So I'm not a programmer, but I know these stats definitely ring true based on the demand I have for projects I'm working on and the difficulty of finding good developers. This makes me wonder whether or not it would be possible to get more inner city kids coding so they can a) get good jobs and b) help to fill this need. I know this would be a lot of work, but it would be awesome to find a way to promote coding among inner city kids and to get them onto this kind of track. Know what I mean?
I agree that the whole process is flawed. In addition to the resume problem, job listings are ridiculous. They use inflated information about experience needed etc. and scare off people that might be a good fit.
From what I gather, that's true. When I was in GIS school, one of the administrators had an anecdote about how job listings were saying they wanted people with like 5 to 10 years experience -- with a product that had come out less than 5 years earlier.
I disagree. I think it teaches bad habits where you write in a "CV" style. Instead, why not have people write a one-page document with short paragraphs and bullet points for why they should get hired. This can include GPA, results, and experience, but I personally just want to see it in a different format than a dry, bullet-pointed resume.
The resume (CV used interchangeably) is merely a tool for guiding the conversation on background & experience. Treating a job-seeker as a supplicant is a turn-off to professional candidates.
The best way to use the test is to screen candidates to find the top 5 or so. Let's so you get 200 resumes. Instead of sorting through them all, you can have the applicants take the Plum.io test. Once the results come in, you'll have the candidates ranked from top to bottom. You don't have to make hiring decisions based on the result, but you can use it to narrow the five or ten you want to interview. That's the best use I've seen so far. It also helps to weed out people that have fluff on their resume. You'll know right away how intelligent they are from an IQ perspective and also how hard they work, in addition to other personality traits that will be useful.
You don't have to make hiring decisions based on the result, but you can use it to narrow the five or ten you want to interview.
It may or may not be wise to reject 95% of your applicants out of hand based on a psychological test [1], but it is certainly a "hiring decision". Don't apply a selection criterion, then try to tell yourself that you didn't.
You'll know right away how intelligent they are from an IQ perspective and also how hard they work, in addition to other personality traits that will be useful.
Yes, personality traits such as "willingness to jump through hoops, just to land an interview with the sort of boss who will ignore one's sales pitch and track record in favor of dubiously-relevant psychological tests." You've set up a very effective screen for this trait.
At least you do this up-front. I had a CEO spring a psychological test on me in a final-round senior-engineering interview, wasting more than a day of my time, not to mention his company's time. Absurdism at its finest: You go in prepared to talk about the business and how you might be able to use your existing technical expertise to score short-, medium-, and long-term wins in performance and revenue, and suddenly your high-school guidance counselor shows up.
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[1] Ranked "top to bottom", no less. That is disturbing. I would quote Mr. Spock and say that this phrase "reflects two-dimensional thinking", but it doesn't even get up to two dimensions.
I can't point to any conclusive evidence of this, but I'm convinced when I used GoDaddy, they purchased the domains I tried a few days later. Based on that, even though it is inconclusive, I'd recommend using someone else when checking to see if the name is taken.
This article is awesome. And you'd think journalists would get overwhelmed, but 99% of people are too lazy to follow through with something like this so that shouldn't be a problem.
Copying and doing better isn't as easy as it looks, and has already been mentioned, this is exactly where competitors come from. There's nothing wrong with copying and improving an idea as long as you don't steal anything proprietary (obviously).
