Defaulting to hire on credentials will put you out of business

http://carlosmiceli.com/defaulting-to-hire-on-credentials-will-put-you-out-of-business/

by paulovsk • 13 years ago

56 48 13 years ago

jspiros• 13 years ago

I didn't go to college, though I grew up in a college town and eventually even worked for a while as the college's lead web developer. I've been developing software professionally for customers and clients since I was 14 (currently 25; so, for 11 years).

Once, when I was applying for a job, I ran into someone with the same perspective as Bryan Caplan's from this article. I had made it through a few interviews and tests into the process at this company, everything was going well, when at some point I mentioned my not having a college degree. I didn't even realize it until later, as by that point in a process people are usually satisfied (or not) with my skills and experience to make the lack of a degree mostly irrelevant.

I was asked to have a call with the CTO of the company. The call became a 45 minute lecture, wherein the CTO questioned the sanity of everyone who had hired me previously, urged me to consider not applying for jobs in this industry in the future, and suggested going to college as my only viable option. The call lasted 45 minutes, with me in shock and unable to believe that someone could be so rude, and not knowing how to end it politely. Still, to this day, I'm amazed. Not so much at the basic idea, not even that someone would admit to being reliant on it, but just that someone could be so rude.

Thankfully, I've avoided such dramatic rejections since, and my lack of a degree has, if anything, continued to serve as a nice filter, keeping me away from jobs where I'd be working for insane people. I've had no issues finding good positions despite my not having a degree; in most cases, my experience, portfolio, and references are what really matter. And, now that I'm focusing on working for myself/entrepreneurship, I'm not going to have to worry about it at all for the foreseeable future.

I like the explanation given, about "credentialism". It's not just confused or inept HR departments that rely on the credential of a college degree to guide their work. It's also young CTOs at technology startups trying to justify the time and money they (recently) spent earning their credential.

randomdata3• 13 years ago

I received a similar lecture from a former employer, except it was by email, after I had handed in my resignation.

He wanted to make it quite known that I wasn't qualified to work in the industry (even though I worked for him in the industry just fine for several years and I was the one leaving the job on my own accord?) and that I wouldn't be able to find another job without a degree. Even though I deep down knew everything he was saying was not really based in any reality, the things he said were actually pretty hurtful at the time.

I had no trouble walking into another job that provided far more interesting work, and paid considerably more, for people who showed a much greater appreciation for us to be able to work together. I still don't know what the purpose of that email was. Sad to see me go, I guess?

gte910h2• 13 years ago

Emailing people who are leaving more than a nice to have worked with you or let's connect on linked in always seems like a giant lose lose proposition.

CapitalistCartr• 13 years ago

Cap's breakup rule: you learn more about girlfriends and bosses when you leave than at any other time. This probably applies to boyfriends, too, but I don't have experience there.

ambiate• 13 years ago

I have 30 hours remaining in my Bioinformatics degree. I cannot stomach the 'pre-med grind'/cost involved in finishing the degree.

My work was generous and allowed me to turn my internship into a full-time job. Yet, everyday I am told I need to finish my degree and move away from this job by coworkers.

I get to ship on average every two weeks, it is wonderful. I have time to toy and tinker on the side.

My only fear is first for blame, then, to fire. I know if I ever was to venture off, the tone would turn from "we're so grateful to have you" to "you'll never make it in this world" in a heartbeat.

sscalia4• 13 years ago

HR departments are largely the problem.

Even if you have a savvy, dynamic, progressive team in a large company - looking for coding/sales/marketing savants - HR will typically not even pass candidates resumes if they don't have a BA/BS etc.

sscalia4• 13 years ago

I'm also reminded of a great FedEx or UPS ad - a new hire walks into a company, and an employee is showing them their shipping system.

