Hire like Google? For most companies, that's a bad idea

Los Angeles Times ^ | 03/10/2014 | Christopher Chabris and Jonathan Wai

[SeekAndFind]

The computer giant can afford to abandon traditional measures of intelligence. Most companies can't.

Laszlo Bock, the head of human resources at Google, made quite a splash with his announcement last year that the technology firm has changed the way it hires people. Gone are the brainteaser-style interview questions that so many candidates abhorred. But also gone, it would seem, is any concern with discovering how smart applicants really are.

"GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless.... We found that they don't predict anything," Bock told the New York Times.

Let's take Bock at his word and assume that the data-obsessed firm has crunched the numbers rigorously and found that the test scores of the people it hires really don't predict how well they perform once they are on the job. If Google ranked its new hires by their SAT scores, and found that those in the bottom 10% of the list performed just as well as those in the top 10%, would it mean that traditional measures of intelligence are useless in the business world?

[willyd]

It is called the Dunning Krueger effect... pretty interesting stuff.