Beware of New Hiring Models
Eddie Yoon in the HBR suggests that it’s inefficient to vet applicants for a new position by combing through each one’s résumé. He recommends a new hiring model, which can be summarized like this:
- Look at successful projects and business innovations,
- determine who was involved and what their role was, and
- only then look at the skills and abilities of the individual.
Thought-provoking, but there’s are a few problems with this. Firstly, aside from a few newsworthy successes at high profile companies, how could anyone be aware of these successes? How could anyone know enough about of all the projects at each of the many thousands of companies out there to judge which are outstandingly successful? Even if you had the information, how many innovations only demonstrate their value years after the fact, long after the participants are scattered and pursuing different lines?
Furthermore, how could any outsider possibly know with confidence who the key players were and what they contributed? The author says he’s found team members have memories like elephants; but speaking of elephants, remember the parable of blind men and the elephant. Everyone’s view of a project is vastly different; and even if everyone can agree it was successful, insiders are going to have a very different, and biased, impression of the sources of success.
Yoon has a notion of a social network reporting system to address these shortcomings. So okay, we’re to get our hiring data from Facebook or LinkedIn. Let’s suppose you could obtain accurate, complete and somewhat reliable information this way. It would take extensive and detailed detective work to assemble any kind of objective picture of a project. How could you possibly do so for enough projects to drive a business model? It sounds a lot easier to read three hundred résumés.
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