Skill Testing
Ken Ganshirt <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Here’s a follow-up to the discussion about skill testing for job applicants. The point of this particular article is about hiring for diversity. It is describing how they got a better gender balance but In my opinion would work well for hiring regardless of gender, colour, or whatever, for all the reasons mentioned in this excerpt. As we’ve already discussed, the test itself would have to be very carefully designed so the candidate does not need access to anyone in the business for context. ###### CONDUCT APTITUDE TESTS BLIND Many companies test technical abilities on the spot. They’ll give you a problem, and ask you to fire off lines of code on a whiteboard. The first issue with that approach is it’s as much about your communication and presentation skills as it is about your core coding skills – far more inherent to biases. In the real world, that’s not how you code. Second, if you’re looking to ensure gender balance, consider that you’re asking a woman, often of colour, to stand up in an unfamiliar work setting and deliver a presentation to a bunch of men. We used to do it that way, and realized that a lot of female candidates weren’t getting to the next round. So, we switched it up. Now, we conduct aptitude tests online, where candidates are able to code where they’re comfortable in their own environment. What we’ve found is now women are often outperforming the men – and since we look at the results blind, our biases evaporated. Will they look at developer sites such as Stack Overflow? Will they google how to figure it out? Of course they will. But guess what, when they’re assigned that in real life, there’s a high probability they’ll do the same thing. It’s not that the quality of female candidates is better or worse, it’s that the presentation layer is different, and our old process tested for the wrong things. ###### Full article: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/small-business/talent/article-women-make-up-more-than-50-of-our-tech-team-heres-how-we-did-it/?utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_source=Tech,%20Telecom%20&%20Media&utm_type=text&utm_content=TechTelecomMedia&utm_campaign=2019-4-2_8&cu_id=hZp%2B6jmyDZx2KMfpEjZOsg%3D%3D ...ken... _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork