Screening programmers is different than screening other employees, and we learned that the hard way. First, you will almost always want to hire an already good programmer. Why not hire an average one and then train them up? Years of experience and training don’t guarantee that somebody will become a great programmer. The large majority… Read the full article

TLDR: Data from two small software vendors shows that conversion rates for direct software sales differ between countries by two orders of magnitude. For each thousand new website visitors, the top group of countries had 9.14 paying customers, while the bottom group had only 0.19 paying customers. Both companies used in this research share some… Read the full article

One thing makes my work life miserable. In some domains of knowledge people acknowledge domain difficulty and seek expertise. Nobody tells rocket scientists how to build rockets. Pre-employment screening is, on other hand, similar to politics. Everybody thinks they would be the greatest president ever, although they have zero qualifications for it. Similarly, every tech… Read the full article

I love cheat sheets. Although theory of testing and theory of education are topics for two PhDs, there is a cheat I can explain in 15 minutes which is going to make you better in both. The “cheat” answers a simple question: how do you decide if a question or an education unit is good?… Read the full article

In the previous blog post I explained that some applicant screening methods are basically useless, and some, like work-sample tests, knowledge tests, general mental ability (GMA), and structured interviews really work. But, we concluded that: No single method of screening has high enough validity to be used exclusively, so it is necessary to combine multiple… Read the full article

This excerpt from the book explains why most screening methods are based on fake science, and lists methods which have proven predictive validity. Since we’re all biased and we use incorrect proxies, why not just outsource hiring to experts or recruitment agencies? After all, they’ve been screening people for many years, so they must know… Read the full article

In the Internet age, four years is a long, long time. So many things have happened since we released TestDome in February 2014, that I have a hard time believing our baby is only four years old. For curious minds, I will tell how it came to be and what the first version looked like…. Read the full article