Blind hiring is how some organizations are trying to fix the hiring process, which everyone knows, and everyone keeps telling us, is broken. The idea is that job applicants are assessed on how they perform at a small representative task, rather than how expensive their education was or who their daddy knows. The task assessors (who are usually ordinary members of the employer’s staff) are not allowed to know anything about the applicant — gender, race, qualifications etc. All this is designed to create a level playing field. Sounds kinda great, but I can already hear cries of ‘foul’ from the dinosaurs out there, who worked their butts off for that 4.0+ GPA and expect it to give them a distinct advantage.
This is the story of my recent experience as a blind hiring job applicant. Some irrelevant details have been changed to disguise the identity of the hiring company, which remains a fundamentally awesome organization, and I don’t want to be the source of too many spoilers. Sure, I have some criticisms — but they’re criticisms of a particular form of blind hiring, not the company. I will divulge one spoiler up front, though. I withdrew from the process — very late in the process — before discovering if I had been successful.
AIDA
The hiring organization had left a few well-placed snares around in the places people like me lurk on the internet. I’m a tech writer looking for some kind of role where I get to write code, and write about writing code, and help people get to grips with all that, so you could probably guess where I spent my time if our orbits were anything similar. Right now, I’m writing a 200-page Installation Guide for Product X version y.z, and then starting again for Product A, version b.c. Guys, I’ve had it with the installation guides already!
There’s an acronym — AIDA — that describes how to write compelling ads. When it’s done right, even knowing the AIDA secret doesn’t make you immune, and boy did these folks do it right. Attention — Interest — Desire — Action. By the time I’d mainlined this four-chord riff, I was pumped for Action!
Action!
Action, it turned out, was to provide them with a short story about dangerous sexual practices. It wasn’t really, of course — I’m just trying to use my elite SEO skills to perplex future casual visitors to this web page, at the same time as protecting my sources. So I wrote the best goddamn short story about dangerous sexual practices I could. Look deep into my eyes. Dangerous. Sexual. Practices. Imagine my delight when I received an email by return. I could hardly wait as I read their reply: “We appreciate that you took the time to share a short story request. A light request, but it helps to prime the nature of our endeavors!”. You know, if I didn’t know better, I might form the mistaken impression that their reply was autogenerated, and they hadn’t actually read every searing, passionate word of my story about dangerous sexual practices.
This was cool, and sure, it seemed I was on to the next stage. But I kinda bristled at that word ‘light’. A ‘light’ request. It hadn’t seemed ‘light’ to me as I spent 4 hours after an already tiring day summoning emotion for their titillation. For them, it appeared light enough to only merit a boilerplate response. At the very least, isn’t someone going to actually, you know, read it and give me a B+ for effort? And while we’re at it, what’s all this stuff about ‘priming the nature of our endeavors’? The words are almost Pythonesque. How is it that asking me to write a short story is going to ‘prime the nature of their endeavors’ any more than, say, a visit to their web site?
By this time, and although I’m through to the next stage, it’s pretty obvious that the short story competition is a piece of make-work, and cannot have any bearing on how I might perform in the real job (… other, that is, than to provide a measure of how unquestioningly compliant I am). Arguably, it presents a small, qualifying hoop through which all candidates are filtered — a sort of motivation test — but a whole short story that doesn’t get read? Why not a haiku? Or how about a limerick?
The veil is beginning to slip, but in my hypnotic infatuation with the process, I am blind, and, Alice-like, fall deeper into their rabbithole.
More action!
Next, the remaining parts of the organizational foreplay plan become clear. I am to build a little doohickey of my choice. A tech demo, to demonstrate, it seems, that I can build little doohickeys, thereby validating my claim to be a reasonably technical tech writer. Finally, I am encouraged to write a blog entry about said doohickey. Better get to work …
… time passes. About 2 days, on and off, over a weekend. I have a family. As luck would have it, I also had to perform some (small-scale but unexpected) work-related tasks during the weekend.
My tech demo is taking shape. I use the opportunity to do a little learning and build it in an unfamiliar JavaScript framework.
… more time passes. About 1 more day. I have a family.
My blog entry takes shape. I write it in Markdown.
I press ‘Submit’ and sit back, having quite enjoyed the creative process, except for the residual guilt of having disenfranchised my entire family for a few days.
