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While this is an anecdotal take on the whole topic of selection, there is research out there that supports this (sort of). Meta data analysis from thousands of

While this is an anecdotal take on the whole topic of selection, there is research out there that supports this (sort of). Meta data analysis from thousands of studies shows that there is essentially 0 correlation between where someone went to school (or their GPA) and how well they perform on the job once hired. See https://skitch.com/andyparkinson/reqfj/emotional-intelligence-view-360-presentation https://skitch.com/andyparkinson/reqfj/emotional-intelligenc... for a table of methods of selection and their respective validities. As you can see, the best thing you can do pre-hire is to have someone complete a work-simulation. If you're hiring a mechanic to fix transmissions, give them a broken transmission and a set time period to fix it. If you're hiring a rails developer, give them a small project that takes a few hours to do and see what happens. It is amazing how much you'll learn about that person in those few hours. You'll see how he codes, communicates, etc. The more you can try before you commit the better. Here's a simple example... When we hire front-end developers, we have a standard PSD file that we hand applicants and give them 2 hours to slice using tableless html/css. No matter how much I fall in love someone when I interview them, the results of this simple exercise will always sober me up (or throw me head over heals). Its gotten to the point where I don't even want to spend more than a few minutes talking front-end developers until I see the results of this exercise. Its not perfect. The correlation between results and success is still very weak, but its the best we have.

kenjackson 16y ago
Meta data analysis from thousands of studies shows that there is essentially 0 correlation between where someone went to school (or their GPA) and how well they perform on the job once hired The data may say that, but it likely omits a lot. For example, if I have a candidate with straight A's from MIT, but I hire someone else who had a 1.2 from Podunk State instead, I supsect that the candidate from Podunk State had some other qualification that offset their school and GPA. This is the same effect that Google sees when their best employees don't ace their interview loop. They actually have one person give them a very low score. This tends to correlate to high performers, because it meant that someone else fought for this candidate, which is a signal of something else compelling about the candidate. To put it another way, I suspect that if you randomly selected straight A students from MIT versus D students from local community college, the MIT students will outperform for a wide variety of professional jobs.
btilly 16y ago
The numbers in your study seem fishy to me. For example IQ is strongly correlated with where you went to school, so how can one have a positive correlation and the other have none? I strongly suspect that those are the correlation coefficients from a linear regression model. That would make a lot of sense to me. In that case the numbers are saying that once you know other factors, such as someone's IQ and work history, there is no useful additional information to be gained from where they want to school and their GPA. However GPA and where you went to school would still have a correlation with job performance.

kenjackson 16y ago

Meta data analysis from thousands of studies shows that there is essentially 0 correlation between where someone went to school (or their GPA) and how well they perform on the job once hired The data may say that, but it likely omits a lot. For example, if I have a candidate with straight A's from MIT, but I hire someone else who had a 1.2 from Podunk State instead, I supsect that the candidate from Podunk State had some other qualification that offset their school and GPA. This is the same effect that Google sees when their best employees don't ace their interview loop. They actually have one person give them a very low score. This tends to correlate to high performers, because it meant that someone else fought for this candidate, which is a signal of something else compelling about the candidate. To put it another way, I suspect that if you randomly selected straight A students from MIT versus D students from local community college, the MIT students will outperform for a wide variety of professional jobs.

btilly 16y ago

The numbers in your study seem fishy to me. For example IQ is strongly correlated with where you went to school, so how can one have a positive correlation and the other have none? I strongly suspect that those are the correlation coefficients from a linear regression model. That would make a lot of sense to me. In that case the numbers are saying that once you know other factors, such as someone's IQ and work history, there is no useful additional information to be gained from where they want to school and their GPA. However GPA and where you went to school would still have a correlation with job performance.