>So then by your own admission they’re not hiring the best due to this heuristic. Picking up on your use of the word heuristic, "hiring the best" is very much

>So then by your own admission they’re not hiring the best due to this heuristic. Picking up on your use of the word heuristic, "hiring the best" is very much an optimization problem. Specifically, there's a signal detection problem inherent to hiring in which you want to maximize your hits (selecting the best candidates) while minimizing your false alarms (hiring someone who turns out to be a bad candidate). There's another layer to this optimization problem, which is that you want to minimize costs, both in time and in money. As such, there are bound to be many heuristics that are close-to-optimal. I don't know whether excluding people with a background in finance is one of them (in fact, I suspect it's not), but the use of such a heuristic is not prima facie absurd. In fact, using (good) heuristics in hiring is a feature, not a bug. The problem here is that the heuristic is (I think) bad.