
Helsinki to Begin Anonymous Recruiting - rendall
https://finlandtoday.fi/helsinki-to-begin-anonymous-recruiting/
======
proxygeek
Recently I've been thinking about inherent biased towards applicants based on
their prior work / educational history, in terms of organizations they have
been to.

I get that it acts as a moderate signal of how tenacious and inherently able
that applicant might have been in the past if she went to XYZ school or ABC
company. But there will be so many false negatives!

A lot of folks who probably would be otherwise capable of the job at hand
would be dismissed for not having the right pedigree. Also, past performance
is not always the best Intuit if future success.

And then of course is the issue of how do you even define success, especially
in case if university graduates. How does a Yale or Harvard define our measure
success for its students... Probably in terms of potential impact they have on
the world or how good their names may look on the rolls 10 years down the
line.

A lot of the issues, especially in terms of job applicators but also
applicable in admissions process, ultimately comes down to information and
numeric asymmetry between the organisation and the applicant.

If there was a way to somehow capture the readings - however brief - for
rejection or selection of applicants or a documented scoring methodology, that
itself would bring a lot of change.

I would love to know if some resources to further explore the alternative
models of applicant assessment which does not place as much importance on the
past organisations / schools they have been to.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated

~~~
andreakate
Professor Iris Bohnet of Harvard wrote a fascinating book called "What Works"
that you might find interesting. What I really like about the book is right
from the jump Bohnet basically says all this "diversity training" and "PC
culture" stuff is a waste of time and an uphill battle. We all like to pretend
we're unbiased but Bohnet tells the truth from the outset: _everyone_ has
biases. The book focuses on systems that emphasize equal opportunity and
remove some of those inherent biases we all have.[1] Bohnet's premise is that
we'll get better results if we stop designing systems with the faulty
assumption that most people/systems/institutions _aren 't_ biased in some way
or another.

There's a chapter about "blind auditions" that Orchestras began to implement
in the 1970's that you might find interesting.[2] After reading that chapter I
remember wondering how much we're overthinking a lot of these issues and
whether we might be overlooking some pretty easy changes that could have a
significant impact.

One interesting fact from the blind auditions study was that even without
being able to see the musician they were able to demonstrate bias (likely
unconscious) when women wore high heels to their audition because the sound
gave away their gender. It's really fascinating some of the ways we
unconsciously "judge" those around us.

[1][https://hbr.org/2016/07/designing-a-bias-free-
organization](https://hbr.org/2016/07/designing-a-bias-free-organization)

[2][https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-
leadership/2013/oct/14/...](https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-
leadership/2013/oct/14/blind-auditions-orchestras-gender-bias)

~~~
fipple
I know that as a result of diversity training and guidelines I am 10x as
cautious about my behavior at work in front of women as with just men. That
means there is a camaraderie that the men have that the women are left out of.
When I worked on Wall Street this divide didn’t exist but there was definitely
a culture of sexually hostile work environment and sexual hatrassment.

~~~
andreakate
This is really interesting because I've worked on Wall Street as well and I
know exactly what you mean but have never really been able to articulate the
difference you've just pointed out. Working on Wall Street I had lots of male
_friends_ , not just colleagues. For the most part I felt included and was
treated as competent. I also dealt with a fair amount of sexual harassment.
Most of it was under the guise of joking/"locker room talk" that I just
ignored. Sometimes, particularly from the older men, it was more physical and
made me feel very uncomfortable.

The allegations against Google actually really caught me off guard because, in
my experience, a lot of men in Silicon Valley seem like they're almost too...
_progressive_ (if that's the right word) to overtly harass their female peers
the way men on Wall Street sometimes do. On the other hand I really struggle
with inclusion in tech in a way that I never did in finance. I often feel
dismissed by my tech colleagues. Both personally and professionally.
Experiencing that sort of divide is much more difficult to explain and, to
your point, much more difficult for me to navigate. Not to diminish women who
have been sexually harassed at work, I'm one of them, but this silent divide
takes a much bigger toll on me personally.

Thank you for pointing it out.

~~~
fipple
It’s simple - either people act however they want, or they watch their
behavior. In the former they develop stronger bonds with each other. In the
latter they are more respectful of each other.

------
hardwaresofton
I've long suspected this was the only remotely feasible way to remove bias
from recruiting (and possibly interviewing itself) -- I'm interested to see
how this will go.

