I think the op's point was completely ignored: Different people progress at different rates. When you're in high school, you have roughly the same amount of schooling experience as your peers. That doesn't change the fact that you may be taking advanced classes while they take remedial ones.
It's easy to accuse the op of arrogance. And who knows, maybe he is arrogant. But in the end, that's just an ad hominem and is insufficient for dismissing his point, which I believe is a legitimate one.
I think the OP missed the bigger point, which is that knowledge comes at various speeds based on an individuals ability to absorb learning, but experience comes from hours invested and the variety of situations experienced.
The OP seems to have conflated the concept that someone asking for a certain number of years of experience are looking for a particular subject matter knowledge level, when they are really looking for someone who has experienced more variations.
When people talk about "What is the value of a college degree? I can already write code with the best of them!" they conflate what they know as equivalent with experiencing different things. Good college programs go through a lot of different scenarios quickly and that is how they substitute for some experience. But any trades person will tell you that learning the trade is both knowledge and experience. The former tells you how the latter tells why and with luck gives you the wisdom to choose the best "how" out of a number of choices.
Sure there is a valid point in there, but I don't think it's one worth pursuing. If you make a fuss out of it then you're not really giving a good impression; you come off as a difficult person who is focused on the wrong things: in this case, the written requirements rather than end goal of judging if you are right for the company. No matter how demonstrably smart and skilled this kid is, I would walk out of the interview with the impression that all his brilliance is going to be misdirected and he'll be out in the weeds have the time because he doesn't have common sense about what's important.
Instead, just do like everyone else is saying and apply. If they reject you based on HR filtering then there's a good likelihood the culture would be bad for you in the long run anyway, if not then you put your best foot forward and if you're as good as you think you'll be snapped up before long.
I totally agree: people do capitalize on experience at different speeds. That said, I think the op fails to put himself into the company's shoes. As one comment said, false positives hurt a lot, so these kinds of company will try to avoid them at all costs, even if it means weeding out very good candidates. Management consulting firms do that a lot for example.
As an employer, I give you this advice: Just apply.
We make exceptions for smart or motivated people all the time. After all, your resume's gonna be viewed by a human who'll give it a subjective assessment. If by chance the company you're applying to is so rigid in their standards that they can only make decision based on objective measures, it's probably not a company that you want to be at.
I fully agree, though I will caveat that many companies, mostly larger ones, have the vast majority of resumes funnelled through HR. HR may be much more inclined to just toss a resume that doesn't check every box that was listed as a "requirement" for the job than a hiring manager actually would. Of course, that may fall under the "it's probably not a company that you want" category, but it is well worth noting.
Same boat. Some of my most impressive hires have been fresh out of the oven so to speak.
In some markets, I think it would be pretty foolish to start putting blanket 'must have +years' experience on postings. It only takes a 15 min phone call to pretty quickly judge where someone is at to proceed further or not. I'd far rather 15min of my time sourcing diamonds in the rough, than eliminating them through poor job postings.
Years of experience is a farce typically made up by HR folks that have zero understanding or clue of the detail's they're hiring for.
Case in point for people looking for "10+ years of rails experience."
Secret tip:
1) Apply anyways. I got jobs just by showing interest and a willingness to learn anything.
2) Build cool, publicly usable and visible projects. Show your versatility to build and ship different kinds of projects
3) Show a knack for picking up languages and technologies quickly and in your own time. This is something you can't fake until you make it. Maybe consider using the technologies you're applying to use in a job.
4) For the really crazy and if it fits your situation, say you're wanting a good fit for everyone and have a few days or week you can chip towards coming in, hanging out and learning more about the company and job to see if it's a good fit for everyone, unpaid. Hiring is one of those decisions that people don't want to hire someone and make a mistake so they'll go for the safe candidate vs the best.
If they feel like keeping you on and paying you for the week, it's up to them. It's better to date before getting married anyways, right? The more you can act like management the greater chance you'll catch their attention and stand out.
The wrong kind of place might not take notice. The right kind will notice and like how you roll.
