Thousands of applicants reaching the substantial work stage is a failure of the systems thinking you're talking about. Hundreds of resumes nearly always gets narrowed down to perhaps a dozen or two at most at the screening stage.

And I would make it very clear that putting in more than 30 minutes of work, timed, is a disqualifier, and I would sleep well at night clearing all those people out of the queue.

Hundreds of good applicants can’t be whittled down to a dozen without being very picky about things in the resume which may just be a poor representation.

You will bias heavily along some kind of axis, preferred previous employers or location, age, etc.

You add a lot of bias into the system by trying to further scrutinise otherwise meaningfully qualified people on paper.

As long as you aren’t biasing for any protected classes, why does it matter? If you as an employer have found that graduates from Foo University is a generally positive signal, then why wouldn’t you bias for that, if it’s saving you significant time, and introducing minimal false positives?

Yes, people don’t realize that’s why a lot of desirable jobs/grad schools become filled with people from top universities and previous employment. Pedigree is probably the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to shaving off a good chuck of applicants to a level that at least you know would be adequate.

Reading this makes me want to throw up.

Do not mix up opportunity and capability.

You do realize that the person you're replying to is not making a value judgement and probably agrees with you.

If you have two groups of people, one with a low but nonzero signal that they can do something, the other with no signals, is it still a good idea to use that signal?

You'll get fewer bad employees, but you also discard many capable people who haven't had the opportunity to even try for your signal.

It still is a signal, albeit a weak and highly inequitably distributed one.

Yes, I didn't look at the replies until late, but you are correct. The invariant of the situation is that there are a large number of people who want 1-2 positions, and there are not enough resources in the company to interview and evaluate them all in person. My point is that when you remove measures like a performance on a project from play, and are forced to whittle down a group of applicants to an interviewable-sized group, people will start to pick increasingly "unfair" ways to do so. No one wants to risk hiring a person for a position who simply cannot perform at the level necessary for the job. If they don't have a project to separate the people who can perform versus the people who can't, then they have to use other markers to say why one person has a better chance of performing well than another, of which previous employer/alumni and references from trusted sources are by far the easiest ones.

> You do realize that the person you're replying to is not making a value judgement and probably agrees with you.

No, in fact I see no indicators at all that it is the case.

> If you have two groups of people, one with a low but nonzero signal that they can do something, the other with no signals, is it still a good idea to use that signal?

It may or may not be. It depends on the quality of the signal itself, its reliability, repeatability, and if that signal blinds you from other indicators or maybe even leads you astray.

Having a signal doesn't mean it's particularly useful. Example: like triggering an alert on a VMs cpu utilization. It's certainly a signal but rarely is it good for anything or actionable.

>> You do realize that the person you're replying to is not making a value judgement and probably agrees with you.

> No, in fact I see no indicators at all that it is the case.

Really, I read it as if it's a bad thing, but a true thing.

Like they're reinforcing my point, that if you have 10,000 qualified candidates and capacity to review 500- grepping for Havard becomes an "easy" way to filter.

Treating people with nuance and balance is not easy to do at scale, you have to bias along some axis, and nearly every axis I can think of is a shitty one- because of course there are fantastic people outside of those axis'

> Like they're reinforcing my point, that if you have 10,000 qualified candidates and capacity to review 500- grepping for Havard becomes an "easy" way to filter.

The best engineers I have ever worked with mostly didn't either finish college or even go in the first place. Entirely self taught.

Once again, you're misunderstanding the goal of the system if you think that it's necessary to deliberately whittle down hundreds of good applicants through careful process to get a great hire.

Hint: you don't even need to evaluate most candidates at all. Random sampling is sufficient and provably bias free.

Reminds me of something I heard once.

> Whenever I get a stack of resumes, I throw half of them in the trash

> I sure don't want unlucky people on my team.

What do you send them as a response "sorry, we're going ahead with other applicants" - "you have not been selected this time" -- what happens if you start needing to dig through that pool of now rejected candidates?

Peak humanity.

> what happens if you start needing to dig through that pool of now rejected candidates?

I acknowledge that I am reaching back out, and they may not be available.

Like a human does.

> Reminds me of something I heard once.

>> Whenever I get a stack of resumes, I throw half of them in the trash

>> I sure don't want unlucky people on my team.

I was actually about to make the same joke.

>should take a qualified candidate 20 minutes to finish beginning to end (as in, including syncing the project, setting up their editor, exploring the problem, googling around about things, trying it out and then following up with the email to HR

So about six minutes for the problem itself, then?

Yeah, speaking of bias ...