Wow. The articles about completely idiotic hiring procedures never cease--because the reality of companies using idiotic hiring procedures never ceases--and each new submission is actively discussed here on Hacker News. How to hire good workers is already a solved problem, but most hiring managers don't do even minimal research to find out what best practice is.
I'm told that this Hacker News community disfavors repeated posting of FAQ posts as comments, but this is a Frequently Asked Question (what's really the best way to hire good workers) and over the last year or two here on Hacker News I've put together a post with a lot of references to the best research. A recent posting of that here on HN
could help companies cure their idiotic hiring procedures. Read the FAQ if you haven't read it before. (Please let me know what you think of it, as I have been doing more research so that I can refine the FAQ and post it on my personal website.) There is no good reason for companies to do anything less than the best when setting up hiring procedures. Protect yourself by knowing what effective hiring procedures look like and how to find companies that use them.
Surprising and disappointing that the best methods were only barely over 50% correlation with performance on the job.
What does the algorithmic whiteboard coding tech interview count as? Does it qualify as work sample and brain teaser combined with interview? I suspect it's too far removed from what software engineering is actually like to be a good work sample, and the prior knowledge required to solve algorithm problems doesn't make it a great brain teaser either.
Surprising and disappointing that the best methods were only barely over 50% correlation with performance on the job.
That's probably about the best we could expect, as job-seeking behavior when a candidate desires a job is different from job-doing behavior over the long term after someone is hired and knows more about the company. The appalling thing is that companies still use procedures (personal unstructured interviews, "personality" tests, and in Europe even handwriting analysis) that are demonstrably much worse than that, rather than the work-sample tests and general cognitive ability tests that at least give companies their best chance to hire workers who will do well on the job.
linked in the parent comment to yours, and you can learn about the best trade-off among time, expense, effectiveness, and legal exposure among all hiring procedures used by companies. It's low-hanging fruit to improve competitive position for a company to follow the minority of companies that use effective hiring procedures rather than the majority of companies that use haphazard or demonstrably ineffective hiring procedures.
I'm told that this Hacker News community disfavors repeated posting of FAQ posts as comments, but this is a Frequently Asked Question (what's really the best way to hire good workers) and over the last year or two here on Hacker News I've put together a post with a lot of references to the best research. A recent posting of that here on HN
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923
could help companies cure their idiotic hiring procedures. Read the FAQ if you haven't read it before. (Please let me know what you think of it, as I have been doing more research so that I can refine the FAQ and post it on my personal website.) There is no good reason for companies to do anything less than the best when setting up hiring procedures. Protect yourself by knowing what effective hiring procedures look like and how to find companies that use them.