Hi, I'm the author. Someone alerted me that this showed up on HN, so I figured I should come by to clarify.
I believe my statement might be clear. What I mean by that is "it's [everyone's] job to say no-hire," as opposed to anyone feeling like "well, I'm not sure about this candidate, but I'll let someone else reject them because I don't want to be perceived as mean." One problem with hiring is that everyone must be willing to uphold the standard - if you have too many people who are never willing to be the one to say no-hire, the standard will fall - everyone has to be willing to take the responsibility for saying no.
That said, systemic bias is an orthogonal (and real) issue. Being "not sure" should be applied to "does this candidate measure up" not "is this candidate a lot like me?"
Saying "no hire" can be hard for some people, but becomes easier if your team adopts the attitude that "maybe means no". It's probably better for the team to miss out hiring some promising "maybe" candidates than later trying to fire a bad one.
Good to know. Does Facebook collect data about how they're doing internally to avoid these systemic biases? Is this tracked?
Although it appears orthogonal, if everyone starts making hiring decisions without any checks and balances that an HR person would put in, I'd assume more bias to creep in. At the very least, I'd want the "standard" to be clearly defined.
I believe my statement might be clear. What I mean by that is "it's [everyone's] job to say no-hire," as opposed to anyone feeling like "well, I'm not sure about this candidate, but I'll let someone else reject them because I don't want to be perceived as mean." One problem with hiring is that everyone must be willing to uphold the standard - if you have too many people who are never willing to be the one to say no-hire, the standard will fall - everyone has to be willing to take the responsibility for saying no.
That said, systemic bias is an orthogonal (and real) issue. Being "not sure" should be applied to "does this candidate measure up" not "is this candidate a lot like me?"