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In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

nytimes.com

71–80 of 285 posts

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#71
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their findings wrt. formal education are interesting, too. The first time I see a big company's representative saying “test scores are worthless.”

Actually they say they're giving less weight to them (historically Google has weighted them very heavily) which is significantly different from "test scores are worthless".

I have awesome test scores but am happy to see this development!! :)

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quote my friend who works in "Big Data": "sometimes I think Big Data is just Excel on 128GB of RAM"

Not to go all senselessly pedantic, but doesn't Excel have a limit of like 55,000 rows?

If you're being pedantic, it's 1,048,576 rows from Excel 2007, 65,536 rows before that.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#73
Why are they talking about "Big Data" rather than just "data"? I doubt the data sets they used were so large that they could not be easily analysed on a cheap laptop using normal statistical packages.

When trying to work out what best predicts job performance, the quality of your data is by far the most important thing to focus on. I would very much like to know more about the details of their internal studies. There are a lot of difficult problems in trying to use statistics to improve interview processes. One of the big problems is that you will always have a truncated sample of only those people who were selected: you would then expect the importance of certain variables, such as GPA or test scores, to be lowered because those who scored lower on such metrics will have had compensating characteristics...

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quote my friend who works in "Big Data": "sometimes I think Big Data is just Excel on 128GB of RAM"

Not to go all senselessly pedantic, but doesn't Excel have a limit of like 55,000 rows?

16 384 columns and 1 048 576 rows actually

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#75
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's standard (or slightly pretentious) British English; I guess the US equivalent would be "majored in math at Edinburgh" (which would be equally incomprehensible to a Brit)

It's not really pretentious – it kinda depends on what university you went to. I typically say 'studied', but my friends who went to other unis say 'read'. I would take 'read' as a pretentious term.

> It's not really pretentious

> I would take 'read' as a pretentious term.

I'm confused...

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#76
post #3

The original article - http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-huntin... Distraction free reading and without all the annoying cruft of Quartz. Fascinating use of "Big Data" to cut through the bullshit. Wonder if it will change anything. I suspect the "tough" interview plays well into a company's PR.

I find the use of the term "Big Data" there bullshit. Even for the largest company like Walmart with 2 million employees - having some data about every one is hardly "big". Collect a whole deluge of data about each and you hardly fill a USB drive.

I realize that reporters like to throw buzzwords into anything to cater to the "simpler" readers. But come one, this is outright silly.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quote my friend who works in "Big Data": "sometimes I think Big Data is just Excel on 128GB of RAM"

Not to go all senselessly pedantic, but doesn't Excel have a limit of like 55,000 rows?

Current limit is 1,000,000 pr worksheet. However there is a tool called PowerPivot which lets you get around that limit and do analysis on larger data sets.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#78

The best book on hiring, no doubt, is Who: http://www.amazon.com/Who-The-A-Method-Hiring/dp/0345504194 We used it to build our hiring process for http://www.thinkful.com/ and it consistently proves valuable. We also use it to help our students prepare for job interviews.

I'm seriously put off by any talk of topgrading and 'a/b/c player' ranking.

Have you gathered much data on the success of this book's approach in your firm? I'd love to hear a positive take on it.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#80
It's a crutch. Nobody knows how to interview. Interviewing properly is a lot of work. There are two people who can do interviews--people who have knowledge of the job and people who have time to interview--and they are so infrequently the same people. These sorts of things were appealing because they were easy, a way to not spend a lot of time on interviewing, or a way to not need a lot of knowledge about the job.

And these things are important, because job candidates are not people, they are OEM replacement parts being order from Pep Boys. Call up the recruiter and requisition a J6-252: Programmer, seasoned 5 years, with degree from MIT. Oh, those ones are too expensive. Guess I'll take the knock-off version, but I refuse to pay full price!

Hopefully, because it's Google saying it, everyone will cargo-cult on this bandwagon too.

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