Comment by neofrommatrix
3 days ago
What exactly are you suggesting here? A standardized test that applies to all your job applications? Or, a candidate having to drive to a test center for every company they apply to? Or something else?
3 days ago
What exactly are you suggesting here? A standardized test that applies to all your job applications? Or, a candidate having to drive to a test center for every company they apply to? Or something else?
the idea is sound. create a basic standardized test targeted at tech/engineering jobs. not actually SAT -- operated by a vendor like The College Board. There are plenty of standardized test operators
When I'm interviewing, I'm putting about 30% of the weight towards "would I enjoy working with this person on a daily basis?", but in the context of technical discussions. Standardized testing won't be able to replicate it.
you're not allowed to discriminate
12 replies →
Would certainly make it easy for employers to differentiate themselves by saying “well, at least we don’t do THAT”.
Interviewing fads are set by these large companies that have the problem of systematically evaluating many thousands of candidates. A standardized test is all they want. Then they could do the rest like college admissions, and at a fraction of the cost.
That’s what Triplebyte planned on. The truth is I don’t trust anyone else to run evals.
> The truth is I don’t trust anyone else to run evals.
It's a common sentiment.
But compare https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decisio... . ("People predicting the future performance of college students state that interviewing the students aids prediction, although in fact the interviews make predictions less accurate.")
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you're right there are quality issues, some probably deliberate.
but the screening cost for companies is eye watering so something should be done.
This largely misses what an interview is all about, save for entry level positions.
given the in-person interview is at the end of the funnel by a factor of 500-1000, standardized testing might even open up opportunity for under represented candidates.
Think of how poor the screening process is at the recruiter & CTS (left side) of the funnel, and how many false negatives there are .
If you could offer standardized test at that level, you may be able to keep viable candidates in the funnel longer.
I don’t think that the suggestion is that the standarised test is the only filter. It is merely one out of many.
Standardized plus the ability for companies to do their own test after they pass the standard one. So go get prescreened at test center then use that test to apply for jobs. Company either flys you in for in-person or sends you back to test center to do live remote interview in controlled environment.
It's been tried and failed: Sun Microsystems pushed certifications in the 90s. Pass the test on some technology, get the certification. Then they studied performance. The result? More certifications implied a worse employee. The reason was the top performing employees had no time to study for the exams, but the managers of the bottom performing employees were happy to send them off to training and testing. And then the certification fad came mostly to an end.
That was something quite different that got tried. This would be more based on aptitude rather than knowledge.
Of course, they'd miss out on some good talent. But in the article where it shows the quote of someone getting rejected for not inverting a binary tree on a whiteboard, that doesn't seem like a terrible thing to test for.
I always felt like the Sun and Cisco certs were more about creating people that would push their products on other companies.
Big Tech / Unicorn / Wannabe Unicorn prescreens are all basically standardized now anyway.
That was essentially triplebyte.
That was part of it. Another part was it being socially awkward in a way that I think outsourcing testing needn't be.
No, that was Triplebyte's marketing. Their actual product was completely different.