
Hiring with your gut - mattjaynes
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/812-hiring-with-your-gut
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Big companies hire based on experience, education, docility, and quality of
handshake. A company can probably do better by "trusting their gut" and taking
slightly riskier applicants, because risk is proportional to reward. Makes
sense.

But I think there's a level beyond that where a company uses a hiring process
designed to avoid biases. Biases based on age, gender, race, nationality,
physical appearance, accent, etc. inevitably play a role in hiring decisions,
and a company that could neutralize those effects could win big. This is the
_opposite_ of trusting your gut.

In fact, a company that specifically recruited ugly people (and other victims
of biases) could probably get the same quality employees as their competitors,
but much cheaper. It's like value investing. I'm not sure how legal that would
be, though.

(This reminds me of _Moneyball_ , by Michael Lewis.)

