I wish I had thoughts that could further this comment, right now they are failing me though
tangentially related thoughts http://www.xoxohth.com/thread.php?forum_id=2&thread_id=2...
I think people are going to be averse to having their minute-by-minute activity mined for any purpose, so I don't see that as a recruiting angle. What I do think is that there's more signal in a person's willingness to learn later in life rather than at age 20 when it's expected. I'm more impressed by the 37-year-old who picked up a machine learning course or textbook on his own and, in a year, picked up a respectable working knowledge of it. Whether he went to college is immaterial, at that point.
but that's not so different from alot of real world activity, showing face time at work, being 5 minutes early for meetings, that sort of thing
those sorts of little things go into your real world reputation, ie do you feel good about recommending someone for a job that's always 5 minutes late? (superficial as that may be)
part of that is why personal recommendations carry the weight they do
if taking classes with minute by minute monitoring were shown to correlated with better chances a monetary reward at the end (x% gets a job, x+y% gets a job with monitoring), that'd change the calculus for alot of people
admittedly, the branding for that is pretty weak