“avoid unstructured interviews, train your interviewers to do structured interviews”
I suggest reading Tyler Cowen / Daniel Gross’s Talent. They argue structured interviews might be fine for low-skill, standard jobs; but for “creative spark”, high impact hires and, or, talent then the meta/challenging/quirky interview—which they talk about is superior.
They argue most of the academic research focused on low skill, standard jobs so not apply to “elite” or any creative spark type of job.
There is much much more—and would summarise more if interested, but it pretty much runs counter to many of your points, but might be aimed at a different thing. That said, I think many EA hires are probably of the Cowen/Gross type.
You might be right in your points, but I found Cowen/Gross interesting. Be well and thanks for writing.
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. 🤦♂️
For a counterpoint to much of this:
“avoid unstructured interviews, train your interviewers to do structured interviews”
I suggest reading Tyler Cowen / Daniel Gross’s Talent. They argue structured interviews might be fine for low-skill, standard jobs; but for “creative spark”, high impact hires and, or, talent then the meta/challenging/quirky interview—which they talk about is superior.
They argue most of the academic research focused on low skill, standard jobs so not apply to “elite” or any creative spark type of job.
There is much much more—and would summarise more if interested, but it pretty much runs counter to many of your points, but might be aimed at a different thing. That said, I think many EA hires are probably of the Cowen/Gross type.
You might be right in your points, but I found Cowen/Gross interesting. Be well and thanks for writing.
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. 🤦♂️