Gladwell on Hiring

Just watched this video of a talk by Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink. He’s a good speaker, so if you have a half-hour to kill, it’s well worth watching. If you don’t have half an hour, let me try to sum it up for you in a couple of minutes.

He’s talking about what he calls the “Mismatch Problem”. It’s our inability in the hiring process to accurately predict how well someone will do at that job. There’s a mismatch between the abilities that the evaluation criteria measure and those that are evidently needed in the actual performance of that job.

He starts with examples from professional sports of how poorly the pre-draft screening tests correlate with later performance. Many of the best players in professional hockey, basketball, and football got really low screening scores. Those with the best screening scores are not guaranteed to even do well. It’s not a good predictor.

He also has examples from teaching and law. Teacher performance - how much their students improve on standardized tests - doesn’t correlate at all with college degrees or advanced certification. This says not only that we’re bad at picking good teachers, but also that our system for training them isn’t working, that it’s not teaching them how to be effective. Whatever they are being taught may be necessary, but it’s not sufficient. Not obvious, but kind of intuitive in hindsight. Teaching is not about how well you’ve learned something, but how well you can explain it to someone else. It’s also about motivating kids.

It also turns out that law school entrance requirements don’t correlate to professional success. The University of Michigan law school created a very aggressive affirmative action program, with much lower admission standards for minority students. Years later they did a study, and those students did every bit as well in their professional careers. The admission standards they used to screen the other students were effectively arbitrary.

So why do we have this problem? Two reasons. One comes from our desire for certainty. We choose criteria that are clear, objective, and measurable. What we don’t do is validate that they actually correlate to success. We intuit that more education should make you a better teacher, or that you need to be IQ-test-smart to be a good quarterback. These seem like reasonable assumptions, but the facts don’t bear them out. We end up like that guy in the old joke, who’s looking for his keys under the lamppost because the light is better there. To be fair, that validation is difficult. It’s usually years before you can evaluate professional success, and it’s hard to come up with objective measures of it that aren’t equally simplistic. It’s also hard to collect a statistically significant set of data.

The other reason is the increasing sophistication of jobs. Since world war II, we’ve shifted from an agricultural and industrial economy to one based on services and information. Our educational system hasn’t really caught up. We have more people in professions based on advanced knowledge, critical reasoning, and nuanced judgement. Even older professions are becoming more sophisticated. A hundred years ago, police work was mostly about wrestling with drunks. Now it’s a mix of multicultural conflict resolution and criminal counter-intelligence work.

Gladwell points out that we have this problem, but he doesn’t have any prescription for fixing it. I think it argues for some sort of apprenticeship system. I’ll have more to say on this later, but the core of the idea is a better integration of work experience into education. The other part of the solution is to embrace detailed subjective evaluation. Accept that simple, objective tests can’t capture the qualifications you need for complex and sophisticated work. Ditch the 1 to 5 scale. Get written evaluations, call references. Learn to ask probing questions and assemble multiple perspectives.