At this point we might as well adopt that joke where you blindly throw away half the resumes because you don't want to hire unlucky people.
At this point we might as well adopt that joke where you blindly throw away half the resumes because you don't want to hire unlucky people.
At one point in the past a major UK a medical school adopted random selection for qualified candidates (Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry - part of Queen Mary University of London). The approach benefitted qualified students from less well-off backgrounds vs those who can afford to win at the ever more elaborate (manual at the time) hurdles of resume assessment criteria and effectively game the system. There was an orchestrated campaign against the lottery around "Why gamble with would-be doctors?". Random selection was quietly dropped.
That's probably a good litmus test for political capture by elites. The Netherlands introduced a weighted lottery for medical schools in 1972, abolished it in 2017 for basically the same reasons, studied the (worse) outcomes for a bit, then put it back in 2024.
A person's total luck is constant over a lifetime. The remaining half of the candidates already spent some of their luck in this selection, so they'll be on average less lucky than the discarded half.
Normally we'd reject the first 37% [0] of candidates and then pick the next one that is above the average, but if all the unluckiest candidates show up first, then we need to sample even more in order to get an accurate baseline.
This is compounded by the the "Teela Brown" problem, where the luckiest candidates may never apply because they're too lucky to end up at our company.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
No, luck would be some expression of the difference between the average and the individual outcomes - it only exists relative to a population at the point in time when it is measured.
But, however you structure the selection process the people who get picked are the ones who’ve expended some luck (like, if you throw away half the resumes, but then pick the resumes out of the trashcan, the ones you plucked out are still the lucky ones).
I see two possible solutions.
1) Most people won’t be using up most of their luck on this one thing. I mean they’ve got their whole lifetime worth of luck, so you just need to make sure to pick people who still have plenty left. In other words, ageism and/or picking people who’ve never accomplished much are the solutions!
2) We assume working for the company is a lucky outcome. If you make the company a really unpleasant place to work, people will have to use their luck to dodge it. However, luck can only be evaluated against other possible outcomes. The plan, then, should be to set up a competitor (possibly a front) that is a really nice place to work. They’ll act as the “lucky outcome expenditure dump.”
> A person's total luck is constant over a lifetime
Ah yes, the much revered cosmological fairness constraint.
everyone knows luck is tied to the wealth-gravity and increases as the inverse distance to the density of matter. hut because its relative, everyone thinks they have the same luck when not observing others.
Even assuming that was genuinely how luck works, the conclusion does not follow from the premise because it’s obvious not everyone “starts with” the same amount of luck to spend.
But assuming a random draw, you're more likely to select people with higher luck.
assuming luck is spendable
This is not at all how probability works. Luck is not a resource one spends. If you flip heads 500 times in a row with a fair coin, the next coin flip is still 50/50.
Donald Trump disproves the fixed luck hypothesis (and the Karma hypothesis!)
Or more to the point. There are generally far more qualified applicants than job roles. That is training and education greatly expanded over the last couple of decades to produce more and more job seekers, whilst job creation hasn't really kept pace.
This hurts more than it should.
May be LLM resume screening is a symptom of a bigger problem - with tens of candidates per vacancy employers can screen resume badly and even throw half of the resumes away and still hire someone qualified.
That's really what it is, or at least what I've noticed.
Any position you have these days is inundated with applications. Most don't meet the qualifications (because in a lot of places say in the US you must apply to jobs to keep with benefits, regardless of what you are applying for), and for the remaining, you'll find that there will always be some that are all similarly qualified. Who do you hire for one position? It sometimes just comes down to luck.
AI doing the job of filtering I can't imagine making the process easier, and more applications are just going to get tossed because of it.
The author made this exact joke in TFA.