| Create an exam, broadcast an invite to take it, hire randomly from all who pass. All excuses for why this won't work can be answered with: then make a better test. As a species, across all cultures, we tell ourselves that the human we're after -- the student, the employee, the promotee -- can't possibly be selected by test alone. When in fact, if we can't write a test to select the qualified humans, then either we're too lazy to write one, or, more likely, we actually want to leave plenty of room for human bias to do the actual selecting. And this is ok because we have a special power: we can judge the value of every human, and its future likelihood for success, with a single conversation. If we weren't in a tech company, we could make a very good living reading palms. We never hire people who don't pass our wonderfully fuzzy exams, so we have no evidence that we're selecting the best people or not. No worries, though, our palm reading is very, very accurate. The way we look at it is like this. We make a test no one can pass. We always have one more question or one more "level" that there's not enough time for. Because when all candidates fail, we have to fall back on our palm reading, which is just how we like it. Power and privilege are precious resources to us. We give them out to those most likely to reciprocate. That's what we're poking for with our "culture fit". In the future, students of our culture will look back on our hiring practices and say, "It was illegal to hire based on race, age, sex, and a million other things, but not beauty??? They didn't start with beauty? And they never realized that beauty needed to be in the mix? I don't understand." But we understand. It makes perfect sense. |
The same reasons whiteboard interviews are problematic will apply to any test done at scale.