this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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I spent the last 4 years working on this at a state-wide level at my last job, so I’ve seen a lot in this space. Skills based hiring is extremely effective when done right. The problem is that most employers don’t know how. They take the degree requirement off the listing and then go through the same interview processes as if nothing changed. In tech specifically, there is a huge highly skilled talent pool whose potential is going untapped because of a glass ceiling keeping them from senior positions. If employers were effective at identifying what applicants, and even existing employees, are capable of they’d have a much easier time filling roles and the ‘talent gap’ wouldn’t be nearly as severe as it is.
I've been in management for about 15 years and have hired many people. My take-away is that standard HR interview practices ("Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a coworker...") are basically a popularity contest that strongly favors extroverts and people with good story-telling and language skills. I suppose these techniques are good if that's primarily what you are looking for. However, if you are hiring for actual technical skills, these interview techniques are worse than useless, they are discriminatory.
Also, HR people, in my experience, are quite under-educated when it comes to interview techniques. I've worked with about dozen different HR people over the years and none of them had any kind of imagination or technical expertise when it came to interviewing. In my organization and in other similar organizations where I have peers, any deviation from the standard HR interview is entirely driven by managers who are sick of the usual HR crap.
Most of HR processes are pure ideological bullshit. "Personality tests" that are nothing else but "we search for obedient drones and here is our tarot to help" and "intelligence tests" that are based on some racial science bullshit made to prove the inferiority of Jews that might be useful only if you work in a factory of math patterns.
They are not there to ensure efficient production, after all they don't know shit about the product or internal processes of the teams. They're a caste of priests whose role is ensuring compliance with the feudal-corporate system.
A friend was just turned down from a job at a japanese software factory because "he talked too much" during his interview, but the one doing the interview is also my friend and said the guy was good but the CTO puts extreme importance on "cultural match".