3 ms·
When you hire en-masse, it's virtually impossible to test for quality. A lot of these large firms (and major US consultancies follow this too) wind up waving 1
by mathattack 13y ago
When you hire en-masse, it's virtually impossible to test for quality. A lot of these large firms (and major US consultancies follow this too) wind up waving 1000s of people in, and then relentlessly culling those who don't perform. The industry winds up with a lot of turnover too.
The strange thing about this system is that while individual people can underperform, if there's a lot of weeding out (let's say 1 of 5 makes manager, 1 of 25 makes partner) you can wind up with some exceptional people at the end. That's part of why the partners at many consulting firms can achieve so much relatively early in their careers.
Of course this type of arrangement requires a lot of process, and is better for well defined tasks without algorithmic complexity (say building a custom telecom billing system) but it does work in some places.