Dreaded_Anomaly comments on Negative and Positive Selection - Less Wrong

71 Post author: alyssavance 06 July 2012 01:34AM

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Comment author: Dreaded_Anomaly 19 July 2012 08:21:20PM 1 point [-]

I just now read an interview which brings up the rise of negative selection in job applications:

In the past, they wanted lots of applicants, so now they’re overwhelmed by applicants, so now every company will tell you they’re getting thousands or tens of thousands of applicants for positions. You couldn’t possibly screen them all by hand, because you can’t look at them all, so they use automated systems to do the screening. But the screening is never as good as somebody who has human judgment, and the way screening works is you build in a series of typically yes/no questions that try to get at whether somebody has the ability to do this job. And a lot of that ultimately ends up, it’s all you can ask about, is experience and credentials. So you end up with a series of yes/no questions. And you have to clear them all, and I think people building these don’t quite understand that once you have a series of these yes/no questions built in, and the probabilities are cumulative right? You have to hit them all, then you pretty easily end with no one that can fit.

Comment author: thomblake 19 July 2012 08:26:21PM 2 points [-]

You have to hit them all, then you pretty easily end with no one that can fit.

Worse, for the ones that do, you're probably just responding to noise. If it's very improbable that any applicant will really match all of the screening criteria, then that can become smaller than the probability of a false positive.

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 24 July 2012 12:52:38PM *  0 points [-]

But the screening is never as good as somebody who has human judgment

That's weird, normally human judgement is worse than simple measures.