Interesting read in Biz Week re: how companies are using creative methods recruiting to land talent.
Think next generation “Moneyball”.
A new era of talent hunting has begun.
It’s happening not only at high-tech companies such as Facebook, but also at Army bases, ad agencies, investment banks, Hollywood studies, corporate boardrooms, college admissions offices, and even at nanny agencies.
In all these fields, experts don’t just sort résumés. They pick people and build teams in a profoundly different way.
Traditional measures of past achievement, such as test scores and academic degrees, are losing power, and companies are getting better at looking for those future superstars who deliver many times the value of someone who is merely good.
Some examples:
Facebook publishes gnarly programming challenges and invites engineers anywhere to solve them.
Not the superficial brainteasers that some companies used, like estimating the number of piano tuners in Chicago.
Instead, Facebook’s website issues multi-hour tests of coding prowess.
Google concluded that it had been looking at résumés far too narrowly.
The company had started out by focusing inordinately on candidates’ education, grade-point averages, and even SAT scores.
They were missing candidates:
- Whose grades had faltered because they were working 30 hours a week to pay for college
- Highly competitive people who had chased an athletic dream when they were younger — and now were applying that same relentless energy to professional goals
- People who weren’t great students but had been running businesses, tutoring, volunteering, and otherwise being civic leaders from their teenage days onward.
Now at Google, several dozen factors — including tidbits like the age when a recruit got into computers — are used to help predict candidates’ chances.
And, they spend time looking at resumes “upside down.” … Now, they start with “interest” to if some special, rare attribute could point the way to greatness.
Corporate directors are also taking fresh looks at the process of picking chief executive officers.
Recent academic studies show that charisma and affability may be overrated as traits that lead to CEO success.
Efficiency, problem-solving, and hard-nosed accountability appear to be more valuable.
Full article is worth browsing.
The Homa Files 