One of my jobs at work is to interview folks. And so, as my regular readers know, I am a major fan of predictive analysis of job skills.
Indeed, I thought we had pretty good evidence suggesting that the order of predictive strength went:
Self-efficacy > Delayed Gratification > Conscientiousness > IQ > most other stuff, with experience being also a major factor.
Imagine my surprise when I read instead this list (HT: Kling) reporting on a meta-analysis of job success predictivity.
IQ > Work Sample > Integrity(tests) > Conscientiousness > Structured Interview > Unstructured interview >>>> reference checks > years of experience >>> years of education > interests > graphology > age.
Hilarious....handwriting analysis is nearly as impactful as years of education.
Thoughts:
I suppose then it's good that I've been pushing work-samples and more structured interviews as a prereq for IT employment at my company, and making that an integral part of the interviewing process I run.
It's also good that I am a damn fine estimator of IQ, from simple conversation.
However, it seems to demolish my position that Practice/Experience >>> other stuff. I reserve here the right to suggest that skills in many jobs are sufficiently narrow that the measures of years of experience SUCK. On the other hand, this fits well with the widely studied feature of Progammers, for whom there is a 10x variation between efficiency of a top 10% programmer and a bottom 10% programmer, with the same amount of experience. I had thought this wouldn't be as true of other occupations.
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1 comment:
Aretae, I know this is a way old post, but it is one of the rare ones where I have something to say.
I’ve done a lot interviews for both Microsoft and Amazon, hundreds at each company, and the interview questions I found worked the best involved problem solving in a novel space for the candidate. For non-coder interviews (mostly program management or management) I watched for how people approached the problem. Did they explore? Did they find the problem fascinating? Could they see the power flows involved? How did they go about solving the problem? Could they guess the consequences of their actions? Were they confident about getting stuck into the depths of the problem? My interviews went from totally useless to mildly useful, but better than most others.
Interviews are always going to be weak indicators of a multi-year employment stint, but sometimes you interview folk who have a combination of demonstrated skill and confidence that you know they’re going to be fine without much actual proof. I’m thinking there’s some crossover with that self-efficacy concept I’ve been reading about here. [BTW I hate the name, it seems a corruption of the word ’efficacy’]
My other thought on this is that self-efficacy seems to have a lot in common with leadership. If someone has some skill at solving a problem, but demonstrates that they are confident in their abilities, I trust in them more.
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