Thousands of applicants reaching the substantial work stage is a failure of the systems thinking you're talking about. Hundreds of resumes nearly always gets narrowed down to perhaps a dozen or two at most at the screening stage.
And I would make it very clear that putting in more than 30 minutes of work, timed, is a disqualifier, and I would sleep well at night clearing all those people out of the queue.
Hundreds of good applicants can’t be whittled down to a dozen without being very picky about things in the resume which may just be a poor representation.
You will bias heavily along some kind of axis, preferred previous employers or location, age, etc.
You add a lot of bias into the system by trying to further scrutinise otherwise meaningfully qualified people on paper.
As long as you aren’t biasing for any protected classes, why does it matter? If you as an employer have found that graduates from Foo University is a generally positive signal, then why wouldn’t you bias for that, if it’s saving you significant time, and introducing minimal false positives?
Yes, people don’t realize that’s why a lot of desirable jobs/grad schools become filled with people from top universities and previous employment. Pedigree is probably the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to shaving off a good chuck of applicants to a level that at least you know would be adequate.
Reading this makes me want to throw up.
Do not mix up opportunity and capability.
You do realize that the person you're replying to is not making a value judgement and probably agrees with you.
If you have two groups of people, one with a low but nonzero signal that they can do something, the other with no signals, is it still a good idea to use that signal?
You'll get fewer bad employees, but you also discard many capable people who haven't had the opportunity to even try for your signal.
It still is a signal, albeit a weak and highly inequitably distributed one.
> You do realize that the person you're replying to is not making a value judgement and probably agrees with you.
No, in fact I see no indicators at all that it is the case.
> If you have two groups of people, one with a low but nonzero signal that they can do something, the other with no signals, is it still a good idea to use that signal?
It may or may not be. It depends on the quality of the signal itself, its reliability, repeatability, and if that signal blinds you from other indicators or maybe even leads you astray.
Having a signal doesn't mean it's particularly useful. Example: like triggering an alert on a VMs cpu utilization. It's certainly a signal but rarely is it good for anything or actionable.
Once again, you're misunderstanding the goal of the system if you think that it's necessary to deliberately whittle down hundreds of good applicants through careful process to get a great hire.
Hint: you don't even need to evaluate most candidates at all. Random sampling is sufficient and provably bias free.
Reminds me of something I heard once.
> Whenever I get a stack of resumes, I throw half of them in the trash
> I sure don't want unlucky people on my team.
What do you send them as a response "sorry, we're going ahead with other applicants" - "you have not been selected this time" -- what happens if you start needing to dig through that pool of now rejected candidates?
Peak humanity.
> what happens if you start needing to dig through that pool of now rejected candidates?
I acknowledge that I am reaching back out, and they may not be available.
Like a human does.
> Reminds me of something I heard once.
>> Whenever I get a stack of resumes, I throw half of them in the trash
>> I sure don't want unlucky people on my team.
I was actually about to make the same joke.