Politics about bias and diversity aside, if your goal was to objectively
disable people from being biased, the simplest solution always seemed to be to
remove their ability to apply any of their biases.

~~~
longerthoughts
>the simplest solution always seemed to be to remove their ability to apply
any of their biases

Bias will exist regardless of which information you present, the most you can
hope for is shifting and limiting the types of bias that come into play to
eliminate useless or harmful bias. Even if you grant anonymity to the
applicant, recruiters can still be biased against or in favor of the school
somebody went to, what they studied, the organizations they were involved in,
etc.

~~~
Z1515M8147
For thia reason I hire based on anonymized data that also discards all place
name locations and institutions. The result is quite effective, as you are
presented with an applications that show only the bare bones of someone's
experiences without context that might bias you.

~~~
thatcat
Do you continue to ignore this information in the interview phase?

------
bufferoverflow
This had been tried before, and it failed spectacularly. Women did even worse.

[https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-
tri...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-
improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888)

~~~
tomp
Don't you mean, succeeded spectacularly? If the composition of candidates was
changed when less biased/irrelevant information was displayed, arguably the
selection could only be _more_ meritocratic, not less.

~~~
Fomite
That is only true assuming the selection criteria that _weren 't_ blinded were
themselves free of bias. That's very rarely true.

And if it's not true, arguably what you've done is removed the adjustment
variables that could correct the bias, rather than the bias itself.

~~~
706f6f70
> were themselves free of bias.

At what point do we start growing people solely for the purpose of leading
unbiased existences away from all of humanity? Of course these existences are
isolated from all humanity lest they associate the human that gives them food
with positivity, or someone having a bad day with negativity. And of course,
we kill these _unbiaseds_ shortly after every selection process, since the
mere process of selection itself, generates bias.

Some SF writer must have beaten me to this right?

~~~
Fomite
Note that, like many machine learning examples of the recent past, the
evaluator themselves need not be biased. Just the data.

------
hirundo
> Anonymous recruiting entails that the ... date of birth ... are not included
> in the job application

If I write on my application that I have 25 years of experience, does that
have to be excluded due to it revealing that my date of birth is likely more
than 40 years ago? Can they really believe that the amount of experience isn't
important?

~~~
caymanjim
I'm 46, and people my age talk about leaving off earlier experience, so as not
to look too old. I condensed my earlier experience (the first 10 years) into a
couple sentences describing the roles--not to look younger, but because with
an average stint of 2.5 years, there are just too many jobs to list.

Other steps people my age take are to stop listing dates--either select dates
like university graduation, or--in extreme cases--all employment dates.

Keep in mind that there are different biases at different screening points
along the way. The manager with the open position may want someone older and
more experienced, but the people recruiting, screening, and filtering the
candidates may be biased or simply not familiar with the value of experience
that doesn't match today's buzzwords.

~~~
CGamesPlay
I've got about 14 years of development experience and I also leave off some of
my earlier experience on my resume. I do it not to conceal my age, but because
the stuff I was doing 10 years ago is so much less interesting and relevant to
my applications today.

Does my outlook not resonate with you/other older employees?

~~~
caymanjim
It does with me, but I'm less picky about traditional experience than most
people. I'd prefer a list of technologies that someone knows, a list of things
they want to work on, and a blurb about how they might fit in to the role I'm
hiring for.

The cover letter seems to have fallen out of fashion, but I find a couple
paragraphs of prose far more revealing about a person's abilities than a
resume. Of course it's also more work to craft one for every position you're
interested in, and doesn't help much if you're looking to put yourself into a
database for recruiters (e.g. LinkedIn or any other job site), where they
force you to iterate your experience in chronological order and list
technologies with no context.

I think it's important to leave off things you're not interested in. I did
Perl for years but there is no amount of money that would get me to do it
again, so I minimize or eliminate its presence on my resume, and put extra
emphasis on the technologies I want to work with now.

------
Haitischmock
People are going to fake a lot more degrees and other qualifications.

When they come in for an in-person interview racial/gender/age/whatever bias
is still going to be there.

Only way to prevent this would be to forbid in-person interviews before
hiring/signing a conract, but then companies would presumably simply stop
hiring from applications, because the qualifications are unreliable and they
can't get a character impression of the applicant.

Hiring by reference from existing employees would become the norm (maybe it
already is).

~~~
donald123
Why would someone do that if they know the faked degrees or qualifications
won't pass the background check eventually? Just to get an onsite interview?

~~~
adontz
Yes, just to get an onsite interview. I saw this many times and it's very sad.

Also, I relate this to culture. Not to offend anyone, but from my personal
experience lying in CV is much more common for some countries, that for
others.

