Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

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> if I’m hiring, I have an obligation to consider the applicant as an individual regardless of gender.

Since it's illegal to hire based on the results of an IQ test in the US, we have to come up with other proxies for it. So, we use stereotypes that are associated intelligent individuals as filtering criteria. Gender provides one of those stereotypes - in both directions. Men have traditionally not been considered for jobs like nursing or caretaking. Women have traditionally not been considered for jobs which require physical strength or analytical skills.

But back to your original premise: when you're evaluating hundreds, or thousands, of applications for a single opening, you're going to fall back on stereotypes, because it's too much work to do otherwise. Gap in employment longer than a few months? Skills have expired. Lots of job hopping after 6-18 months? Unreliable. Only has worked for companies known for their physical labor? Not capable of working in an office. A short job history with no college? Not smart enough.

Even though every single one of those is potentially wrong, it's also potentially correct. If you need to weed 100 applications down to 10 for phone interviews in the next hour, can you really afford to give each of the 100 applicants the benefit of the doubt?

EDIT: Removed "intelligence", replaced with "the results of an IQ test", which is what I meant originally. Apologies.

> Since it's illegal to hire based on intelligence in the US

Source? This article says it can be legal. https://www.hiresuccess.com/resources/guide-to-employment-te...

> when you're evaluating hundreds, or thousands, of applications for a single opening, you're going to fall back on stereotypes.

You personally might. But that's not what everyone does, not what the most successful people in recruiting do, and definitely not what I do. Why not use far stronger signals? For example:

1. Do they have the exact skills you are looking for or only some of them? 2. Aside from listing the skills, do they give concrete examples of using those skills? 3. How much experience do they have in their role? 4. Do they have experience in our specific industry? 5. If written communication is part of the job, how well is their resume written?

You can do a quick scan of the above in 10 or 20 seconds.

Thousands of resumes? Scan the first hundred that arrived and skip the rest. For most companies, your job isn't to find the one best person out of thousands of applicants, which would be a huge cost. It's to find someone qualified for the job.

Why use stereotypes when you have much stronger signals already available and it's just as quick to scan for those better signals?

> Source

See sibling comment.

> Why not use far stronger signals

These all rely on assumptions that an exhibited trait - a well polished resume that is tailored to the job description - have the non-visible traits sought.

Stereotypes work the same way. They're an assumption of someone's internal traits based on an outward trait, and are typically accurate when applied to groups (much as your resume filtering likely is mostly accurate, with a few outliers).

Stereotypes are just typically considered to be negative.

The factors I listed have nothing to do with a polished resume. It's comparing information with a strong signal.

Stereotypes are actually an extremely poor quality signal when hiring. If you use them, you're doing more work than you need to find a qualified person. Test it out and find out for yourself like I did on the advice of someone who does it for a living.

>Since it's illegal to hire based on intelligence in the US, we have to come up with other proxies for it.

Where are you getting this from? Mental disability is a protected class but not the same as intelligence.

I should have worded it better - it's effectively illegal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co

TL;DR: It's hard to defend an IQ test against a discrimination lawsuit.

Unless there's an explicit business need to concretely identify someone's IQ, a business is at risk of being called out as using the IQ test to discriminate against some protected group, since that protected group is potentially disadvantaged while taking the IQ test by any one of dozens of (legitimate) reasons.

It's not effectively illegal. That's a mis-characterization of both current law and that lawsuit in particular.

The court ruled that "the company's employment requirements did not pertain to applicants' ability to perform the job". And it was more specific than that. If such tests disparately impact ethnic minority groups, businesses must demonstrate that such tests are "reasonably related" to the job for which the test is required.

That does not make IQ tests effectively illegal. Demonstrate that anyone with an IQ lower than X cannot perform the job in question, and you're good. The actual "problem" is that other tests are far better at determining if you will do well in a job role. So companies use the better tests. If there were a job for which IQ was highly related to being able to do the job, then companies would surely use IQ as the test for that job.

To give a concrete example, why would I give a programmer an IQ test when I can give them a programming test? I'll take it further: an extremely high IQ is a deficit for many developer roles. Most of the genius programmers I personally know write code no one else can maintain, and are often condescending - usually without even knowing it, which hurts team moral. I love those guys and they often inspire me, but many of them would make bad employees if the job required writing average business programs on a large team. A programming test would reveal that when you see their code is very clever, and also includes an internal compiler so they can write the solution in a high level language they invented... There is good reason my very smartest programming friends are often unemployed. When a genius programmer is called for though, boy do they shine.

So it's not a case of companies avoiding the use of a good test due the law and replacing that good test with less effective proxies, as you first suggested. The real effect of that ruling and the law is that companies use tests that can be proven to demonstrate whether or not you can perform the job. That's better for everyone.

It is almost certainly legal to hire based on assessments of intelligence. If I insisted in a job interview that 4+9=12, the moon is simply a sky-reflection of the lights from Manhattan, and that I can’t stand to be in the same room as tall people since they affect gravity in disturbing ways, you would draw conclusions about my intelligence. Would you then avoid hiring me?

IQ tests might be illegal under some circumstances, but I would point out that they are not a reliable measure of intelligence anyways, making this all a bit of a moot point.

Interesting read, as was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricci_v._DeStefano

I'm glad I don't have to worry about hiring. Seems like employers are caught in a catch-22.

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