me over for consideration
... for positions I've never applied for. Apparently even rejecting various
pseudonyms I've generated.

Which I suppose is the flipside of your situation.

~~~
joezydeco
Wow, that's just bizarre. Are you sure you don't have a resume active on some
random job board that's continually getting sent out?

~~~
dredmorbius
One of me does have a publicly posted resume. I've given some thought to
seriously trimming what it reveals.

Others of me have public profiles, sans resume:
[https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/33WYAgFc...](https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/33WYAgFca39)

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redact207
The more I hear about these stupid HR systems, the more I see manipulating
them as a matter of good SEO.

It's a system that rewards people that stuff keywords - effectively echoing
the job requirements and adding the industry's buzzwords. It's also a system
that rewards people who take a shotgun approach to applications, rather than
individually crafted responses.

Ripe for exploitation I'd say.

~~~
greyerzer
> It's also a system that rewards people who take a shotgun approach to
> applications, rather than individually crafted responses.

One of the main purposes of these systems is to deal with the massive amount
of shotgun applications that companies are receiving. Of course, this means
that more targeted applications do not receive the consideration they deserve,
thereby incentivising job seekers to use a shotgun approach.

Sounds like a vicious cycle to me.

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jared314
I think the automated resume filtering systems are interesting. Previous
stories, about how to hire people, have told how the nice people involved in
hiring did the exact thing these systems do, only manually. They take a big
stack of resumes and filter 95% straight into the trash, based on some
arbitrary rules.

I don't like the idea of these automated systems, but I also don't see how
this is any different.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I've used an automated resume filtering systems in the past. They worked quite
well. I'd absolutely do it again.

[http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/one_hiring_filter_tha...](http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/one_hiring_filter_that_works.html)

It certainly did filter quite a few people straight to the trash, based mainly
on an inability to fizzbuz.

------
tomasien
Just got hired to make software that ranks candidates based on more dynamic
qualities, like the ability to answer basic logic problems or complete a task
that the job may require. Could be cool.

~~~
victork2
I don't want to be mean or anything ( and probably it will go against the HN
crowd) but you're part of the problem. Basically it's the reliance on
computerized system to assess somebody's skills that is at the root of the
problem.

I know it seems horrendous to a lot of people that thinks that computers are
the solution to every problem but as of the current state of technology, it
just does not work. I have been in the position of an applicant recently and
the tests are just plain ridiculous. From the "IQ-Test" at Bloomberg for
engineers to the automated "solve our problem and get hired" websites the
system is just bloated with these cheap ( and shi* ) solutions.

It's time for companies to put some money on the table to hire real people
doing real interviews to candidates. Any company that don't involve somebody
at step 1 of the recruitment process to assist you and that claims that
"Employees are first!", I say: bullshit!

~~~
readme
I disagree that there is a problem. The _problem_ is that _you_ are choosing
to apply at places that employ hiring mechanisms that you personally object
to.

So I think that _you're_ the problem. Some people appreciate the rigorous
screening. If you don't, apply somewhere else.

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m0nastic
One (optimistic) takeaway from this article for folks here is that this should
show exactly how much of an advantage they can have in recruiting people
(although obviously this isn't great news for people looking for a job).

Not to say that every big company has this sort of hiring inefficiency, but it
seems like it's definitely a predisposition as you increase in size.

Most people seem to say that hiring is arguably the most important thing you
do as a company. This shitty system can absolutely work to your advantage in
trying to recruit talent.

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brudgers
Automated resume rejection makes a lot of sense.

If there are 200 applicants for a position, software which eliminates all of
the candidates only has 0.5% error.

That's pretty good AI.

~~~
esrauch
I know that was a joke, but in situations like this there are two separate
measures of error; precision and recall. Precision is how many of the results
marked as relevant really were (measure of false positives), recall is how
many of the actually relevant results were correctly considered relevant
(measure of false negatives).

Any system can trivially have perfect precision by saying all results are not
relevant, or perfect recall by saying all results are relevant. Your system
would have 100% precision and 0% recall.

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lnanek2
I was reading a book recently that called getting arrested, "being put on the
electronic plantation". This was just getting an arrest too, not even a
conviction. The logic was that all the good jobs do background checks nowadays
and won't even interview someone with an arrest. So someone working retail
with an arrest wouldn't be able to move up to bank teller, for example. Now
throw in that you can be arrested even in cases where you are innocent or in
cases of identity theft...

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greyerzer
The interview and the article state that "In some cases employers do not want
to hire anyone at all, they think it's cheaper to leave positions unfilled!".
If it is cheaper to leave a position vacant, why bother listing it as open?
Wouldn't it make more sense to eliminate it?

~~~
razzmataz
Sometimes there is an internal candidate that will get the job, yet it still
has to be posted for some arcane rule/law... Or so I hear.

~~~
vonmoltke
I hear this excuse often, but in ten years at a large company I never met
anyone I never met anyone who was the beneficiary of such a thing.

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fiatmoney
This reeks of principal-agent problems. HR departments at large firms are
notoriously concerned with 1) folk knowledge about not getting sued (with a
very tenuous relationship to reality, eg mgkimsal's comment), and 2) checking
boxes. Since their actions have almost zero connection to outcomes, it's no
wonder they play it safe / easy in hiring, and both firms and workers see
shortages.

One way to start solving the problem is to make the department with the
position responsible for filling it, either with their own man-hours, or via
their own headhunting budget.