Scale maybe terrible, like multiple certifications in some field with no
actual basic knowledge or skills. Like Certified Senior (sic!) Software
Developer who can't tell you difference between stack and queue, or CCIE
certified network engineer who has no idea what is DNS and how it works (real
case).

~~~
donald123
And what makes it different for those people without anonymous recruiting?

------
Z1515M8147
I hire on anonymized data. I can tell you that it works well. The only flaw is
that if your pool of application sifters is not diverse, bias will start to
creep back in. For instance, in a group of several application sifters of a
single gender who are collectively deciding which applications to progress to
interview stage, one may frequently encounter presumptions of gender and age
of the applicants due to implicit bias by the sifters.

The organisation must have a very respectful culture in which colleagues feel
comfortable calling out others on their biases when this happens.

~~~
gammateam
"ooooh this person has _MIT /Stanford/Harvard_ on their resume, just like I
do!"

"eh, midwestern state school"

"what even is an HBCU are those accredited?"

"fortran though?"

the initiatives are at least conscious of sensitivities in the space, but we
have a long way to go

------
tomrod
Economist here. This will bake in bias that affirmative action and other
programs seek to counter. Inequality of opportunity unfortunately isn't
countered by this approach. Why? The same group(s) facing discrimination at
the employment point also face discrimination earlier in life, or have baked
in social discrimination (such as the US justice system overpenalizing blacks
relative to whites/Asians, or Ivy League admission rates for Asians versus
other groups).

It would be nice to build a group-blind world, and the more we adopt these
specific approaches the better can can iterate towards. However, care should
be taken to ensure the baked in biases don't further entrench.

~~~
Aqua
I'm sorry, but this sounds absurd. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you're
saying implies that employers should hire people that are less qualified for a
job just because they belong to a group, members of which on average are more
likely to be discriminated earlier in their lives than others?

Engineer here, and no, blind hiring will not bake-in any biases, because
that's exactly the problem this approach solves - it aims to hire the best
candidates regardless of their race, origin, religion, accent and other
irrelevant characteristics.

~~~
ianleeclark
> Engineer here, and no, blind hiring will not bake-in any biases

Yes, it will: if you're born to a well-off family, you'll go to better schools
before college. Due to this, you'll have a better chance at succeeding in
college, have more resources to delve deeper into your field of study, better
manage studying abroad, &c. All of these factors will make your list of skills
more attractive to employers.

Compared to someone who was poor who went to worse schools, didn't study
abroad, and couldn't afford to spend more time on their field of study due to
having to work to pay for college. This will make your list of skills less
attractive to an employer.

Right out of the gate, there is a bias against people who grew up poor in the
hiring process.

> it aims to hire the best candidates regardless of their race, origin,
> religion, accent and other irrelevant characteristics.

It does so by devaluing repressed classes of people. This is a societal cost
to benefit businesses.

~~~
nemo44x
This is how I mainly take it. A lot of comments about how this will make it
"bias free!" and "nondiscriminatory" when really what it will do is give
advantaged people even more advantage. Those who were not able to go to the
better school and get more life experiences and obtain connections are going
to be even further behind.

There seems to be this implied belief that there's a conspiracy in the West to
hire white males above all. This simply isn't true. By having access to race
and gender and even age in some cases it allows us to select for a diverse set
of candidates. So although we may not (or we may!) end up with an outcome that
is as diverse as the set we started with, we at least made the effort to give
different people an equal _opportunity_.

If I'm only allowed to recruit based on the best credentials then those with a
socioeconomic advantage will continue to.

~~~
manigandham
You have no idea what someone's advantage in life is, and you're turning
"diversity" into "diversity of race and gender" which is about nothing but
immutable physical characteristics. Life is not constant. People move through
various conditions all the time. Are you going to deny someone who grew up
poor and then got a scholarship to Harvard?

Putting people into permanent "social classes" is far worse than letting
people use their abilities and become competent independently.

~~~
nemo44x
> Are you going to deny someone who grew up poor and then got a scholarship to
> Harvard?

This is the exception to the rule and not really relevant to anything I said I
think? What about the kid who grew up poor and could have gotten into Harvard
but didn't go because their parent was sick and couldn't afford care and they
attended a local college to be home with them? This is more likely.

> Putting people into permanent "social classes" is far worse than letting
> people use their abilities and become competent independently.

I agree - letting people use their abilities to advance themselves is best. If
anything, I support blind screening of applicants. But I think the approach
here has different intentions than what will very possibly occur - those with
access continue to compound that.

~~~
manigandham
What about it? Life isn't fair.