I guess that depends on what a year of experience unit is. 2000 hours? If you used Rails full time in your day job since it was released and built a Rails-based startup on the side, it could be possible to have 10+ unit-years of experience with it.
But yeah, it's a poor measure, plain and simple. Someone who tinkers with Rails one week out of each year could soon claim eight years of experience, even though they'll have no experience compared to someone who has used it in their full-time job over the same number of years.
> Case in point for people looking for "10+ years of rails experience."
"10 years of Rails and other object-oriented web development experience". (Or something along those lines to get past the HR filter.)
Sometimes requirements get mangled somewhere between the hiring manager and the recruiter placing the ad. But there are also a lot of phony ads out there, and I'd probably ignore a "10+ years of rails" one.
The top rated answer though is pretty priceless. The easy way to over come the experience requirement, is to put in the time. But the relevant response is that when you don't know what you don't know, you're not nearly as effective as you think you are. I remember being so depressed at Intel one day when I figured out I was tons smarter than this senior engineer I was working with but I didn't have a shot at his job until I had more experience.
I advise folks, don't rush, breathe, look around you, learn. And then apply all that. But recognize its very hard.
Generally the advice here to just apply is solid too. If the skill set matches I and any other hiring manager will give you a look. And experience comes even when it isn't 'paid' so doing projects in your spare time is also a great tool.
The top rated answer main point is also funny as well. It reminds me of my town. They are more than willing to vote for more services and while also more than willing to pay less taxes. In the short term, it's a party but in the long term it's a disaster waiting to happen.
People want everything for free. Or in this case, people want all the success without any of the failures which lead to that success.
Something I don't think everyone considers when they don't get a job is that probably somebody else did get the job.
Maybe you are very skilled but only have 2 years experience and someone else that applied is just as skilled and has 5+ years experience. Maybe they interviewed that guy first and liked him and didn't feel the need to interview anyone else.
Maybe you are very skilled AND have 5+ years experience, but the hiring manager/HR had a stack of 10 (20? 100?) resume's of equally qualified applicants and you randomly ended up on the bottom of that stack (You have a 50% change of ending up in the bottom half) And they gave interviews to the first 5 (or 10 or 50) and ended up really liking one of those guys.
I remember when I thought I was a badass programmer. Now, after almost two decades of it, I realize how little I know. IMHO, humility is the best sign of experience. That said, asking for a hard number (like 5 years of experience) is no guaranteed filter, but it probably will get you way better application results than putting the threshold at 2 years.
I fully agree. For most of my 3 decades in programming, I've considered myself a badass programmer, but in retrospect, there are always glaring mistakes that were not evident to me at the time.
One concrete benefit of requiring N years of experience, with N greater than 2, is that one of the major career learning experiences is to deal with one's own code in "maintenance mode", and you can only experience that if you have a number of years of distance from when you originally wrote the code.
Of course, requiring N years of experience is no guarantee that the candidate has dealt with this situation, as there are people who (consciously or not) structure their careers to avoid ever retreading their own code.
What the employer means in the context is that they want someone with practical experience with the tech; not just book-learning. All you have to do is display the experience that you have, or get some if you don't have it.
"We covered this in class" is generally useless, given the gulf between theory and practice. "I have app X in the app store" is priceless. Github profile, history of helpful posts in a related forum, stack overflow reputation - any of these can show that you've done the work before.
The experience requirement is also used to weed out applicants who intend to read one book on the tech/language and learn the rest on the job. In some positions that is appropriate, in others it is not.
>The experience requirement is also used to weed out applicants who intend to read one book on the tech/language and learn the rest on the job. In some positions that is appropriate, in others it is not.
I'd go one further and say that almost every position is appropriate for this, it all comes down to the person's willingness and ability to learn quickly. Given the mindset of an average HR drone though, you almost have to fake it. I've found that being a quick learner doesn't mean much of anything when it comes to getting through the process, as it's not something you can readily prove.
"Years of Experience" along with "Degree" are objective requirements that can simplify hiring. Some companies will be hard and fast about them, others will be more flexible.
