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.

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dijit 6 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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sgarland 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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?

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NewsaHackO 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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jaggederest 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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dijit 6 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	jaggederest 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> 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.