There are trillions of decisions and situations in your life that accumulate,
and there is absolutely no way you or anyone else can judge that to engineer
some kind of fair outcome. It is good intentioned but not realistic, and it
ends up causing _far more bias_ because you think you're doing the right
thing, while basing it on a faulty perception.

~~~
nemo44x
> What about it? Life isn't fair.

Right, which means we shouldn't cry when it turns out to be unfair as you are
here.

> There are trillions of decisions and situations in your life that
> accumulate, and there is absolutely no way you or anyone else can judge that
> to engineer some kind of fair outcome.

When have I even once said there should be "fair outcomes"? I don't believe in
equal outcomes. I do believe in equal opportunities.

> It is good intentioned but not realistic, and it ends up causing far more
> bias because you think you're doing the right thing, while basing it on a
> faulty perception

What is the "faulty perception"? I'm simply stating that if the goal is to
have a diverse workforce then removing the heuristics we are told make us
diverse from the recruiting process makes it difficult to achieve this goal.
If I want to fill a position and my company has given us a goal of eventually
having the ideal diverse workplace without sacrificing the quality of our
people then I need tools to do this. I will use the, possibly arbitrary and
political, heuristics they give me (age, gender, race, etc) and ask my
recruiting staff to give me a group of 12 candidate for in-person interviews.

From these 12 there must be at least 1 attribute from each heuristic across
the group. So maybe we say there are 3 races we optimize for, 3 age bands and
2 genders. This means that my set of 12 could have a black woman who is 41,
for instance, and a white male who is 25, and an Asian male who is 55. This
has all of these covered and the remaining 9 candidates can be any
combination. But at least I have committed to creating an equal opportunity in
the way the company and a large part of society see as "diverse". Even if I
don't agree with it 100%.

Does this create _far more bias_ when the goal is to create the ideal, diverse
workforce? By systematically including certain biological features of people
in the candidate pool are we at least _ensuring_ we gave a diverse group of
individuals an _equal opportunity_?

~~~
manigandham
You're defining diversity as only diversity of race and gender, irrelevant and
unchangeable physical characteristics that have nothing to do with a person's
individual character. You're making decisions not on competence but on
subjective biases and your perception of wrongs that have nothing to do with
merit.

There is no "ideal diverse workforce". By forcing a particular set number of
people in each arbitrary group, you are absolutely designing for an outcome,
not opportunity. You did not give anyone who applied an opportunity to be
hired, you demanded a specific "heuristic across the group" based on nothing
but what someone looks like, on biological features that nobody has control
over.

This is completely opposite of making things as fair as possible, and I am
truly lost at how you are rationalizing this.

~~~
nemo44x
> You're defining diversity as only diversity of race and gender

I didn't make the definition. The company leadership makes it based on
internal feedback, advice and general societal beliefs in what "diversity"
means.

> irrelevant and unchangeable physical characteristics that have nothing to do
> with a person's individual character

I agree - everyone should be judged by the content of their character, not the
color of their skin. However, it is difficult to judge someone's character
alone from a CV.

> You're making decisions not on competence but on subjective biases and your
> perception of wrongs that have nothing to do with merit.

Every person I'd hire deserves to be hired. There are no bones thrown to fill
a quota (which doesn't exist). However, to help achieve the goal of a "diverse
workplace" a systemic method needs to be incorporated to ensure that a diverse
set of candidates were given an opportunity to join the interview pool. With a
large enough pool we can reasonably assure that every hire is hired on merit
alone as they will be competing with other people that have different
immutable physical characteristics. This also means if the hires tend to all
look a certain way I can reference the systemic method used to ensure that in
fact we actually _removed_ bias from the selection process by ensuring certain
attributes were included in the overall pool.

> There is no "ideal diverse workforce".

Ask 1000 people and you'll get 1000 answers.

> By forcing a particular set number of people in each arbitrary group, you
> are absolutely designing for an outcome, not opportunity.

No, you are creating a pool that is defensible in terms of who you end up
hiring. No one is guaranteed a job because they are in the candidate pool.
They will compete with their cohort on equal grounds.

> You did not give anyone who applied an opportunity to be hired, you demanded
> a specific "heuristic across the group" based on nothing but what someone
> looks like, on biological features that nobody has control over.

See, this is where you're making a mistake. The specific heuristic across the
group includes everyone. It doesn't say "not white males in their 20's" \- in
fact 9 out of 12 candidates could be just that so long as the other 3
candidates somehow cover every other enumeration of attributes. But with a
large enough pool you can ensure that each characteristic the company
determines is "diverse" is somehow included in the candidate pool without
diluting it in terms of merit. This doesn't mean the outcome looks anything
like the candidate pool.

> This is completely opposite of making things as fair as possible, and I am
> truly lost at how you are rationalizing this.

Fair enough - I don't know your thoughts but it could be from the point of
view you're looking at if from. To me, you sound like someone who thinks a
systematic method of candidate pool selection sounds like _exclusion_ of
certain people. And it would be if we _excluded_ certain candidates because
they didn't possess an arbitrary diversity attribute. However, this process is
_inclusive_ because it demands that each enumeration of each diversity
attribute be included at least once. And with a large enough candidate pool
(this is key - you need to do the work here interviewing enough people) this
means there are still very many seats for the dominate attribute enumeration -
white guys that are youngish as it happens to be.

However, it would be an illegitimate candidate pool if there wasn't a white
person in it, or a male in it, or a young person in it as well! That would be
_exclusionary_.

This is a pragmatic approach to fulfilling a diversity goal (regardless of if
my personal beliefs are different) while ensuring that there is no exclusion,
that the quality of hires remains at the level desired and most importantly
that nobody who is hired or anyone they work with has any reason to believe
they only got the job because they won diversity bingo.