New kid in suit: "No no no, you don't understand - I have an MBA"

Woman: "Oh? Oh. Then I'll have to SHOW you how it works."

afterburner2• 13 years ago

I'm always amazed how much HR filters before it even gets to the relevant manager who actually needs the hire (and knows what he/she needs from them).

gte910h2• 13 years ago

I'm always amazed by the firehose of COMPLETELY unqualified people who apply to everything. Filtering IS needed usually.

protomyth• 13 years ago

The worst HR filter I've ever head came from Microsoft somewhere between 1990-92. There recruiter informed a group of CompSci students gathered to hear about careers at Microsoft, that people graduating from our school were only allowed to apply for jobs in customer support. I think the professors were more ticked off than the students.

itcmcgrath2• 13 years ago

We're not a large company at only 1100 people, but our HR department is excellent. Not only do they help filter for us (I received about 100 applications for a Product Manager position recently), but they also allow us to see all the applications if I want to go spelunking and ignore the system designated ranking.

In short; not sure I agree with your generalized statement. I'm sure there are cases where it is true.

sscalia4• 13 years ago

"System designated ranking" - you lost me there bud.

I'm sure your HR department, and therefor - you - are ignoring some outstanding candidates.

It's cool though, we'll hire them.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

The one piece of data that having a college degree communicates is that the person with it did something they didn't have to do, it took longer than a few months, and it involved a wide variety of tasks. As such its a useful way to prove you can do something that takes a long time to do.

I agree however that there are people who haven't chosen to do that who have shown that ability in other ways. And there are people who have neither a college degree nor any long term project in their history which often indicates they are unwilling to put up with any inconvenience.

But the message that there is no silver bullet that will make sure all of your employees are "great" is true. If you assume that credentials are that bullet you will eventually get populated with a bunch of highly credentialed and ineffective bozos who will drive out the good people and leave behind an empty husk of a work force.

sscalia4• 13 years ago

I believe this is the same thinking the author of the article is rallying against.

So a candidate is more qualified because they ran a (potentially) meaningless gauntlet of bureaucracy, debt, and busywork?

I know that's not quite what you're saying. As I stated below - the issue is the gatekeepers. Large companies are ignoring incredibly talented individuals - simply because their HR departments are inept - or their hiring prerequisites don't allow anyone without a degree.

That said - startups can use this to their advantage. Review code samples, ask REAL questions, get to know your hires.

I love finding the savant coder, the incredibly motivated sales rep, etc - and using them to build our company - and looking at their past projects, samples, experience to make a hiring decision.

riggins2• 13 years ago

In a similar vein.

GED recipients have been less successful than originally anticipated. Social scientists were surprised because these are people who are intelligent enough to pass the curriculum but they weren't achieving greater success than other dropouts. In trying to understand the gap, what they focused in on is that life success isn't just intelligence, its soft skills like stick-to-it-iveness, willpower, concentration, etc. The GED recipients were talented but unfocused. And the same habits that kept people on track to graduate were the habits that led to life success.

How is that relevant? It's relevant in that college signals more than conformity. It signals soft skills that matter. A willingness to slog through sometime tedious, un-exciting work. Which is what companies need sometimes.

So while I'm kind sympathetic to the argument, its a bit too black/white IMO.

randomdata3• 13 years ago

> In trying to understand the gap, what they focused in on is that life success isn't just intelligence, its soft skills like stick-to-it-iveness, willpower, concentration, etc.

Do you have more information about these studies? I have always assumed that to be true. When you look at successful people, it is the indicator that stands out most often. I'd love to look at the formal research.

bradleyland• 13 years ago

> The one piece of data that having a college degree communicates is that the person with it did something they didn't have to do, it took longer than a few months, and it involved a wide variety of tasks. As such its a useful way to prove you can do something that takes a long time to do.

As long as we accept that it is one way of proving you can do something that takes a long time to do. I'm not sure that's what the author was saying when he talked about the signaling of a college degree though. It's more a matter of the acceptance of the dogma of the degree, not the signal that the application can commit to long term projects.

