It looks like there is a trend starting in the software industry to encourage empirical hiring. This particular article follows about a month after another hiring post reached the front page of HN.[1]
I really agree with it, and I hope more people are looking at it seriously instead of fixating on the fact that the word "Google" is in the title. Giving all the candidates the same questions and the same exact interview methodology is much more fair and empirical than simply having an interviewer wing it (which is virtually certain to bring in bias). Most interviewers I know think they are better than the average interviewer due to illusory superiority cognitive bias [2]. However, when it comes down to it, you cannot easily judge the difference between candidates if you ask one a completely different question than another. This goes against all the principles of psychometric testing, yet it is still ubiquitous because no one has bothered to empirically look at whether or not they're really interviewing in a rigorous way.
There is a serious issue in the industry right now where otherwise capable people fail interviews due to their appearance, manners of speaking or other harmless idiosyncrasies. It's because interviewers are very personally attached to their subjective methods, and they tend to really enjoy having personal ownership over the interviewing process instead of surrendering control to a standardized script. This trend looks like the software hiring equivalent of a professor grading papers without reading the name attached to the paper -i f we can have several candidates answer the same exact questions and perform the same exact activities on an interview it makes it much easier to determine who is the real "best candidate" when it comes time to comparing their results.
If this really takes off, the only remaining problem as I see it is designing interviews that accurately correlate to the job activities.
From their article it looks like what they are doing is pseudo-science at best. Hopefully not harmful pseudo-science, but it could be actually harmful. If one is not careful enough it is rather easy to replace more-or-less working common sense with some horrible pseudo-scientific approach. For example, optimizing for 'individual employee performance numbers'? Without consideration that, say, adding yet another employee with 'a good number' may actually diminish the total sum?
Regarding prediction of 'employee performance numbers' based on 'interview scores'. It is not surprising that the result is completely random. As far as I understand it, in the big companies performance numbers don't show actual contribution of an employee. At best they are showing "how this person was able to use the resources around them to achieve goals", note, mostly via using human resources of informal social networks. But usually performance numbers are just random. And at worst they could be negatively correlated with actual contributions.
I really agree with it, and I hope more people are looking at it seriously instead of fixating on the fact that the word "Google" is in the title. Giving all the candidates the same questions and the same exact interview methodology is much more fair and empirical than simply having an interviewer wing it (which is virtually certain to bring in bias). Most interviewers I know think they are better than the average interviewer due to illusory superiority cognitive bias [2]. However, when it comes down to it, you cannot easily judge the difference between candidates if you ask one a completely different question than another. This goes against all the principles of psychometric testing, yet it is still ubiquitous because no one has bothered to empirically look at whether or not they're really interviewing in a rigorous way.
There is a serious issue in the industry right now where otherwise capable people fail interviews due to their appearance, manners of speaking or other harmless idiosyncrasies. It's because interviewers are very personally attached to their subjective methods, and they tend to really enjoy having personal ownership over the interviewing process instead of surrendering control to a standardized script. This trend looks like the software hiring equivalent of a professor grading papers without reading the name attached to the paper -i f we can have several candidates answer the same exact questions and perform the same exact activities on an interview it makes it much easier to determine who is the real "best candidate" when it comes time to comparing their results.
If this really takes off, the only remaining problem as I see it is designing interviews that accurately correlate to the job activities.
[1]: http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority