by Charles Hugh Smith
OfTwoMinds.com
Previously
by Charles Hugh Smith: Tune
In, Turn On, Opt Out
Google has
concluded after some research that degrees, grades, GPA’s and more
are not predictive in hiring the best candidate.
Indeed, “Candidates’
past academic performance wasn’t predictive either, a stunning admission
for a company that’s notoriously stuffed to the gills with PhDs.
“Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and
G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just
a few years out of school,” Bock said. “We found that
they don’t predict anything.”
“In fact,
Bock said, Google is increasingly hiring candidates who have no
formal education, to the extent that you now see teams at the Chocolate
Factory where 14 per cent of the team members have no college background.”
The bottom
line, he said, is that Google’s earlier hiring practices simply
weren’t effective. When Google studied its employees’ performance
and compared it to how the same employees scored in interviews,
there was no correlation. “We found zero relationship,”
Bock said. “It’s a complete random mess.”
Since Google
is famously data-driven, I don’t think we can dismiss these conclusions
as outliers. Though it could be argued Google is a high-tech company
and therefore not a reliable mirror of the economy as a whole, I
think it is self-evident that Google is precisely the sort of company
that we’re telling college students they need a degree to work for.
Google found
academic success has little correlation with performance in the
workplace, and I suspect this is one result of higher education
being increasingly disconnected from what I term the emerging economy–the
parts of the economy that are growing and expanding, as opposed
to those that are shrinking or declining.
In other words,
if the ability to excel in the system of higher education does not
generate an ability to excel in the emerging economy, then something
is systemically wrong with higher education, which is supposed to
prepare students for employment in the real world.
Given the wide
acceptance of the correlation between high GPAs and future workplace
performance, there is a second-order consequence of Google’s insight:
the vast majority of corporate human resource (HR) departments are
actively hiring the wrong people for the wrong job, as they are
essentially randomly matching people and jobs.
I think this
disconnect between higher education and the emerging economy is
simply part of a systemic (and widening) disconnect between the
emerging economy and legacy systems designed for the society and
economy that existed 60 or 100 years ago.
That Google
is hiring more people without any degree suggests having a degree
is no longer a signifier of much value to employers such as Google.
We can speculate that people who learned on their own by following
Emerson’s mandate to “Do the thing and you shall have the power”
may have more applicable (i.e. useful) experience as a result of
their self-learning than people who submitted to four years of college.
Is there value
in a general education? Of course. But can most or all of this material
be learned online or on one’s own? Yes.
We as a society
have enormous sunk costs in monstrously costly legacy systems; these
generational investments in the status quo have created institutional
momentum, vast armies of vested interests and cultural habits that
actively resist structural reform. Three of the largest such systems
are healthcare, defense/national security and education.
One place to
start an investigation of any legacy system is to ask: how would
we design a replacement system from scratch? In the case of higher
education, I think the first answer is: accredit the student, not
the school. The second is to tie the curriculum and processes to
what emerging-economy employers actually need.
If we think
of the current higher-education system as a Factory Model (something
I have written about for years) that took a small Elitist system
designed for scholarship and expanded it to ramp up wartime production
in a era of typed-on-paper orders and labor-intensive industries,
we can understand the widening disconnect between the emerging economy
and this legacy system.
The source
article is found here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/20/google_hiring_procedures/
July
1, 2012
Copyright
© 2012 OfTwoMinds.com
Republished with permission from:: Lew Rockwell