More directly, it's fine to look at an applicant who has a college degree and say, "this person was willing to put in the time and effort to get a college degree", so long as you're willing to evaluate other long term commitments with a similar measure. For example, if I see that a developer has a Github profile containing a handful of active libraries with commit activity dating back a year or more, I'm similarly impressed.

vorg• 13 years ago

Both Github profiles and college degrees can be gamed. Many people cheat in exams, copy assignments, and send doubles along to aptitude tests. They clone the base code for their Github projects from somewhere else, only dressing it up with infrastructural differences like they would a college programming assignment.

Those who didn't put in the time for either a degree or Github history will often lie on their CV about them. An interviewer will often not check up when employing someone so they'll have something against the new hire later on if they want to get rid of them quickly.

Developers who don't do college but genuinely can code projects don't apply for jobs anyway, they apply for funds then employ people.

ismarc• 13 years ago

Things I use that signal the same thing that a college degree (in any subject) does: Military service, long-term contributions to an open source project (even if it's their own and no one uses it), long-term personal projects (such as restoring a car, being in a band, participating in a gaming group) and being employed at a single company for 3+ years. None of these things are easy and rosy the whole time, there's conflict, potential disillusionment, the luster wears off of them and they require real work to accomplish (you can't just kinda half-ass them). For younger developers (sub-25), a college degree (even an associates) of some sort is the most clear on paper before you've had a talk with them. However, you can easily find out if there's anything like that by asking them what they do for fun and leading into things not directly related to their potential position (I typically lead with an example of how I like to work on cars, so I buy a classic car in bad shape and fix it up over 3-4 years, sell it off, then repeat).

mindcrime3• 13 years ago

Interesting stuff. Personally I'm from the camp of people who don't put a lot of stock in credentials. I wouldn't go so far as to say they carry no weight, but I certainly don't weight them particularly heavily, especially if I have anything else whatsoever to go on.

And to the extent that I do care about, say, a college degree, I definitely am not of the mindset that "You have to have gone to an Ivy League school, or you're obviously a dolt who will never accomplish anything". In fact, I think recruiting at less prestigious schools could be a source of competitive advantage, especially for cash starved early-stage startups. Why try to compete with Google and IBM and Cisco and Microsoft, etc. for grads from Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Brown, MIT, etc., etc? Forget that, we will probably recruit at schools like North Carolina Central[1], Shaw[2], St. Augustines[3], Peace[4], Meredith[5], Wake Tech[6], Durham Tech[7], UNC-Pembroke[8], Fayetteville State University[9], NC A&T[10], Winston-Salem State[11], etc. There's talent to be had everywhere, and I doubt we'll be finding a lot of Google recruiters on those campuses.

[1] http://www.nccu.edu/

[2] http://www.shawu.edu/

[3] http://www.st-aug.edu/

[4] http://www.peace.edu/

[5] http://www.meredith.edu/

[6] http://www.waketech.edu

[7] http://www.durhamtech.edu

[8] http://www.uncp.edu/

[9] http://www.uncfsu.edu/

[10] http://www.ncat.edu/

[11] http://www.wssu.edu/

hkmurakami2• 13 years ago

As for the Bay Area, I've consistently been impressed by Cal Poly SLO guys I've met.

Their education is so much more practical and real-world-ready than my Ivy League engineering education (which was largely theoretical in nature).

mindcrime3• 13 years ago

I mean, I have nothing against Ivy League schools, or their graduates. And I won't even say that I think they are overrated so much as I think other schools, and their graduates are underrated. I also think there are a lot of other factors that affect the extent to which someone is a valuable employee, beyond sheer academic ability. Attitude, work ethic, personality, ambition, perserverance, cultural fit, etc. Net-net, my personal belief is that a firm can hire recruiting largely from schools that are not the famous, elite "top tier" schools, and still hire plenty of smart, talented, successful people.

Maybe time will prove me wrong, but we'll see...

TylerE• 13 years ago

Are you hiring? I'm in your neck of the woods, looking for new opportunities, and your problem space looks interesting.

mindcrime3• 13 years ago

Sorta, not exactly, maybe. It's complicated. :-) Shoot me an email and we can chat... prhodes (at) fogbeam (dot) com

johngalt• 13 years ago

Fundamentally credentials make sense to me. If we were designing an employment system from scratch, some form of independent standards and certification would be difficult to pass up. It would aid accurately sorting skilled/trained people into appropriate areas of work.