~~~
manigandham
Regardless of who made the definition, that's the definition you're following.

We're going in circles here as long as you fundamentally believe diversity of
physical and biological details is important. If that's what you want to
enforce in your workforce, even though it is meaningless to the job, then
you're designing for an outcome, and not opportunity. Inclusive does not exist
in a vacuum; to include some means to exclude others.

~~~
Baeocystin
Not the parent commenter, but for what it's worth, I appreciate you taking the
time to write your responses in this thread. I am honestly baffled (and a
little alarmed) that more people don't understand the points you are making.

~~~
nemo44x
Please explain why?

From my perspective what makes sense is we have large groups of people that
believe diversity as defined by certain attributes is important. We also have
large groups of people that don't. And both groups have some good and some
poor reasons for their beliefs. Both "sides" are legit. So how do we reconcile
this?

To me, the most agreeable aspect of each side is that:

1) We live in a diverse society whether we like it or not, which has a history
of certain exclusion and we should try and improve on that to make all of our
lives more peaceful.

2) Not everyone has an advantage or disadvantage because of certain immutable
attributes and we should be conscious of this as well. Social engineering is
less engineering than politics.

The idealist approach is to optimize one way or the other; mainly for
political reasons which results in resentment and bitterness. The pragmatic
approach is to try and create a system that is __defensible __one way or
another - even if it is flawed in both regards. The perfect system is
impossible anyhow and a matter of opinion.

So, you design a system that takes into account both points above. You ensure
you interview across certain enumerative attributes generally agreed upon as
important. But you don't optimize across it as it can turn into an
exclusionary system in its own right with awful side effects such as legit
resentment, meritless and simply political. You don't exclude any of the
apparent important __diversity __attributes - they all are important. You also
create a reasonable metric around what this means. This ensures you, in some
way, have at least given the opportunity to a vast range of of people. It
doesn 't mean you've given an outcome to anyone.

The trick becomes in keeping it honest - that you don't assume that a certain
set of attributes is more important than another. Where a lot of similar
systems get it wrong is they define that a certain subset of attributes must
be included. They should demand that over the entire pool _all_ attributes
must be included. And only to a limit and after that it's fair game.

