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I've always been surprised how little disruption there has been in the field of corporate hiring. As other people have mentioned, many employers use a college

by pshin45 14y ago

I've always been surprised how little disruption there has been in the field of corporate hiring. As other people have mentioned, many employers use a college degree as a rough proxy for intelligence and/or work ethic, but how good is it really? Can't we do better? "Moneyball" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball) is a great book about the statistical revolution that took place in major league baseball, and shows us how advanced analytics enabled one team to go beyond rough proxies and subjective judgments to successfully sign players who were highly productive but undervalued by other teams. Assuming sports is just a simplified version of real life, why hasn't a similar data-driven revolution happened yet in business hiring? Or does the status quo work "well enough"? While we're at it, I guess we could also pose the question of how favorably (or not) YC's own application process compares to that of most colleges and corporations.

michaelochurch 14y ago
I like this idea, but I don't think you can Moneyball corporate hiring very easily. Professional athleticism is a direct meritocracy. If you hire better players, you win more games and make more money, and you see the effects immediately. In the corporate arena, there's no direct feedback and the meritocracy, to the degree that it exists, is much murkier. It takes years before you learn that you've hired an incompetent executive and, by that time, the damage is done. For a concrete example: the owner of a baseball team would almost never put his 300-pound, incapable cousin on the team as a personal favor. It would ruin the performance of the team and destroy his business. Yet VC-funded startups are frequently pressured to hire the VC's underachieving friends into executive roles. The people who are in authority to allocate executive positions have learned that there's more personal benefit in treating these positions as favors to be traded than by filling them with the most qualified people, so they choose the former (and always will). With Moneyball, we're talking about direct-production roles where performance is visible and it matters. The problem with executive hiring is that those are value-capturing roles that occasionally involve production.
emiliobumachar 14y ago
Measuring one's individual performance is a lot harder in business than baseball.

by pshin45 14y ago

michaelochurch 14y ago

I like this idea, but I don't think you can Moneyball corporate hiring very easily. Professional athleticism is a direct meritocracy. If you hire better players, you win more games and make more money, and you see the effects immediately. In the corporate arena, there's no direct feedback and the meritocracy, to the degree that it exists, is much murkier. It takes years before you learn that you've hired an incompetent executive and, by that time, the damage is done. For a concrete example: the owner of a baseball team would almost never put his 300-pound, incapable cousin on the team as a personal favor. It would ruin the performance of the team and destroy his business. Yet VC-funded startups are frequently pressured to hire the VC's underachieving friends into executive roles. The people who are in authority to allocate executive positions have learned that there's more personal benefit in treating these positions as favors to be traded than by filling them with the most qualified people, so they choose the former (and always will). With Moneyball, we're talking about direct-production roles where performance is visible and it matters. The problem with executive hiring is that those are value-capturing roles that occasionally involve production.

emiliobumachar 14y ago

Measuring one's individual performance is a lot harder in business than baseball.