Quote:
Originally Posted by Triple_R
Anyway, in my country, job interviews still matter, to the best of my knowledge. A good, applicable resume gets you the interview, but how you handle the interview is important.
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Funny that you mentioned job interviews.
Veteran
Financial Times columinst Lucy Kellaway had some choice words about their supposed effectiveness.
The question with interviews is why we bother
Quote:
By Lucy Kellaway
Financial Times (Oct 7, 2012)
...For the past 2,000 years and more we have been interviewing people, but far from getting better at it, we're getting worse. The earliest example of the genre I can find is in the New Testament where Jesus, who at the time was recruiting for the position of disciple, kept the process short and snappy with a single question: "What do you seek?"
Modern interviewers make much heavier weather of it. In the past decade or so everyone has become hooked on asking things like "tell me about the time you showed courage". Or "tell me about a time you learnt from failure". The poor candidate has then to spit out a rehearsed, almost certainly fabricated answer, while the bored interviewer nods sagely, a process that is most unpleasant for both sides and leaves no one any the wiser.
The latest craze for oddball questions is even worse. Why are manhole covers round? How many piano tuners are there in the entire world? Google is also largely to blame for this craze, but now half the big employers in the United States are following, figuring that if they ask things that the hapless candidate can't prepare for, that the answers will somehow be more telling.
The website Glassdoor.com has composed a list of daftest of all daft questions, with Goldman Sachs heading at the top. It asks prospective bankers: if you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and put in a blender how would you get out? Such clever-dick questions can only prove one thing: whether the candidate is any good at clever-dick answers.
...The reason that no one has found a good way to interview is that there isn't one. Study after study shows this charade to which we are all so addicted is not much better than picking people at random. The only reason we persist is that we are all way overconfident of our ability to judge others.
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Of course, she's just a journalist, not a scientific expert in the field of human resource management, but Ms Kellaway, I find, has a knack for hitting the nail square on its head.
Between unreliable human judgment and a machine-calculated probability backed with the best data science has to offer, I don't think it's hard to see why a future society would choose the latter over the former.