Big Data, Corporate Hiring, and the Declining Role of Education

Two interesting articles on corporate hiring point toward a future in which digital data of various kinds -- test scores, online profiles, work histories coded in particular ways -- will replace educational background, appearance, and skill at squash or golf as the main determinants of corporate hiring and promotion.

Tom Friedman's is called "How to Get a Job at Google" and it just summarizes a conversation he had with Laszlo Bock, Google's head of "people operations." Bock is dismissive of educational achievement:

G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict anything. . . . the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time — now as high as 14 percent on some teams.

Of course that means 90 percent of Google's employees have been to college, but Bock seems especially interested in those who haven't:

when you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people.

Instead of pondering resumes, Google is looking for ways to directly measure the attributes they are looking for: technical skill, intelligence, leadership, humility, a sense of ownership toward one's work. The last thing they care about, says Friedman, is experience.

To find out how Google and other companies are assessing these traits, we can turn to a long article by Don Peck in the Atlantic, "They're Watching You at Work." This treats all the different ways corporations are developing to assess the potential of new hires and measure the performance of employees. Peck spends some time ridiculing the approaches corporations have been taking to these things, running through all the data on how much better tall, attractive people do, how useless interviews are -- one study found that the candidates who do best are the ones who played the same sport as the interviewer -- and how little corporations actually know about who is doing well. The change began with huge employers of hourly workers, especially those whose work is easily monitored, like call centers. By tracking how well people are doing, these companies have built up huge data sets on performance, promotion, retention, and so on. These techniques are now being extended to professional employees, whose performance, work habits and so are increasingly monitored. New hires are evaluated by sophisticated tracking of their online habits and by video games that analyze how they make decisions and solve problems. The upshot is the same one pointed to by Bock, that college performance will matter less and less:

One of the tragedies of the modern economy is that because one’s college history is such a crucial signal in our labor market, perfectly able people who simply couldn’t sit still in a classroom at the age of 16, or who didn’t have their act together at 18, or who chose not to go to graduate school at 22, routinely get left behind for good. . . .

But this relationship is likely to loosen in the coming years. I spoke with managers at a lot of companies who are using advanced analytics to reevaluate and reshape their hiring, and nearly all of them told me that their research is leading them toward pools of candidates who didn’t attend college—for tech jobs, for high-end sales positions, for some managerial roles. In some limited cases, this is because their analytics revealed no benefit whatsoever to hiring people with college degrees; in other cases, and more often, it’s because they revealed signals that function far better than college history, and that allow companies to confidently hire workers with pedigrees not typically considered impressive or even desirable. Neil Rae, an executive at Transcom, told me that in looking to fill technical-support positions, his company is shifting its focus from college graduates to “kids living in their parents’ basement”—by which he meant smart young people who, for whatever reason, didn’t finish college but nevertheless taught themselves a lot about information technology.

As the proud parent of two basement-dwelling sons, perhaps I should be encouraged by this. I would be even more optimistic if I believed that these sorts of measurements would undermine the tyranny of handsome Ivy League grads with good backhands. Wouldn't it be great if people were really evaluated according to how good they are at their jobs? And yet there are also dangers here. I am especially creeped out by the use of online profiles. It may well be true that some measurement of how many social networks you belong to and how much you post and how much research you do online correlates better with job success than how you look in an interview. But is it really anybody's business? And aren't there bound to be people who for whatever reason have strange profiles but would still be strong candidates? Will people become afraid to join online Tea Party or anarchist groups if they are afraid this will mess up their job prospects? What does my online life say about my potential as an archaeologist?

It seems, though, that this is the future, however I feel about it.