Usain Bolt is possibly a fascinating athlete in sports. His body is just wrong for running sprints. He’s too tall.
And yet some coach decided to overlook his body type, and records fell by the way-side. So much so that I have to believe that coaches worldwide are now looking for tall, not short, sprinters.
I recently saw this post float by Twitter on secretly terrible engineers. The general thrust of the article was that perhaps the interview process was profoundly broken in some way.
And then there was this exciting follow-up on grey beards and the use of questions that only a college grad would be familiar with as a way not to hire grey beards and approach to find out who is ‘old’ without asking their age…
And I thought about money ball. In money ball, Billy Beane questions how we select people to make up baseball teams and radically transform the sport of baseball opening it up to players that we would never have considered in the past.
The current recruiting system is running up against a brick wall of supply. At this point, we don’t have enough people graduating with advanced degrees in CS. As Kate Heddleston puts it so well, we are running out of people who can do the 100m dash who fit the 100m dash profile.
I believe that there will be a strategic advantage for the first tech company to figure out how to hire people who do not fit the 100m dash profile. That company will recruit more people more efficiently and get more out of them than any other company. Unlike outsourcing, which companies did to drive costs down and therefore easy to replicate, I genuinely believe that this will be disruptive in a way that we can’t imagine. Hiring, promoting, rewarding, and training people will be different. I wish I could tell you what it was, but as a beneficiary of the current system, I don’t know and can’t imagine. I know it will be different.
My only hope is that I will be able to adapt and not be like those short guys watching this tall dude blow past me…
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