My intuition here is “actually fairly good.” Firms typically spend a decent amount on hiring processes—they run screening tests, conduct interviews, look at CVs, and ask for references. It’s fair to say that companies have a reasonable amount of data collected when they make hiring decisions, and generally, the people involved are incentivized to hire well.
Every part of this is false. Companies don’t collect a fair amount of data during the hiring process, and the data they do collect is often irrelevant or biased. How much do you really learn about a candidate by having them demonstrate whether they’ve managed to memorize the tricks to solving programming puzzles on a whiteboard?
The people involved are not incentivized to hire well, either. They’re often engineers or managers dragged away from the tasks that they are incentivized to perform in order to check a box that the participated in the minimum number of interviews necessary to not get in trouble with their managers. If they take hiring seriously, it’s out of an altruistic motivation, not because it benefits their own career.
Furthermore, no company actually goes back and determines whether its hires worked out. If a new hire doesn’t work out, and is let go after a year’s time, does anyone actually go back through their hiring packet and determine if there were any red flags that were missed? No, of course not. And yet, I would argue that that is the minimum necessary to ensure improvement in hiring practices.
The point of a prediction market in hiring is to enforce that last practice. The existence of fixed term contracts with definite criteria and payouts for those criteria forces people to go back and look at their interview feedback and ask themselves, “Was I actually correct in my decision that this person would or would not be a good fit at this company?”
On top of all that, this whole process is totally unaccountable and for some market failure reason, every company repeats it.
Unaccountable : the reason a candidate wasn’t hired isn’t disclosed, which means in many cases it may be a factually false reason, illegal discrimination, the job wasn’t real, or immigration fraud. Or just “they failed to get lucky on an arbitrary test that measures nothing”.
Repeats it: So each company wastes at least a full day of each candidates time, and for each candidate they consider, they waste more than that of their own time, plus plane tickets and other expenses. And then to even be noticed by a company it’s apparently considered the responsibility of the candidate to spam every company in their country with a copy of their resume.
Why isn’t there a standardized test given by a third party for job relevant skills? Why isn’t there a central database where all the candidates put their resumes, and it won’t make any difference to the chance of being hired if a particular candidate spams everyone. (to an extent, having a linkedin profile and just waiting for a recruiter to ping you is this)
I know it’s the result of some series of competing incentives that result in this market failure, aka moloch, but still.
Why isn’t there a standardized test given by a third party for job relevant skills?
That’s what Triplebyte was trying to do for programming jobs. It didn’t seem to work out very well for them. Last I heard, they’d been acquired by Karat after running out of funding.
Every part of this is false. Companies don’t collect a fair amount of data during the hiring process, and the data they do collect is often irrelevant or biased. How much do you really learn about a candidate by having them demonstrate whether they’ve managed to memorize the tricks to solving programming puzzles on a whiteboard?
The people involved are not incentivized to hire well, either. They’re often engineers or managers dragged away from the tasks that they are incentivized to perform in order to check a box that the participated in the minimum number of interviews necessary to not get in trouble with their managers. If they take hiring seriously, it’s out of an altruistic motivation, not because it benefits their own career.
Furthermore, no company actually goes back and determines whether its hires worked out. If a new hire doesn’t work out, and is let go after a year’s time, does anyone actually go back through their hiring packet and determine if there were any red flags that were missed? No, of course not. And yet, I would argue that that is the minimum necessary to ensure improvement in hiring practices.
The point of a prediction market in hiring is to enforce that last practice. The existence of fixed term contracts with definite criteria and payouts for those criteria forces people to go back and look at their interview feedback and ask themselves, “Was I actually correct in my decision that this person would or would not be a good fit at this company?”
On top of all that, this whole process is totally unaccountable and for some market failure reason, every company repeats it.
Unaccountable : the reason a candidate wasn’t hired isn’t disclosed, which means in many cases it may be a factually false reason, illegal discrimination, the job wasn’t real, or immigration fraud. Or just “they failed to get lucky on an arbitrary test that measures nothing”.
Repeats it: So each company wastes at least a full day of each candidates time, and for each candidate they consider, they waste more than that of their own time, plus plane tickets and other expenses. And then to even be noticed by a company it’s apparently considered the responsibility of the candidate to spam every company in their country with a copy of their resume.
Why isn’t there a standardized test given by a third party for job relevant skills? Why isn’t there a central database where all the candidates put their resumes, and it won’t make any difference to the chance of being hired if a particular candidate spams everyone. (to an extent, having a linkedin profile and just waiting for a recruiter to ping you is this)
I know it’s the result of some series of competing incentives that result in this market failure, aka moloch, but still.
That’s what Triplebyte was trying to do for programming jobs. It didn’t seem to work out very well for them. Last I heard, they’d been acquired by Karat after running out of funding.