I have done a decent amount of HR work focused on hiring over the past several years, as well as a lot of reading regarding how to do hiring well. While recruiting for a fellowship isn’t completely identical to hiring an employee, there are enough of similarities to justify learning.
I can’t say I am surprised that a “hiring” process like the one described here failed to properly filter/select best fit candidates. Finding the right people for for a job (or in this case a fellowship) can be really difficult. Not difficult in a way that requires for time or effort, but difficult in the way of many of the more fuzzy and ambiguous things in life: if you are very careful and use best practices, then your “accuracy rate” is still somewhere between 50% and 90%. However, I am very happy to see the willingness to analyze data and reveal flawed processes. That suggests that you are already on the right path. A+ for that. You seem to be far beyond where I was when I was your age.
I have done a decent amount of HR work focused on hiring over the past several years, as well as a lot of reading regarding how to do hiring well. While recruiting for a fellowship isn’t completely identical to hiring an employee, there are enough of similarities to justify learning.
I can’t say I am surprised that a “hiring” process like the one described here failed to properly filter/select best fit candidates. Finding the right people for for a job (or in this case a fellowship) can be really difficult. Not difficult in a way that requires for time or effort, but difficult in the way of many of the more fuzzy and ambiguous things in life: if you are very careful and use best practices, then your “accuracy rate” is still somewhere between 50% and 90%. However, I am very happy to see the willingness to analyze data and reveal flawed processes. That suggests that you are already on the right path. A+ for that. You seem to be far beyond where I was when I was your age.
I encourage you to improve your “hiring” process. Although there are a dozen different books that you could read, the book Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead to be a very digestible summary of easy-to-adopt ideas, and is a good starting point. If you want a condensed version, you can take a look at the re:work hiring guides, and an even more condensed version would be this:
clarify before you start interviewing what the criteria and minimum standards are
use a written rubric
use structured interviews
use different people to conduct interviews and to assign scores
Good luck!