Hiring is a cargo cult; there are very few people even attempting to be empirical. The cynic in me suggests that people hire based on the last blog post they read about hiring.
> We always tried to be creative about probing people and their résumés. Bethany once decided to analyze the résumés of our best data-science people for common features. She found that those people shared an avid interest in music. From then on she and her team looked for that quality. She recalls, “We’d get really excited and call out, ‘Hey, I found a guy who plays piano!’” She concluded that such people can easily toggle between their left and right brains—a great skill for data analysis.
Gee, it's like they aren't even trying. It's so unscientific I can't take the process seriously at all.
Totally agree, this bullshit makes me want to scream. People do the same thing with emails. Have a Hotmail account? People assume you're a Luddite even though, in 2018, Hotmail is basically office 365 Outlook, which is actually just as good, if not much better than Gmail.
A lot of 2004 attitudes persist long after they have any relevance or predictive power.
While I don't disagree that most of HR is cargo cult bullshit, the hotmail signal is real. Having worked in customer support hotmail users really are as dumb as a box of hammers [0].
I'm being sarcastic. The joke is that it would be the worst possible signal to send out.
AOL was an internet provider that mostly died out in the mid-2000s. Back then, "true nerds" scoffed at it -- it was for grandmas and total noobs.
So if you got an AOL email address (which you still can actually do, turns out), it not only is a relic of ancient technology, but it's a signal that you're a technology noob in like the 90s.
I just am amused at the idea of sending a resume to a trendy tech company with an AOL email address. They'd either laugh or flip out.