Contact
Gee, they liked my stuff! My work samples were ‘excellent’ and they were ‘delighted’ to offer me the chance to spend a (paid) day with the team in one of their chatrooms. The day would involve:
- Seeing how I jived with the team
- Providing commentary on a piece of writing I’d never seen
- Writing — or starting to write — a new piece on a topic to be decided after a little ducking and jiving.
I think I jived OK with the team — they were very pleasant people. We shot the breeze and chewed the cud. I did struggle to garner any real, warts-and-all feedback about life at Company X. Life was just ‘Great!’ it seemed, decorated with virtuoso-level emojis expressing joy and rapture. God help us when we all have to use VR chatrooms — the air will be fizzing in a blizzard of bluebirds and love-hearts.
I duly compiled my feedback on their selected piece of writing. I then began to sense that my interactions were being compared to an idealized set of behaviors that they deemed essential to do the job. Let’s call him Bob — Bob came forward with lots of little hints as to what, perhaps, I should think of doing next. No mention was made of the (apparently excellent) 3 days work I’d already completed, just that maybe it was time to focus on ‘A’ or ‘B’. ‘A’ turned out to be working through my feedback with the right person, which started well, before s/he had to leave the chatroom for something urgent.
‘B’ involved channeling enough inspiration to come up with an angle for my next piece of new writing. Craftily, I reasoned that if they were paying me for the day, they were effectively my ‘clients’ — and it would be great if I could begin something they’d derive actual value from. Creativity and constraints are natural bedfellows. Bob didn’t like this idea and suggested I thought of something else. So I came up with a couple more and we eventually settled on a topic. It wasn’t received with universal applause, but I settled down to it.
By now, the shadows were drawing in and we bade our farewells — Bob said I could finish off my next piece of writing in my own time. Bless. He made a last attempt to ask me if there was anything else I wished to do before we said goodbye. Again, I had the impression that there was something I should be asking for, but clearly lacked the go-forward to come up with. I ended the day more irritated with Bob than I had any right to be. His inscrutable ways were a million miles away from the straightforward, job-role-related conversations I had anticipated.
I had a good night’s sleep and in the morning, sent Bob an email in which I withdrew my application.
Deconstruction
You have to be highly motivated to progress through blind hiring as a job applicant. In my case, the description of their organizational culture was very attractive and there were aspects of my candidacy (my age) that played well towards a blind hiring context. Certainly, I have experienced age-related prejudice in the past. So I was genuinely motivated when I started on the journey.
Of the three prepared samples of work, I only have quibbles with the short story. I know it was really a slight obstacle to deter the truly unmotivated, but it didn’t send a positive signal about how an organization values an applicant’s time.
The tech demo and blog entry — took me quite a long time but were absolutely on message for the kind of role I applied for.
For me, things started to smell a little iffy when I joined their chatroom. Up until then, I’d been in demonstration mode — I did the best job I could within the constraints of time and real life. In the chatroom sessions, I rather expected them to begin to sell the role to me. This never happened, and I was still being assessed, this time against an undisclosed set of behaviors/attributes.
Let’s face it, we have to be pretty adaptable in today’s workplace. By which I mean, it’s quite common for new people to learn the behaviors and outlook that make a company successful. In technical writing, it pays to be especially adaptable. Do you think Agile, for example, was established for the benefit of tech writers? No. So the modus operandus of many tech writers, including me, is to adapt to an employer’s secret organizational sauce and come to a joint and productive understanding over a period of a few weeks or months. Ultimately, judging people by how they appear in chat on day 1 is judging the wrong person, because they aren’t yet the person they’ll be when they’ve acclimatized to your working methods.
I remain in awe of the company I didn’t get a job with, and the outstanding and talented team of writers already on board. I also remain optimistic for the future of blind hiring, and what it promises, once it ditches its creepiness. My advice to hirers is that at some stage, you should discard the secret-squirrel blinders of the blind hiring format and actually, you know, meet and have a conversation with the candidate in something approaching a naturalistic, whites-of-eyes encounter, whether it’s via Skype or in person. It can also make sense for both sides to agree on a contract/freelance relationship for the first few months, so that both can evaluate what happens when the honeymoon ends.
Would I go through this again? I’d rather rewrite the whole SAP product portfolio in brainfuck. That is, unless you have an (ideally, remote) opportunity for a cranky tech writer who speaks Java, JavaScript, Python, various dialects of XML and minors in dangerous sexual practices.