But to note, if you want to claim that you have outstanding reasons why lack of years, or a degree, or a certification, or whatever ought to be disregarded, figure out why that is, and emphasize it.
If you have an active GitHub profile, an interesting blog, a self-published book - a great many recruiters will overlook their objective benchmarks.
Focus on your strengths, shore them up, and advertise them. Time wasted complaining that some recruiters are inflexible is not only pointless; it takes time away that you could be using to do something positive.
In my experience, companies that use years of experience as a candidate filter are not companies you would want to work for. Number of years of experience is easy to determine, but pretty much useless in determining someone's skill. What it really shows is that the people in charge of hiring are either lazy or incompetent. Neither speak well to the quality of people going into the company, so once again, why would you want to work for them?
>Number of years of experience is easy to determine
Only if defined in a naive way (i.e. ignore personal projects, work experience during middle school/high school/college, have some arbitrary way of interpreting what it means to have experience in a particular language.)
Employers use "years of experience" as a concise way of indicating roughly how much skill they're expecting, as much as anything else. If you think you have that much experience, apply anyway and let your CV speak for itself.
If the company is the kind that filters out qualified candidates on a technicality, well, hopefully you didn't really want to want to have your time wasted by a callback from that company anyway. I'd still suggest not directly mentioning it anywhere, though, just in case it prompts an HR person to skip your application without looking any closer. It also communicates a lack of confidence. Again, your CV should be able to speak for itself.
I have used "years of experience" as a shorthand for "we are looking for someone with mature judgement; who has been in many different situations and worked through them; who will stop and consider consequences before committing to risky ventures; who will not panic when faced with a new problem; who is likely to have learned from experience in a way which will benefit our company."
Perhaps I should spell that out in future, though.
This will be buried but I'll throw it out there anyway.
In the UK it's actually illegal to specify a minimum number of years of experience. The issue is that no-one enforces the rule unless someone kicks up a stink. In the UK, if you are rejected for a position implicitly because you didn't have the minimum number of years of experience you can claim compensation through the employment tribunal on the grounds of age discrimination.
UK law is black and white about the issue and I'm personally sick and tired of seeing employers and recruiters blatantly and ignorantly flouting the law.
I recall vividly how two years after Java first came out, many would-be-employers in the banking sector started advertising heavily for 'Java programmers with minimum of five years experience'.
Years of experience is an easy way for a company to justify not hiring you. If you have the skills, you likely need to improve your skill at effectively educating people of your ability.
I recently went through something like this. I wound up getting the job, but only after my recruiter pulled a few strings. As an applicant, you can't do that so it's best you improve your communication so that after that first meeting they see your spark.
Most of the answers here and on stack exchange clearly show that the person answering has never been (or lots of time has passed since) in this position.
I have been in this situation lots of times. Not only I didn't have the years, by I also didn't have the education. And have learned how to "beat" the system:
1. Be really good. You can't fake that.
2. In your resume, show your real skills and interests. Write details. Lots of details. But only details that are of interest to the current position.
3. Don't have a "generic" CV. Write one specifically for every other position you are applying to.
4. Do not be shy and provide references to hobby projects, freelance work and your ambitions (and also dreams).
5. Be humble. Never make comparisons with anyone. Just talk about yourself.
I have been in a hiring position lately, and I can see why this succeeded with me. Most of the candidates send shitty CVs. One can't judge them from the CV. For such candidates you can only guess from the years of experience. Don't be that guy. If you send me a CV that shows passion, knowledge, culture and determination, I won't look at the years of experience at all.
The original StackExchange thread is an interesting read. For the job applicant (any job applicant), the problem is always how to make an affirmative case that an employer ought to offer the job to you and not to someone else. The commenters on StackExchange and here on HN are mostly commenting from that perspective, that the job applicant has to figure out how to excel over other job applicants in making a strong case for being hired.
Some comments here are about the issue of how companies should hire in the general case. Because that is a frequently asked question here on HN, and because that has been the subject of much research, I'll recycle some electrons here to provide a FAQ on the general issue. The review article "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings"
sums up, current to 1998, much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring practices. There are many kinds of hiring screens, such as resume reviews for job experience, telephone interviews, in-person interviews, checks for academic credentials, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations.
