Hacker News Reader

“In economic terms, the gains from increasing the validity of hiring methods can amount over time to literally millions of dollars,” writes Schmidt regarding the importance of valid assessment methods. “However, this can be viewed from the opposite point of view: By using selection methods with low validity, an organization can lose millions of dollars in reduced production. In a competitive world, these organizations are unnecessarily creating a competitive disadvantage for themselves. By adopting more valid hiring procedures, they could turn this competitive disadvantage into a competitive advantage.”

The problem is that this misunderstands the purpose of the hiring process. The purpose of the hiring process is to get people who are qualified, while signalling that your company hires good people, and staying out of legal trouble along the way.

I'm not sure I agree that an organization can gain "millions of dollars" by fine-tuning its hiring processes to the nth degree. While I absolutely agree that there are skill differences between programmers, I contend that the economic differences attributable to skill between programmers are dwarfed by the economic differences between any automation and no automation. Simply put, having a terrible programmer automate your business processes today is far better than sifting candidates to find the perfect programmer to automate your business process two years from now. Hiring is about satisficing, not optimizing.

View on HN