I say this with no credentials whatsoever, so I'm not just trying to be part of the 'credentialist conspiracy'.

In practice our existing system just isn't fulfilling that purpose enough to justify the enormous amount of money being spent. Accurate signalling on knowledge/skill level has been lost in the noise of wealth/conformity signalling.

dmourati• 13 years ago

The article made me think about my own recent process getting hired at a startup. We certainly have mostly degreed and credentialed employees but we have at least one senior member who dropped out of college to co-found the company. I think a mix of both types is the right approach. To quote FAKEGRIMLOCK: THIS LAW 9: FIRST BATMAN, THEN ROBIN.

old-gregg• 13 years ago

Worked pretty well for Google, no?

While reading "In the Plex", one fact stood out: nearly all of their early hires were well-respected CS figures from 1st grade universities. Not only you had to be smart, but you had to have good grades from a good school to get hired by Google early. The only exception I could find was Salar Kamangar. At least that was my impression from reading the book.

pc86• 13 years ago

Isn't the early Google work a good definition of a Hard Problem, though?

[Startup X] does not need a CMU PhD to build the latest Node app. The domain is blocked at my office so I can't read the article, but I'd argue that spending the extra money on "10x" talent does nothing but shorten your runway.

dingfeng_quek3• 13 years ago

On the other hand, the investment in [Startup X] is partly justified by the idea that spending money on "10x" talent is a chance for "100x" returns.

randomdata3• 13 years ago

Not necessarily. While you seem to recount the history as I remember it, it has been said on here many times that Google did not maintain those policies. Perhaps they ultimately saw the same risks in continuing down that path?

hkmurakami2• 13 years ago

Quora has done the same, yet their results speak for themselves.

(Brilliant people for sure, but that hasn't saved them from a suspect business model)

tkahn6• 13 years ago

Also in "In the Plex" they talk about how Google kept a record of everyone's SAT scores and GPA and alma mater and found no correlation between those things and skill/quality/productivity/effectiveness.

yyqux• 13 years ago

If this is true, then it doesn't actually do anything to confirm the argument of the original article. The opposite actually. If you had selected a random sample of people and placed them in jobs in Google, then sure, that would provide a lot of evidence that academic performance doesn't matter. But that isn't what happened: this is a sample of people who already made it past the Google hiring filter, which allegedly is placing too much weight on credentials.

If the premise of the original article was correct though, you would expect that the uncredentialed people who made it past the hiring bar would be far stronger than the people who got an unjustified boost based on their credentials and the prejudices.

If it's true that easy-to-measure academic credentials are basically uncorrelated with job performance, then that's probably a good indication that their hiring process actually is well-calibrated: if people with poor credentials were doing better than people with good credentials, then their hiring process isn't giving sufficient weight to non-academic factors. If people with good credentials were doing better than people with poor credentials, that would indicate that they were putting too much weight on credentials and could improve hiring by weighing other factors.

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

Here's the thing: for the typical job listing, there are dozens, or hundreds, of applicants. Maybe more.

You do not have the time to do a full-fledged investigation of every one of them, or bring them all in for a lengthy interview. You just don't. You need some filter to reduce the number to something more manageable, and degree/school is a straightforward way to do it.

Also recognize that 99% of jobs, even technical jobs, do not require (1) a one-in-a-million technical skill which is (2) easy to identify and measure.

Is filtering by degree flawed? Absolutely. But that's an academic argument. The question managers face is: what's a better way, subject to real limitations of time and resources?

Last but not least: in my experience, most jobs require navigating some amount of bureaucracy and difficult people. Someone completely unwilling or unable to make these "compromises" probably would be better working for himself, and not within an organization.

7Figures2Commas• 13 years ago

Filters should be created and maintained based on their efficacy, not on how easily they can be applied.