The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well (but only about at the 0.5 level, standing alone). One is a general cognitive ability test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general cognitive ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than anything else that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes.
For legal reasons in the United States (the same consideration does not apply in other countries), it is difficult to give job applicants a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of a hiring process. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case in the United States Supreme Court
held that cognitive ability tests used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring process had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring process might be illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants and is not supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job. Companies outside the United States are regulated by different laws.
I am still skeptical about the IQ tests and job-skill tests. They both seem to look at things at a very narrow timeframe. One could potentially have a high IQ and be great at a specific task, but it seems to say very little how this person is going to perform in future tasks - i.e. a brilliant mind, facing a challenging job skill task, might become highly bored or sloppy when settling in the day-to-day work frame. But I guess statistics and outliners have one way or another a problematic relationship.
It does make sense though that companies might be looking for someone who has developed a sense of judgment over the years. Similar to how fathers (responsible ones) become less naive on decision-making as the family's dependency on him grow which is why we turn to him (or our mothers) for advise. Because they may be less skilled or knowledgable than us, but they've been around long enough to know how to react to difficult problems.
I think that is the most important aspect in achieving your goals in a company. You need effective decision making skills on top of your technical abilities.
I think the answer is you don't. People are really stupid creatures who prefer to hire not based on what's best but what they feel comfortable with. This results in 95%+ of people being hired not for what is best for them but of circumstance and of well, luck.
Think about it. How many well qualified resumes out there were discarded because the hiring manager was angry their football team lost yesterday? How many were lost during the office party? Probably more then we want to know.
One of the respondents makes the point that a company can loose a lot by hiring a bad candidate, but "false negative cost a company close to nothing."
While there is truth to this, I would say it is less true when there is a labor shortage. By not hiring a good candidate when they have the chance, a company looses the revenue that candidate might have helped them earn while they spend time looking for a surer bet.
[+] [-] csallen|14 years ago|reply
It's easy to accuse the op of arrogance. And who knows, maybe he is arrogant. But in the end, that's just an ad hominem and is insufficient for dismissing his point, which I believe is a legitimate one.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|14 years ago|reply
The OP seems to have conflated the concept that someone asking for a certain number of years of experience are looking for a particular subject matter knowledge level, when they are really looking for someone who has experienced more variations.
When people talk about "What is the value of a college degree? I can already write code with the best of them!" they conflate what they know as equivalent with experiencing different things. Good college programs go through a lot of different scenarios quickly and that is how they substitute for some experience. But any trades person will tell you that learning the trade is both knowledge and experience. The former tells you how the latter tells why and with luck gives you the wisdom to choose the best "how" out of a number of choices.
[+] [-] dasil003|14 years ago|reply
Instead, just do like everyone else is saying and apply. If they reject you based on HR filtering then there's a good likelihood the culture would be bad for you in the long run anyway, if not then you put your best foot forward and if you're as good as you think you'll be snapped up before long.
[+] [-] kwekly|14 years ago|reply
After three years he/she is open to apply for what might take others 7.
[+] [-] louischatriot|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imjk|14 years ago|reply
We make exceptions for smart or motivated people all the time. After all, your resume's gonna be viewed by a human who'll give it a subjective assessment. If by chance the company you're applying to is so rigid in their standards that they can only make decision based on objective measures, it's probably not a company that you want to be at.
[+] [-] timwiseman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RowanH|14 years ago|reply
In some markets, I think it would be pretty foolish to start putting blanket 'must have +years' experience on postings. It only takes a 15 min phone call to pretty quickly judge where someone is at to proceed further or not. I'd far rather 15min of my time sourcing diamonds in the rough, than eliminating them through poor job postings.
[+] [-] pnathan|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yuhong|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j45|14 years ago|reply
Case in point for people looking for "10+ years of rails experience."
Secret tip:
1) Apply anyways. I got jobs just by showing interest and a willingness to learn anything.
