BOFH: HR's AI hiring tool is perfectly unbiased – as long as you're us BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns HR's in a bit of a pickle, and the Boss wants us to fix it. "I can't see why it's our job to fix this," I say to the Boss. "You wrote the bloody software!" the Boss snaps. "No, we wrote the CODE," the PFY explains. "THEY wrote the software." "What are you talking about?" the Boss asks …
I've developed my own AI hiring tool, which consists of small squares of paper, divided into 4 sections by drawing diagonals across them. You write the names of the first 4 candidates to apply in the sections, then put a cocktail stick through the middle and spin it on the desk, hiring the candidate whose name is in the section touching the desk when it falls over.
People have remarked that this tool makes no proper evaluation of the skills and experience of the candidates, isn't actually intelligent and the chosen name is in fact is completely random, but I point out that this is exactly the same feature set of all the much more expensive software versions of it currently on the market.
Always employ lucky people.
The technique is to take all the CV's, and throw them up in the air. After the dust has settled, you choose one at random: The Lucky One.
We've had far worse initial-hires at vast expense from bloody 'Recruitment Agencies'. A solution ---->
"The technique is to take all the CV's, and throw them up in the air. After the dust has settled, you choose one at random: The Lucky One."
Caution: Trigger alert below, possibly not politically correct by today’s standards and may involve out of date stereotypes!
That reminds me of a *dave allen?) joke from years ago. A vicar, a priest and a rabbi out for a round of gold and get to discussing their remunirations from the congregation collection plate. The priest says he draws a circle on the ground and throws the money up in the air. What lands in the circle, he gets, God gets the rest. The vicar says he does the same, but what lands in the circle goes to God and the vicar gets the rest. The rabbi says he doesn't draw a circle. He just throws the money up in the air and what God wants, he keeps :-)
Regardless of the fact that the BOFH is set in England, El Reg is content to surrender their language to Uncle Sam.
It doesn't seem to be unique to El Reg either.
Redgate, the maker of databases tools based in Cambridge, has also succumbed to US English as the norm.
It is all so very sad.
We needed a new Project Engineer, skilled in handling high-value, long-term, technical projects from initial order, customer specifications, sub-contracting sub-orders, installation, commissioning and hand-over, including getting the invoices in on schedule. We were well prepared to pay a good price for this engineer.
The agency sent us a bouncer. They said he might need 'a bit of training' but he was cheap.....
Now I'm prepared to give those who find themselves in unfortunate positions the benefit of the doubt. This was not one of those.
Don't give pimps agencies the benefit of the doubt. Advertise for CVs to be submitted direct from the applicants. As an extra safeguard specify what you want in terms of a CV with specific subheadings. The pimps are unlikely to be prepared to redo a stack of CVs from their prepared format (into which they will already have disorganised the candidates own carefully prepared CVs and may stand a good chance of defeating generative AI. Applicants who are really interested in the job will self-select by being prepared to rewrite to the specification and also demonstrate that they can follow a spec. It will be rough on those who don't get the job to have put in the extra work for nothing but at least they'll know they were considered and not buried in the blizzard of agency submissions.
"Advertise for CVs to be submitted direct from the applicants."
I wonder why larger HR divisions have done away with wanting cover letters along with a resume and application. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that HR staff have reading difficulties, but there would be more to file and that's job security. If I had to go back out and get a "real job" again, any company with a full time HR department would be out.
We just added a Doc/docx and pdf (if we could get away with charging extra) parse and a fuzzy match to a HR CRM system.
There's just so much wheel reinvention going on where the keyword of AI get added as if it somehow makes it better than everything else that's gone before because it allows the users to be even more brain-dead than before.
And don't even get me started on Microservices Devs...
In my mind, this is one situation where AI could possibly actually make a minor improvement. Well, it's still crap, but it might somehow manage to be less crap than what you had before. Fuzzy matching is a pain. The rules you write to try to match things are fiddly, they can be thrown off by tiny changes in grammar, phrasing, terminology, or sometimes even spaces and punctuation. It often means you're identifying the resume that best fits your idealized pattern, which if people knew your pattern, for example if you were obvious about it from the job description, means the person or agency best able to mash their resume into that format. Since most places don't make that public, it's a pure guess. People know that's going to happen to them, so they do the equivalent of trying to use an early 2000s SEO strategy on their resume. It might work for your system, but any human trying to read it gets something less useful than a shorter one that doesn't try to pack everything they ever did with buzzwords. An AI at least has some chance of handling synonyms or different word order a little better, although I expect it will still have most of the downsides. I've yet to find something that can even slightly approximate reading or skimming by a knowledgeable person.
I don't know how well it worked for you, but most experiences I've had lead me to believe that your version may have been a lazy and ineffective mechanism that saved a few weeks of manager time at the cost of hiring worse candidates and passing over perfectly qualified ones.
That might be misinterpreted given the Apple CEO's preferences, but I'll just keep anyway.
On one hand failed attorneys want software engineers to install a backdoor into secure communication services. On the other, a company is asking for a completely unbiased job candidate selector that can be weighted by anybody in management's whim.
Then we have phone companies that advertise "unlimited" plans with footnotes telling about the limits.
We interviewed a candidate who had everything we had asked for in their CV and more. One of the 'more' bits was 6 months in a role I'd spent 10 years in for the same employer so I asked some questions. They didn't show any signs of understanding the questions, let along the answers. This caused us to ask a few more questions on other roles. They were happy to name all the clients they'd worked for but not able to say precisely what they did or how, the reverse of what I'm used to. I passed. HR got an email complaining that I'd asked the wrong sort of questions and asking for someone else to interview them.
The next week, the hiring manager who'd interviewed them with me was interviewing candidates for a completely different role. The same candidate appeared as their CV now contained everything we'd asked for in that role. They didn't get that one either.
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