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by Arch-TK 1166 days ago
I think the issue is that, and I'm paraphrasing something which someone else said but which I think reflects what I've seen, nobody (at least in larger companies) wants to be responsible for a bad hiring decision.

While yes, you can get someone who has a good track record of being a good judge of character to make hiring decisions. If that decision goes wrong and the blame game starts then you inevitably ask this person to explain their hiring decision. This person will then reply: well it was my opinion that X, Y and Z.

In the alternative case where you just get someone to follow a rigid process you can answer: Well he scored well on this exercise and the opinion of the team was in his favour and the work history ticked the right boxes. This effectively dilutes the responsibility. You can no longer blame one person for the bad hire.

Lastly there's also the diversity aspect. With companies increasingly being scrutinized for their hiring practices, "it was my opinion" just gets translated to "this person's internal biases guided the hiring process and as such it was not fair."

I agree this is all making hiring much harder than it needs to be. And certainly you can still find companies where the hiring decisions are made on highly experienced and well honed gut instinct (its the only kind of interview I have been a part of) but it also makes sense how in our increasingly overcomplicated world we are developing increasingly overcomplicated hiring processes.

My recommendation is if you want a sensible hiring process (with maybe a telephone screen followed up by one normal interview) you should stick to smaller and less corporate companies.

1 comments

Unfortunately, "gut instinct" is just another phrase for "unconscious bias". Sometimes those biases are helpful, some less so. And some can result in hiring results that are unfair enough to invite lawsuits.

I know plenty of smaller, less corporate companies that still use careful hiring processes with thoughtful rubrics. They do that not because of risk avoidance; they are generally still ok firing people who don't work out. They do it because they want to run a fair process while maximizing ROI.