TL;DR My client is paying top dollar for enterprise licenses for a platform that their own policies prevent people from using.
My enterprise client has a few open roles for developers so we’ve been asked to interview candidates. After the first batch of resumes we decided that we needed to do some pre-screening because the agencies certainly were not.
I reached out to the client’s recruiting department to ask about getting access to a technical screening platform like CoderPad, Codility, or HackerRank.
The conversations that followed sound like an episode of The Office.
The client’s recruiter said they have licenses to Codility and that they’d be happily walk me through the onboarding process but before they could do that, they’d need to discuss how the platform was to be used. A little baffled, I agreed to have the chat, check the box, and get our hiring pipeline flowing.
“Codility has been approved for limited use cases. The company is worried about being accused of bias in their hiring process so there are some restrictions.”
These are the restrictions:
- Codility’s live coding interview feature is not approved
- Codility cannot be used to screen candidates
- Candidates must consent in writing to completing a Codility test
- Codility can only be used to hire for full-time positions
The company has roles for temporary contractors not full-time employees. Both types of workers are granted the same access to internal systems once they’re onboarded, and both roles write code. Bad or malicious code has the same impact regardless of the employment type.
I was told that the live coding interview feature is not approved because it relies on browser plugins that have not (yet?) been approved by the company’s internal Application Security team. I can understand that but maybe they should have chosen a complaint platform.
Points 2 and 3 need additional explanation.
The candidate must consent in writing to sitting a Codility test.
“What if they decline?”, I asked.
“Then they advance to the next round”, was the response.
What?!? It’s a Fast Pass! As soon as the agencies figure this out, they’ll inform the candidates, nobody will take the test, and now we’re interviewing more unqualified candidates.
And if the candidate decides, for some reason, to subject themselves to the Codility test then we cannot decline to interview them based on the results of that test. The test results are “just another data point for consideration” during the hiring process.
Because the company doesn’t want to appear biased.
In my opinion, eliminating candidates for a developer position because they failed to code a working FizzBuzz implementation is not bias - it’s an impartial skills assessment. It’s literally the opposite of bias. I can’t think of a more unbiased approach to qualifying candidates for technical roles.