[movax]

Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate noted for his work in judgment and decision making, stated in an interview earlier this year that interviews are terrible at choosing the best candidates. Unfortunately, he didn’t articulate alternatives.

[apple4ever]

The alternative is certainly the big problem.

The other big problem is not even giving an interview to a great candidate based on things like a resume and possible a cover letter.

[SeanAppleby]

I feel like this is the much more complicated and secretly much worse problem, not just for businesses, but for society as a whole.

We lean on heuristics like pedigree, both corporate, which is reflexive on having already past a hiring filter before, and academic, which is ludicrously expensive, both in time and money, is itself largely reflexive on having been born into high socioeconomic status, and seems to have dubious value outside of providing an easily digestible signal to get past these filters constructed in the labor market.

Maybe if we could design a better interview system and more accurate and precise cheap signals for who to throw into that (expensive to scale) pipeline, we could save young people from having to start their lives 4 years later and behind the starting line, reaping the productivity gains of the labor market gaining those extra 4 years and a wider pool of talent, while also creating more socioeconomic mobility spread more widely across society.