Re: Hiring Laws

Andrea Gallagher (drea@alumni.stanford.org)
Fri, 25 Jul 1997 13:56:05 -0700


At 07:23 PM 7/24/97 +0000, Mark Grant wrote:
>Personally in one of the two companies where I've had to conduct
>interviews we did essentially the opposite (high scores on our programming
>tests were far more important than 'social skills') and it worked well.

Don't get me wrong, the programming test is the most important factor. We
certainly didn't interview anyone who wasn't up to par on the test. But we
were hiring programmers to work on small teams with producers and artists,
and to occasionally deal with clients. Are you arguing that programming
test results will predict a candidates ability to handle team dynamics and
to support artists and designers? Or are you arguing that those skills are
more easily learned than programming skills?

Perry and I are arguing in favor of our anecdotal evidence over research
and statistics. Not something I normally like to do, but somehow I think
that certain kinds of jobs are harder evaluate in a statistical manner.

Regards,
Andrea