BY JEREMY KAHN January 19, 2021
The journalist Malcolm Gladwell, on his podcast, “Revisionist History,” devoted a recent episode to his theory of “hiring nihilism.” It is Gladwell’s belief that people are so bad at predicting who will perform well at a given role—especially based on traditional screening criteria such as CVs and candidate interviews—that one should simply concede that all hiring is essentially arbitrary. Gladwell explained, when it came time to find a new assistant or hiring an accountant, he did so in explicitly arbitrary ways—picking whoever an acquaintance recommended or someone he met on the street, with only the most cursory of face-to-face conversation. Why waste time on a process that would ultimately produce a result no better than throwing darts?
Source: Fortune
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