Timeline for Should I keep asking candidates to include a specific word to filter out candidates who didn't pay attention to the job ad?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
19 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 6, 2019 at 12:01 | comment | added | BittermanAndy | 3 low quality applications passed the filter. 47 unknown quality applications did not pass the filter. The filter was not useful. | |
| Feb 5, 2019 at 17:10 | comment | added | anaximander | @J... The problem is that the technique isn't necessarily increasing precision. If you had a candidate who was perfect in every other way but failed to include that word, chances are you'd overlook it because they were so good otherwise. At the end of the day, it boils down to this: the "technique" takes a very large candidate pool and rapidly trims it to a very small one, and in that small pool, the correct candidate cannot be found. Logic suggests that you should perhaps try widening the pool, or else be prepared to wait a very long time. | |
| Feb 4, 2019 at 15:41 | comment | added | Aaron Hall | As someone who pays a great deal of attention to detail as a knowledge worker, I would prefer not to work for a firm that engages in these kinds of nonsensical games for the purposes of important decision making. I suspect most other knowledge workers feel the same way. This answer alludes to this idea, but I'd like to see it called out more directly. | |
| Feb 3, 2019 at 23:00 | comment | added | J... | @dwizum Hiring is a complex multidimensional problem of which this 'sunshine' technique aims to increase precision in filtering candidates for one of those many dimensions. You can't look at outcomes in the way you're thinking, it's a wrong line of reasoning. | |
| Feb 3, 2019 at 22:55 | comment | added | dwizum | @J... I'm not making any assumptions. It doesn't matter if one of the other 47 were the right person or not. The process the OP used did not attract and filter candidates appropriately. It failed. I didn't mean that the 3 he got were the wrong ones versus the 47 he rejected, but rather that the 3 he got were wrong compared to whatever population contained the right candidate. It doesn't matter if his add caused the right person to not apply, or if his filtering rejected the correct person, either way he didn't get that person. | |
| Feb 3, 2019 at 22:52 | comment | added | dwizum | Honestly, I don't think it matters if the skill set you're trying to hire for is scarce or common, in either case you want to do the best job you can of attracting and screening candidates. In other words, I don't think the answer would change if it was about hiring programmers vs any other skilled professional role. | |
| Feb 3, 2019 at 21:59 | comment | added | Daniel | Good practical answer, alas it completely misses the most important point. It´s not programming jobs that are scarce, it´s good programmers! Op should better concentrate on how to attract applications from good candidates. If you look at the comments, the only achievement of the sunshine test seems to be that it deters (good?) programmers from applying altogether. | |
| Feb 3, 2019 at 16:51 | comment | added | J... | @dwizum Realize that you're making the (unverified) assumption that one of the 47 remaining candidates was the right candidate. I'm not sure why you expect that - it's certainly not a given. The three which did get reviewed were not the right fit, but at least they all at least had one of the skills OP was looking for, if not all of them. We also know that the 47 remaining did not have the right attention to detail that OP is looking for - only OP can decide whether that one skill is absolutely required. We can assume that it is, given the importance OP has placed on it. | |
| Feb 3, 2019 at 14:20 | comment | added | dwizum | @J... - filtering 50 candidates down to 3 is definitely not out of the norm, in terms of a ratio, but the OP is basically stating that he got the wrong three, which is the important point here. You do want to filter down to one candidate ultimately, but you want to filter on the right things to get people you care about. Asking people to put "sunshine" in the response has resulted in 100% failure for the OP; none of the filtered candidates were appropriately qualified for the job. | |
| Feb 3, 2019 at 13:34 | comment | added | Sentinel | This is not way out the norms. On Upwork this is pretty standard to make sure you aren't blasted with Indian auto-applications. | |
| Feb 2, 2019 at 12:45 | comment | added | J... | @nikie As for the non-interviewed candidates, it's usually because their CV clearly demonstrates a poor skill fit with the job requirement. Interviewing people who don't have the right skills is foolish - you don't need to do it to know they are not suitable. | |
| Feb 2, 2019 at 12:44 | comment | added | J... | @nikie You're getting mired here. Your original point was that other companies don't use this technique therefore it is not required. We agree it isn't required - the point was not whether this technique is required, the question is whether it is effective. Your proposed control group has no correlation with OP's circumstances and makes a poor experiment. I wouldn't be surprised at how many bad experiments are done - science does bad experiments all the time. That shouldn't justify a bad approach just because others have also made errors in experimental strategy. | |
| Feb 2, 2019 at 11:28 | comment | added | nikie | @J...: You'd be surprised how many experiments work exactly that way, because true randomized testing is too expensive or in some cases even unethical. By the way: How many of those 80-90% "straight to the bin" submissions did you actually interview and try out? You know, as a control group, to test how well your selection process correlates with actual job performance? | |
| Feb 2, 2019 at 11:10 | comment | added | val - disappointed in SE | You can find this way good out-of-box thinkers, but not right candidates. | |
| Feb 2, 2019 at 10:38 | comment | added | J... | @nikie That's not what a control group is, nor is it how experiments work. If you want a nugget of anecdotal evidence, I easily get 50+ CVs in a hiring round where I might be lucky to find one decent candidate. At least 80-90% of submissions go straight into the bin, so OP's stats don't seem that crazy to me. | |
| Feb 2, 2019 at 9:58 | comment | added | Neil Slater | I guess the OP is might perform this experiment if they take the advice here, so it would be interesting to know the results later (although it would be a small sample and not adequately randomised, it would still be interesting). | |
| Feb 2, 2019 at 9:55 | comment | added | nikie | @DonHatch: The control group are all other companies who don't require the word "sunshine" on their applications and manage to find qualified employees. I agree that a fully randomized test would be better, though ;-) | |
| Feb 1, 2019 at 21:27 | history | edited | dwizum | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 89 characters in body
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| Feb 1, 2019 at 21:13 | history | answered | dwizum | CC BY-SA 4.0 |