I'm only saying that we should at least try and ensure we speak with everyone
in terms of various individual attributes that are generally accepted, albeit
arbitrary, when opening an opportunity. And that's it. What is alarming about
this? How is this not pragmatic? Who is this stealing from? How is this bad
for anyone?

~~~
Baeocystin
First, and most importantly, thank you for the friendly reply.

Regarding your questions, I can't think of a clearer explanation that the
comment that I initially replied to. Fundamentally, the core argument is that
the moment you start using immutable characteristics as part of your
heuristic, you've already lost- there _will_ be resentment, because now, by
definition, you've given something to someone that they did nothing to earn,
and that position is coming from someone else.

That these exact things happened in the past, and happen now, doesn't mean
that reversing the arrow makes things better- it just breeds a new generation
of the same thing.

In terms of how do we move forward as a society, and speaking strictly as just
my own opinion: we need to focus on what our _commonalities_ are, not our
_differences_ , and go from there.

I had the great luck of growing up as the child of a diplomat, and thus
getting to see a much wider variety of countries and ways of life than most
people do. One of the most important lessons I took from the experience is
that people are far more alike than different, even in areas that have had
little previous cultural exchange. It takes some time to find out how to
translate across different givens, but once you understand the shared local
model of how things work, people's decisions make sense.

The catch is that if you don't agree with some of the base assumptions, then
some decisions will seem utterly abhorrent, and the same is true in reverse.
Some are mutually exclusive, in that there is no such thing as a middle
ground. That is the problem of diversity, and it is a very real one.

So, moving forward- these schisms exist because the world used to be far more
closed off from itself than it is today. I'm only in my mid-40's, and yet when
I was a child, a letter to the US and back was a 3-month round trip. Now I can
hop on any of a dozen free webcams if I felt so inclined and look at who is
walking down the street where I used to live. All we can do is start talking
to those now so close, find out what we _can_ agree on, and try to forge
something we can all live with.

(I realize this is a bit further afield than the original subject of applying
for jobs, but I think a friendly reply deserves an honest answer.)

------
lucb1e
> the name, date of birth, address, mother’s tongue, gender and any other
> personal information [are] not included

[...]

> when much of the information in the application has been hidden, it’s hard
> to establish a clear picture of the know-how and capability of the applicant

So they base their assessment of know-how and capabilities on age, gender,
mother's tongue, and other personal information that has been hidden? I feel
like I must reading this wrong.

~~~
dcole2929
I don't think you are reading that wrong. People use all sort of pseudo
science to make inferences on people's competencies. Like if you are a woman
in a male dominated field you're likely to be highly competent. Or when hiring
for a leadership position an older candidate may be subconsciously preferred
over a younger one with more experience. It's all generally bunk and this is
imo, an admission that they have been using the wrong criteria to judge
candidates.

~~~
lucb1e
> if you are a woman in a male dominated field you're likely to be highly
> competent

In my experience it's the opposite. Like with small countries: the odds they
produce someone extremely good at a certain sport is just smaller than in
large countries, so large countries are more likely to win some world cup or
the Olympics. I know only a handful of women in IT to begin with, but most of
them aren't great at it.

But that's not your point. You're saying that there are biases in hiring, and
I agree. What I'm surprised by is that the article quotes them saying that
they now find it very hard to judge someone. Who would say, alongside a press
release about anonymous applications, that they find it difficult to base
their judgement solely on only relevant information?

------
komali2
Recently was using coderpad, I believe, and after the session ended it had an
advertisement for some similar scheme - a blind technical interview (with
Uber, Lyft, or Facebook! it advertised) that, if you do well in, you can
choose to "unmask." Was thinking about doing it, anybody else tried it?
Probably would be disadvantageous to me - I generally pitch myself as a
moderately skilled engineer with very good soft skills, as opposed to a
tremendously skilled engineer straight up (maybe in a couple years...). Can't
demonstrate soft skills anonymously.

~~~
klohto
I’d like to think I’m more skilled in soft skills than others but I always
demonstrate that at the on-site interviews. How do you market those skills on
a resume?

~~~
komali2
Well, like this:
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A3Ns93sbE8v70hCt7yWJigoi...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A3Ns93sbE8v70hCt7yWJigoiL0sQZNTtMPr9zVtkoqM/)

Best I think I can do is certain descriptions for projects highlighting my
role, as well as stick a little section at the bottom describing a personal
experience and showing a bit of my personality and value system. Stuff like
"Led hackathon team of 4 to develop a serverless app integrating several
APIs." It's really quite tricky to show off your soft skills on your resume. I
think the resume should be more to just get your foot in the door. If I can
get on the phone, I'm usually good to go.

~~~
klohto
Based on your resume, I think you can present all of these skills anonymously
as well.

Of course, there might some clear marks that will give away your gender and
age, but that's up-to the interviewer to decide. All the things you have on
your resume can be done by a woman or 20-year old as well as 60-year old.

So, I don't this would hurt you in any way and you can still demonstrate your
soft skills.

------
emilfihlman
I'll just laugh when it ends up being majority of white males, simply because
that's what there are mostly available. Perhaps it'll finally shut the
patriarchy blaming people up.

~~~
Mirioron
It's Helsinki. It's impossible for the majority not to be white, whether
they're male is another matter though.

------
Traubenfuchs
As a tall, handsome young white man with a great employment history at
internationally known companies I do not like this at all.

There is no perceivable bias that would penalise me, besides the fact that I
do not fulfil diversity quotas... Or do I? I am not straight! I really am the
full package.

~~~
fake-name
Soooooo..., you're angry you no longer will get a illegitimate boost in front
of your peers?

