Thanks for mentioning Tyler Cowen / Daniel Gross’s Talent.
I’m upvoting this and commenting so that it gets high in the comments and so that there is an increased possibility of readers seeing it. While I haven’t yet read the book Talent, it is on my to read list and it seems very relevant. (it is now a few ranks higher up on my to read list as a result of more than one person mentioning it in the comments on this post!) I also want to read it so that I can evaluate their arguments myself and judge how much I should update my opinions on hiring as a result. At face value, I do think that a lot of the research on hiring has been done on roles that are fairly standardized. That makes it hard to apply some of this research if you are hiring one operations manager at a small company, and the nature of the operations manager job is also very fluid.
As a more general thought, one of the challenges/frustrations I feel with a lot of social science, and especially a lot of evidence-based management is that there seems to be so much variation depending on context, such as one thing working well for low-skill jobs and another thing working well for more complex jobs. I really wish that there were fewer complicating and confounding factors in this kind of stuff. 🤦♂️
Thanks for mentioning Tyler Cowen / Daniel Gross’s Talent.
I’m upvoting this and commenting so that it gets high in the comments and so that there is an increased possibility of readers seeing it. While I haven’t yet read the book Talent, it is on my to read list and it seems very relevant. (it is now a few ranks higher up on my to read list as a result of more than one person mentioning it in the comments on this post!) I also want to read it so that I can evaluate their arguments myself and judge how much I should update my opinions on hiring as a result. At face value, I do think that a lot of the research on hiring has been done on roles that are fairly standardized. That makes it hard to apply some of this research if you are hiring one operations manager at a small company, and the nature of the operations manager job is also very fluid.
As a more general thought, one of the challenges/frustrations I feel with a lot of social science, and especially a lot of evidence-based management is that there seems to be so much variation depending on context, such as one thing working well for low-skill jobs and another thing working well for more complex jobs. I really wish that there were fewer complicating and confounding factors in this kind of stuff. 🤦♂️