2) Build cool, publicly usable and visible projects. Show your versatility to build and ship different kinds of projects
3) Show a knack for picking up languages and technologies quickly and in your own time. This is something you can't fake until you make it. Maybe consider using the technologies you're applying to use in a job.
4) For the really crazy and if it fits your situation, say you're wanting a good fit for everyone and have a few days or week you can chip towards coming in, hanging out and learning more about the company and job to see if it's a good fit for everyone, unpaid. Hiring is one of those decisions that people don't want to hire someone and make a mistake so they'll go for the safe candidate vs the best.
If they feel like keeping you on and paying you for the week, it's up to them. It's better to date before getting married anyways, right? The more you can act like management the greater chance you'll catch their attention and stand out.
The wrong kind of place might not take notice. The right kind will notice and like how you roll.
[+] [-] randomdata|14 years ago|reply
But yeah, it's a poor measure, plain and simple. Someone who tinkers with Rails one week out of each year could soon claim eight years of experience, even though they'll have no experience compared to someone who has used it in their full-time job over the same number of years.
[+] [-] flomo|14 years ago|reply
"10 years of Rails and other object-oriented web development experience". (Or something along those lines to get past the HR filter.)
Sometimes requirements get mangled somewhere between the hiring manager and the recruiter placing the ad. But there are also a lot of phony ads out there, and I'd probably ignore a "10+ years of rails" one.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|14 years ago|reply
I advise folks, don't rush, breathe, look around you, learn. And then apply all that. But recognize its very hard.
Generally the advice here to just apply is solid too. If the skill set matches I and any other hiring manager will give you a look. And experience comes even when it isn't 'paid' so doing projects in your spare time is also a great tool.
[+] [-] tedunangst|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diminium|14 years ago|reply
People want everything for free. Or in this case, people want all the success without any of the failures which lead to that success.
[+] [-] hdctambien|14 years ago|reply
Maybe you are very skilled but only have 2 years experience and someone else that applied is just as skilled and has 5+ years experience. Maybe they interviewed that guy first and liked him and didn't feel the need to interview anyone else.
Maybe you are very skilled AND have 5+ years experience, but the hiring manager/HR had a stack of 10 (20? 100?) resume's of equally qualified applicants and you randomly ended up on the bottom of that stack (You have a 50% change of ending up in the bottom half) And they gave interviews to the first 5 (or 10 or 50) and ended up really liking one of those guys.
[+] [-] jiggy2011|14 years ago|reply
Younger people on HN complain that it's impossible to get hired because they don't have experience.
Older people on HN complain that it's impossible to get hired because they aren't a fresh out of college 20 something who has time to code 24/7.
[+] [-] SoftwareMaven|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gavanwoolery|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] microtherion|14 years ago|reply
One concrete benefit of requiring N years of experience, with N greater than 2, is that one of the major career learning experiences is to deal with one's own code in "maintenance mode", and you can only experience that if you have a number of years of distance from when you originally wrote the code.
Of course, requiring N years of experience is no guarantee that the candidate has dealt with this situation, as there are people who (consciously or not) structure their careers to avoid ever retreading their own code.
[+] [-] xsmasher|14 years ago|reply
"We covered this in class" is generally useless, given the gulf between theory and practice. "I have app X in the app store" is priceless. Github profile, history of helpful posts in a related forum, stack overflow reputation - any of these can show that you've done the work before.
The experience requirement is also used to weed out applicants who intend to read one book on the tech/language and learn the rest on the job. In some positions that is appropriate, in others it is not.
[+] [-] Karunamon|14 years ago|reply
I'd go one further and say that almost every position is appropriate for this, it all comes down to the person's willingness and ability to learn quickly. Given the mindset of an average HR drone though, you almost have to fake it. I've found that being a quick learner doesn't mean much of anything when it comes to getting through the process, as it's not something you can readily prove.
[+] [-] gisikw|14 years ago|reply
But to note, if you want to claim that you have outstanding reasons why lack of years, or a degree, or a certification, or whatever ought to be disregarded, figure out why that is, and emphasize it.