Can you hear that? It's the sound of the worlds tiniest violin playing you a
sad song.

~~~
Traubenfuchs
I am not angry, but I do not support changes to hiring practices that are bad
for me.

------
jeffbarg
The most shocking part of this to me is the last line:

"The City of Helsinki is Finland’s biggest employer with around 38,000
employees."

Is this common for governmental organizations to be such large employers? Even
in Europe, this is surprising to me.

~~~
ed_balls
NHS (Great Britain - state owned health provider) is on a track to reach 2mln
employees.

~~~
gaius
Precious few of them nurses but there’s always room on the org chart for more
middle managers.

------
adontz
To me it seems counterproductive. Either whoever lies in CV more will win (be
interviewed at least), or bias will show itself during personal interviews.
You can't look at a person without realizing sex/age/race.

~~~
Spearchucker
Of course you're going to know who you're interviewing. The whole idea is to
anonymize the PRE-interview phase, specifically, selecting candidates. That
selection post excludes personally identifying information.

If someone lies on their CV and is caught out another/more candidates will be
chosen to interview, no?

~~~
nemo44x
> That selection post excludes personally identifying information.

Here's the cognitive dissonance of it all. How can we achieve the goal of a
"diverse" workplace (which is based on certain attributes like gender, race,
age, etc) when we can't select a candidate pool with these things taken into
consideration? Will this have a net negative effect on at least creating an
_equal opportunity_?

I'm not saying I'm for or against this blind screening. But I am skeptical it
will work as intended. If anything, those with the most advantage due to their
socioeconomic status from birth will simply advance in the system even more
quickly.

~~~
manigandham
>> "diverse" workplace (which is based on certain attributes like gender,
race, age, etc)

That's not a good goal. Diversity of what you look like is absolutely
terrible.

------
mms1973
What about doing the same for politicians running for office? show us your
"accomplishments", we don't care about the rest, LOL.

------
dullgiulio
Quite interesting how such a thing affects salaries as all yearly personal
incomes data is public in Finland.

~~~
walshemj
Always how they got away with that with the Eu's Data Protection laws and now
GPDR.

Do I have an overriding "need" to know what my neighbour is earning and its
certainly open to abuse eg other UK media organisations using it as a stick to
beat the BBC with.

------
someguy1444
This could be a form of discrimination against native born applicants. A
person's "mother tongue" is not some trivial matter. Many Indians I've worked
with are not as fluent in English as they claim to be. Communication skills
matter. Trying to even the playing field so that people who are not native
speakers of the local language is ridiculous. I have worked hard to improve my
own communication skills and consider it a very valuable skill when searching
for employment.

~~~
asdff
Communication skills are tested in the interview.

------
ranprieur
If employers are looking for a radical utopian reform, I'd rather see them do
away with the interview. Interviews slant hiring toward personal charm, and
toward the cultural uniformity of the workplace, at the expense of competence.

~~~
justfor1comment
We need the same set up that the Turing Test has during interviews to remove
the factors you enlisted.

~~~
tomrod
Something like a civil service exam?

------
darkhorn
Like in Turkey. I gues more than half of the Turkish civil servants are
recruited via tests/exams, and then randomly selected via computer. Here 37000
teachers are selected randomly via a software
[https://youtu.be/vwYjqp_aNak](https://youtu.be/vwYjqp_aNak)

------
funkythings
This will backfire, as in previous experiments:
[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-
tria...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-
improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888)

------
umichguy
The UK Civil Service already does this. They ask you to remove all PII,
school/ university names. That said you can leave your previous employer names
in it.

They call it "name-blind" recruitment.

------
pishpash
Now if they do what paper submissions do in academia and also require you to
discloser 1st and 2nd degree conflicts of interest.

------
Derek_MK
> “A key challenge is that when much of the information in the application has
> been hidden, it’s hard to establish a clear picture of the know-how and
> capability of the applicant,” the city’s resolution says.

