Amazes me how little data-driven recruiting is. Just as the author puts it, a good hire is for culture ad, and that means being explicitly aware of what's missing. Tough stuff to really look inside and see what's missing.
Most hires I see are either out of desperation or because the recruiter had a good chemistry with the candidate. A 1h interview means 0,3% of the time I will work with that person in one year. Talk about a small sample size.
I've both taken and been at a company that administered personality tests as part of the interview process. I found the results fairly useless to be honest. Although I did manage to score so low on one part of the assessment that an interviewer seemed to question my basic ability to function in society.
Personality tests are broken - there is no way a functioning human being will answer them truthfully. Not for the lack of trying... our subconscious will try to protect us and we'll answer in a way we imagine it is socially acceptable.
While I have little doubt they're indeed broken in the way you describe, as long as the results are consistent they could still be useful to hire for diversity.
You would care more about your team members having a wide variety of results, rather than the qualitative interpretation of the results themselves.
@johnsmith4739 You've arrived at home after a long day at the office. As you take your wallet & keys, you realize that you've accidentally taken home a granola bar that you obtained from the snack room at work. You had intended to eat it at your desk, but for some reason you forgot. On a scale of 1 to 10, how guilty do you feel for having unlawfully stolen property from your employer?
I'm a founder of a rectech startup. I see four big problems in most companies:
1. Turtle speed. The hiring process takes 45 days, and most of the best candidates get hired by someone else, usually before the hiring manager gets around to interviewing the candidates.
2. Arbitrary process. Candidates get a completely different set of questions, completely different interviewers and completely different resume screenings as different recruiters and hiring managers do things completely differently.
3. Overscreening. Screened by the job board (knockout questions). Screened by the AI in the ATS. Screened by the recruiter. Screened by the hiring manager. Then a phone screen. Then a first interview (which is really another screening). Only then can we try to hire the half-of-a-candidate that made it through the process. Most of this screening isn't cultural, it's people trying to read between the lines on a resume to figure out why Lucy left a job six years ago after being there for four months.
4. Assessments applied after steps 1-3 to confirm executive bias instead of early in the process where the data from assessments could actually be used, you know, as data to compare and fit candidates.
Insanity, right? Let me add another one - have you seen how they advertise job openings? With the "technical specifications." It's like they actively try to do a bad job.
We only worked with founders that are involved in the recruiting process. 2, maybe 3 "dates" and you should be able to decide with clarity.
Yeah. Job ads are problematic because they are mostly mix of trying to get bad candidates to self-select out, old-fashioned keyword packing search spam and utter BS compliance disclaimers. It leads to eight pages of garbage, and ironically piles of bad candidates to screen out. Since most recruiters spend 80% of their time screening, it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We get so much more pop out of job ad spend when we limit the job ad to about 150 words and just say what the job is, and what really matters to you. "Software developer with proven track record of building web and mobile apps with React. You must have at least two years of professional development experience and be able to pass a Javascript coding test." Describe pay and benefits (about a 20% boost in applications for including pay). Done.
3. is, I think, one reason personal contacts tend to work well. A top candidate for a position that may not even be actually listed yet can easily end up screened out by someone or something just flipping through a pile of resumes because they are missing some keyword.
Any websites which irritatingly change the page title back and forth to "You have 1 message waiting" (or anything else, really) get immediately added to my blocklist.
Most hires I see are either out of desperation or because the recruiter had a good chemistry with the candidate. A 1h interview means 0,3% of the time I will work with that person in one year. Talk about a small sample size.
(shameless plug): I built this for figuring out the candidate personality: https://freyasense.com/recruiting/