I care about the future, philosophy, politics and various things between. Maybe not the most EA of people.
a guy named josh
Karma: 26
Okay, I definitely see those concerns! Unknown legal risk—especially as it relates to in many cases hiring in a lot of different countries at the same time with potentially different laws seems like a good reason not to release scores.
For me personally getting a rejection vs getting a rejection and being told I had the lowest score among all applicants, probably wouldn’t make much of a difference—it might even save me time spent on future applications for similar positions. But on that maybe just releasing quarter percentiles would be a better less brutal alternative?
I think a general, short explainer of the scoring methodology used for a hiring round could/should be released to the applicants, if only for transparency’s sake. So, explainer + raw scores and no ranking might also be another alternative?
Maybe I am misguided in my idea that ‘this could be a low-time-cost way of making sure all applicants get a somewhat better sense of how good/bad their applications were.’ I have after all only ever been on the applicant side of things and it does seem the current system is working fine at generating good hires.
This is something I would be interested in seeing! A lot of EA orgs already have public info on their hiring process (at least in a structural sense). I’d be more curious about what happens under the hood, ‘scoring methodologies’ in particular.
Would love for orgs running large-scale hiring rounds (say 100+ applicants) to provide more feedback to their (rejected) applicants. Given that in most cases applicants are already being scored and ranked on their responses, maybe just tell them their scores, their overall ranking and what the next round cutoff would have been—say: prompt 1 = 15⁄20, prompt 2 = 17.5/20, rank = 156⁄900, cutoff for work test at 100.
Since this is already happening in the background (if my impression here is wrong please lmk), why not make the process more transparent and release scores—with what seems to be very little extra work required (beyond some initial automation).
I think scores would be good in the potentially time-saving way you outlined. I also think that having a more nuanced sense of how well my applications—or specific parts of it—were perceived/scored would be helpful.
My experience asking for qualitative feedback has been mixed—sometimes I have gotten just flat out ignored, at other times I have gotten the usual ‘no can do due to lack of operational capacity’ and some times I have actually gotten valuable personal feedback.
My idea is that there has to be a way to make some feedback beyond yes/no automatically available to all applicants. Maybe simply being told one is a particularly strong applicant and should reapply or apply to similar roles is good (and kind) enough.