Yes, it's impossible to interview every applicant, but a company focused on minimizing time spent and resources used instead of maximizing recruitment of employees who can create the most value is doing it wrong.

rayiner• 13 years ago

At the same time, positions go unfilled and those managers complain they can't find anyone qualified enough...

bcoates• 13 years ago

> what's a better way, subject to real limitations of time and resources?

Selecting at random from the applicant pool.

Any reasonably selective filter function that becomes sufficiently part of HR conventional wisdom will render the fraction of applicants who both pass it, and are capable of getting and keeping a job, unavailable in the market. The residue is people who either fail the function or pass the function and are sub-par employees. Because the feedback loop on the effectiveness of hiring practices is sufficiently attenuated, the utility of the filter going negative will not be noticed.

Treat easy, popular ways of identifying top talent like stock tips: even if they were true in the past, by the time you hear about it, it's not a good idea anymore.

mikecane• 13 years ago

Thank god Andrew Carnegie didn't live today. He'd have never gotten a job other than his first one: shoving coal into an oven. The same for all of the people who started companies before degrees existed.

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

I've interviewed a fair number of people for tech positions over the years and one of the fastest lessons I learned was that the correlation between a CS degree on the resume and technical ability is basically non-existent. More so, among the best devs and engineers I have worked with one was a physicist by training and several had no college degree whatsoever. Credentialism is a sucker's game, if you fall victim to it you'll be at a competitive hiring disadvantage. Hiring is tough, but it's also one of the most important things you can do as a company, make sure to put the right amount of effort into it.

P.S. As the article points out, falling victim to the credentialism trap as an employee is also a sign of conformity. Some companies want that, but hiring extremely talented non-conformists is an easy and excellent way to kick the competition's ass in many cases. The future of technology is almost never created by conformists.

columbo• 13 years ago

One thing I absolutely do not agree with is Bryan Caplan’s laughably narrow-minded view on people that do not attend college.

Not everyone turns 18 and suddenly has everything they need but simply decides not go to because, like, non-conformity, man!

It is just as likely that <insert life> happened. Is someone who decided to raise an unexpected child a non-conformist? The oldest child staying home to work because the breadwinner in the family died... clearly that person is a non-conformist.

Are you serious?

epochwolf• 13 years ago

I think it's an honest view into his mindset and the mindset of a lot of other people. They view these people as non-conformists and don't see a difference between choosing not to attend college and not being able to afford[1] attending college

[1]: Afford in time, energy, money or other resource, not strictly money.

kenko• 13 years ago

For that matter, is someone who went to trade school or got an apprenticeship or went into a manufacturing job a nonconformist?

Equally laughable is the idea that "going to college signals conformity to organizations that want you to be a conformist in order to work there".

Right, that's exactly what going to, say, Deep Springs, or St. John's, say, signals. I signalled conformity by going to a school with a rep for weirdos and grinds, and concentrating in something widely agreed not to have much direct relationship to the business world (and which has an observable correlation with disputatiousness and disrespect for ipsedixitry)---of course!

It's true that going to college is the default option for people in the middle class or above (or who wish to join the middle class or above), but it's simply fallacious to conclude that if you don't go to college you don't go out of nonconformity. Your action doesn't conform, but that doesn't in any deep sense make you a nonconformist. (The person who decides to raise an unexpected child might well be very much a conformist.)

Caplan strikes me as one of those people who can't distinguish between the novel or unusual and the praiseworthy.

Kudzu_Bob• 13 years ago

Over forty comments on credentialism so far, and nobody has mentioned the elephant in the living room, Griggs v. Duke Power Company. Pardon me while I feign surprise.

dingfeng_quek3• 13 years ago

There are many sources of competitive advantage, which includes but is not limited to good hiring practices and the development and retention of talent.

Companies which were not dependent on cheap/competitive talents were able to get away with many inefficient work practices. Companies which are not dependent can and will still do that. Introspection is stressful and costly, change even more so.

"This is why great designers, salesmen or computer programmers are still highly valued": A very narrow selection of professions where productivity is very sensitive to variations in ability.

Defaulting to hire on credentials will put you out of business

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