What exactly do you learn about a candidate's know-how and capability by
knowing their name, gender, etc? Unless you are so deep in denial that you'd
just blatantly say "Men are more capable than women".

~~~
pishpash
Depends on what's considered identifying information. There is Google you
know.

But I applaud the concept. I'd be interested in the results.

------
biztos
So you remove bias from the resume-screening process and then do exactly what
during the interview process?

------
JohnWilcox
Does it really not bother anyone else that we are heading down a rather
dystopian world of a kind of hyper-meritocracy that eschews with all other
rights and privileges as it commoditizes humans to nothing but a function of
their skills and abilities as put on paper, or even exhibited in practice?

It does not seem all that healthy to just dismiss and ignore and totally
negate compounding value of cross-generational achievements and
accomplishments ... that you are not better than the last widget you created
compared to the next person you are compared in preparation for creation of
the next widget.

Does anyone else realize this is really just a sneaky way of introducing the
degenerate nature of communism into the equation? ... that your humanity means
nothing if you are not a featureless and characterless humanoid with zero of
your own "biases" that contributes to the hive mind collective. I really don't
think people have thought this thing through and the ways in which it can go
wildly out of control once edge cases start gripping.

So you are hiring totally blindly, without consideration for anything but
merits ... it doesn't matter that you are a Native Fin and your competitor

None of that seems remotely healthy or sane to me, and really just smacks of
the idealistic and self-deluding narrow view of the effete and decadent who
live sheltered in a bubble, without any fear of their own replaceability
(whether rightful or not), let alone possessing event the remotest
understanding for the wider consequences of their actions and outcomes, even
fore themselves, if that bubble were to burst.

This type of technocratic and authoritarian mentality that somehow you can
inhumanely simply strip humans of their humanity in order to craft a perfect
specimen of humans, ideally in their minds, a mixed master race devoid of
"bias" and therefore devoid of their humanity; is really a rather detestable
and clearly inhumane ideology by its inherent characteristics.

~~~
core-questions
It bothers me a great deal. It seems that the only constructive ways that
progressives have been able to come up with to equalize the unequal has been
to flatten, to push down, to dehumanize and to remove the differentiation
between people, by administrative fiat if necessary.

The thing is, if you decide that Applicant #42 is a good candidate, you're
going to bring them in anyway. If you have a ton of biases, you still have
just as much of an opportunity to enact them as you would have before, though
you might have to be a bit more subtle. This doesn't solve the problem; it's a
patch on top of it designed to feel good while accomplishing nothing.

> Does it really seem all that healthy to just dismiss and ignore and totally
> negate compounding value of cross-generational achievements and
> accomplishments

If by this you're referring to the heritability of traits, yes, it's a shame
that things that are statistically and demographically visible have to be
erased in the attempt to flatten everything.

> somehow you can inhumanely simply strip humans of their humanity in order to
> craft a perfect specimen of humans

I don't know if this is the ultimate goal; my instinct is that this is the
projected goal, because it is at least somewhat defensible philosophically
even if I dislike it. The actual behind-the-scenes goal might be as simple as
reducing people to more-manageable consumers that cause less trouble and more
reliably produce the quarterly numbers we need.

~~~
FranzFerdiNaN
Progressives have to do that because employers continue to be racist and
sexist and discriminate on age, purely based on a resume. So removing that
first filter is a good thing.

------
manigandham
The problem is you think you can judge who is repressed, usually based on
group identity, but that never ends well.

Life isn't fair, some will be rich. Judging by capabilities means that anyone
can learn to do the job well, even if they have to work harder to overcome
their circumstances, and it'll always be down to the individual. People move
between classes all the time, and in the US you'll see many people going in
both directions.

~~~
dang
We detached this flamewar from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18545520](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18545520)
and marked it off-topic.

Please don't foment flamewars on HN.

~~~
manigandham
Can you please tell me how that comment does so? Is it the use of the word
"you" in the first sentence? If so it was meant as generic pronoun, but I
guess that can be misunderstood.

~~~
dang
I was referring to the entire subthread, in which you posted several flamewar
comments. You did it elsewhere too. Please don't—it's exactly what we're
trying to avoid on HN, as you surely know.

The GP comment wasn't so bad, but the problem is that generic comments about
ideological topics usually lead to flamewars.

~~~
manigandham
Several? Generic comments about ideological topics seems to describe
everything in the entire thread so it's unclear to me what exactly can be said
then.

Respectfully, the discussions are valid, received upvotes, and seem to end on
their own just fine. Outside of a few personal tangents, which are rightly
disallowed, the rest don't seem to need any moderation.

------
black-tea
Great. This should stop the "wage gap" arguments. It will mean even fewer
women in tech, but apparently that's what they want.

~~~
emiliobumachar
Affirmative action could be made compatible with anonymous recruiting. Set up
a point system. After all the subjective points are set in stone, unmask the
applicant and apply any modifiers.

~~~
fhbdukfrh
So the worst of both worlds? You're trying to both eliminate irrelevant bias
and emphasize it. Your result will be "we hire the least white, white males"

~~~
tomrod
Depending on the legal criteria (if quotas) decided by society, that could be
true.

It could not.

It really comes down to implementation (of which "doing nothing"/autarky is
one choice).

