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Comment by jackmott42 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people who have problems with various recruiting techniques seem to assume a universe where nobody is dishonest. You can call for references but in many cultures people do not want to be mean and will say nice things about you even if you were a terrible employee. People will also lie and scheme and it can be difficult to really dig into someone's professional career to know if they are serious and good people or not. This is where some official record like a GPA can be useful, or a live coding interview where you get the opportunity to at least prove you are not a total faker.

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That would be a good argument if people were being hired solely on the basis of their responses to these questions. No one's doing that. These are simply filter questions used to decide who to do initial interviews with and need to be discussed in terms of their false positive/negative failures.

False positive: people can lie with no meaningful way to verify.

False negative: you're increasing the funnel drop rate of your recruiting pipeline while simultaneously selecting against more experienced and non-traditional candidates.

Why would you ask this except for cargo culting?

I’d assume they still get enough candidates through that filter, and not too many false positives. It might actually be worth the false negatives.

That is what background checks are for. They are irritating, but at least that would let the job candidate apply without having to fill in all the crap from the get go.

> A lot of people who have problems with various recruiting techniques seem to assume a universe where nobody is dishonest.

OK, so I lie about my high school achievement from decades ago? Now what. How are they going to decide whether I'm lying about smoking behind the bikesheds or getting a gold star for being quiet at lunch or whatever.

Sure maybe this is useful for 20 year olds going into entry level jobs, but for the majority of people?

The article's contention is that highschool GPA is literally irrelevant for the jobs in question. Coding interview questions are at least pertinent.

Sure, but asking me to self-report that information is a lot different than requiring proof of it.

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