If you have an active GitHub profile, an interesting blog, a self-published book - a great many recruiters will overlook their objective benchmarks.
Focus on your strengths, shore them up, and advertise them. Time wasted complaining that some recruiters are inflexible is not only pointless; it takes time away that you could be using to do something positive.
[+] [-] nahname|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaredsohn|14 years ago|reply
Only if defined in a naive way (i.e. ignore personal projects, work experience during middle school/high school/college, have some arbitrary way of interpreting what it means to have experience in a particular language.)
[+] [-] bunderbunder|14 years ago|reply
If the company is the kind that filters out qualified candidates on a technicality, well, hopefully you didn't really want to want to have your time wasted by a callback from that company anyway. I'd still suggest not directly mentioning it anywhere, though, just in case it prompts an HR person to skip your application without looking any closer. It also communicates a lack of confidence. Again, your CV should be able to speak for itself.
[+] [-] dsr_|14 years ago|reply
Perhaps I should spell that out in future, though.
[+] [-] Peroni|14 years ago|reply
In the UK it's actually illegal to specify a minimum number of years of experience. The issue is that no-one enforces the rule unless someone kicks up a stink. In the UK, if you are rejected for a position implicitly because you didn't have the minimum number of years of experience you can claim compensation through the employment tribunal on the grounds of age discrimination.
UK law is black and white about the issue and I'm personally sick and tired of seeing employers and recruiters blatantly and ignorantly flouting the law.
[+] [-] polymatter|14 years ago|reply
I'd like to be able to say this with some authority (without it sounding like "this guy on the internet told me").
[+] [-] SagelyGuru|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bricestacey|14 years ago|reply
I recently went through something like this. I wound up getting the job, but only after my recruiter pulled a few strings. As an applicant, you can't do that so it's best you improve your communication so that after that first meeting they see your spark.
[+] [-] loxs|14 years ago|reply
1. Be really good. You can't fake that. 2. In your resume, show your real skills and interests. Write details. Lots of details. But only details that are of interest to the current position. 3. Don't have a "generic" CV. Write one specifically for every other position you are applying to. 4. Do not be shy and provide references to hobby projects, freelance work and your ambitions (and also dreams). 5. Be humble. Never make comparisons with anyone. Just talk about yourself.
I have been in a hiring position lately, and I can see why this succeeded with me. Most of the candidates send shitty CVs. One can't judge them from the CV. For such candidates you can only guess from the years of experience. Don't be that guy. If you send me a CV that shows passion, knowledge, culture and determination, I won't look at the years of experience at all.
[+] [-] tokenadult|14 years ago|reply
Some comments here are about the issue of how companies should hire in the general case. Because that is a frequently asked question here on HN, and because that has been the subject of much research, I'll recycle some electrons here to provide a FAQ on the general issue. The review article "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings"
http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...
sums up, current to 1998, much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring practices. There are many kinds of hiring screens, such as resume reviews for job experience, telephone interviews, in-person interviews, checks for academic credentials, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations.
The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well (but only about at the 0.5 level, standing alone). One is a general cognitive ability test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general cognitive ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than anything else that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes.
For legal reasons in the United States (the same consideration does not apply in other countries), it is difficult to give job applicants a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of a hiring process. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case in the United States Supreme Court
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196...
held that cognitive ability tests used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring process had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring process might be illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants and is not supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job. Companies outside the United States are regulated by different laws.
[+] [-] stfu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesflorentino|14 years ago|reply
I think that is the most important aspect in achieving your goals in a company. You need effective decision making skills on top of your technical abilities.
[+] [-] diminium|14 years ago|reply
Think about it. How many well qualified resumes out there were discarded because the hiring manager was angry their football team lost yesterday? How many were lost during the office party? Probably more then we want to know.
[+] [-] sopooneo|14 years ago|reply
While there is truth to this, I would say it is less true when there is a labor shortage. By not hiring a good candidate when they have the chance, a company looses the revenue that candidate might have helped them earn while they spend time looking for a surer bet.