Losing Track Of How Your System Works
The ability to automate, dig deep, pre-sort, evaluate, chew, swallow, and spit out decisions without really understanding the implications or assumptions hard-wired in the set-up can be a rather large problem. A recent Wall Street Journal article by David Wessel about the use (overuse?) of software to screen job candidates got me to thinking about the costs of overly picky employment systems. What’s the problem with that? So concerned with weeding out false positives, false negatives are likely going through the roof. False postives cost a firm money in lost productivity and the cost of replacing a failed hire. I worry more about false negatives. What’s the cost of a false negative? The opportunity cost of not hiring someone who would have been stellar. Non-conformists, radical thinkers, creative types often don’t fit the jobs they excel in, but often are exactly the kind of thinking that invigorates corporate process. Applicants … Continue reading