Smart Hiring

An excerpt from The Atlantic - 

The Science of Smart Hiring

Finding great new workers is hard. A little bit of empiricism can help.

Hiring is hard. General managers know it. Startup founders know it. School principals and casting directors know it. But for readers who are none of those things, consider America’s most public hiring processes—aside from presidential elections, perhaps—which are sports drafts.

Every year, millions of Americans watch professional talent evaluators try to predict who will be the best future athletes in the NBA and NFL Drafts. Again and again, audiences get valuable lessons in the inability of experts to divine future talent. Scouts aren’t dumb. Overall, the first pick tends to be better than the tenth pick, and he tends to be better than 100th pick. But years after the draft, at least one squad almost always looks foolish. For every top five team that can’t believe it picked a Darko Milicic or Ryan Leaf, there is a top five team that can’t believe it missed a Stephen Curry or Tom Brady.

Hiring is hard for the same reason that dating is hard: Both sides are in the dark. "The fundamental economic problem in hiring is one of matching with costly search and bilateral asymmetric information,” Paul Oyer and Scott Schaefer write in "Personnel Economics.” In English, that means hiring is expensive, time-consuming, and inherently uncertain, because the hirer doesn't know what workers are the right fit, and the worker don’t know what hirers are the right fit.

http://www.theatlantic.com/author/derek-thompson/