Not What You Know
Freddie, now on his own blog, is worried about hiring practices:
The last couple of years have seen my friends begin to start their honest-to-goodness careers, as opposed to jobs that were by design short-term. I’d say that among people I would call friends, a good two dozen have gotten long-term/serious jobs in the last couple years. And here’s the thing: literally none of them got there jobs without some sort of “in”, a personal connection that got them the job.
Now, look— I know that this is about the worst way to assemble evidence, and I’m not trying to make any kind of scientific point here. But I do think that this is a common phenomenon, and I imagine if the average reader asked around, he or she would find something similar. I have to think that this is an error in a classic capitalist sense, and hurts the efficiency of markets under which businesses are supposed to operate. I’d like to know what a more enthusiastic capitalist than me thinks about all this.
A couple points to make: I got my first job in Washington as an editor at a think tank right out of college with no connections, no internship, no friends in the business — nothing but a resume and some work samples. I didn’t even live in D.C. when I applied. That was in 2005. So anecdotally, anyway, it’s still possible to break into competitive fields without schmoozing.
On the other hand, my sense is that, yes, it is really difficult to get many jobs without some sort of personal connection. But is that really so unreasonable? On one hand, when hiring for a mid-career or senior position, employers will almost always end up looking at people with multi-year track records in their field. It’s entirely understandable, I think, for employers to give preference to those people who they can find out about in advance. Why go with an unknown quantity if you can get someone who’s been vouched for by a reliable source?
This is an even greater problem when hiring for the entry level/junior positions which Freddie seems to be speaking about. How in the world is an employer supposed to make a good judgment about not just talent, but reliability and social compatibility, based on an interview or two, a few work samples, and a resume? The fact is, those just starting out in a field simply don’t have the work history on which to make a judgment about their abilities. So employers end up seeking additional information, and that usually means trusted sources who can vouch for their character/talent/reliability. It’s true that this isn’t always fair. But it doesn’t seem unreasonable for employers who’re risking an awful lot of time and money on someone to go with the safer bet of someone who’s been given a good reference.
Additionally, I suspect it’s often not even that those with connections get preference so much as it is that they get inside knowledge of the details of the system — they’re coached on how and what to say. Talk to person A, make sure to mention that you’ve done this, bring up your time with Professor Blahblahblah, tell him all about your experience in L.A., he loves that sort of thing, etc. etc. The hiring practices and mechanisms of many companies can be labyrinthine, and those with connections often succeed not because of some malicious or lazy favoritism but simply because they’ve got a willing guide to the hiring gauntlet.
The problem, I think, is when employers mistake their friends — golf partners and drinking buddies — for good judges of talent and reliability. Coming from a friend who knows little of your field, “My son’s got a friend who’s very interested in that sort of thing” probably isn’t the best guide to talent. Nevertheless, it often results in a response of, “Oh yeah? Well, have him call my assistant and we’ll set up a time to talk.” So the trick, I think, is smarter nepotism, based on ability rather than friendship. Employers ought to strive to be better judges of who’s qualified to recommend new hires.
(By that same token, all of us should take care when we recommend people within our fields, and not simply give them a pass because of some pre-exisiting friendship. And on that note, I’ll finish this post by recommending Freddie’s blog. Because it’s good!)
This is all well taken. As I tried to say there are certainly advantages for employers in hiring people who are at least somewhat vetted by a current employee. My frustration is that, first, there really are people who have no real connections capable of getting them a job. When they are struggling to make headway in a bad job market, it’s hard to know that they have an additional barrier in front of them. And in a simple sense, it’s annoying to think that in an otherwise equal decision between two qualified applicants, someone may be privileged because of a personal connection. But that’s life, I guess.
And thanks so much for the encouragement.
— Freddie · Jul 13, 03:25 AM · #
Good for you, Freddie! Just remember all of us lowly commenters when you achieve greatness.
— Joules · Jul 13, 04:10 AM · #
I think Freddie’s got a better fix on it than Suderman. Yes, outstanding resumes will always get your foot in the door, but in my experience a great many of the juicy positions are filled by the boss on the basis of office politics (which is really what “my daughter needs a job…” means) or outright favoritism toward friends or acquaintances.
Nor is it limited to “go here, see this person, talk about this.” In my opinion, that’s so ordinary it doesn’t even count. I’ve experienced entire Potemkin hiring processes where a dozen people were interviewed for a position where the company had already picked an applicant on the basis of, you guessed it, who she knew. How do I know? My interviewer told me!
My experience has been that it’s about 20% resume, 80% who you know. I spoke with a girl recently who worked in a Canadian government office. On further questioning, literally everyone in the department, including her, were there because they knew someone else in the department who had gotten them the job.
Private industry is even worse, and small businesses are the very bottom of the barrel for that kind of thing: often no shareholders, no corporate oversight, no regulations on how employees are to be hired, treated, or promoted. So what you get is lots of what Freddie talked about.
I suppose what it comes down to is that the entire free market is founded and run on collective human greed. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just as a wolf isn’t a savage creature. But nor is it a noble one. It’s an animal, and when it’s hungry it will eat what it can. I think there is a deep danger to being enthusiastic about capitalism, which one should be, to the point where one forgets that underneath it all there is no higher philosophy or pure science, only the aggregate actions of a society attempting to maximize prestige and influence as well as wealth, and all of it often in the most lazy way people think they can get away with.
— Clarke Ries · Jul 13, 03:53 PM · #
Clark,
I agree to a large extent, which I why I said that there are indeed times when the process isn’t fair. However, I still think that in many cases it’s entirely understandable when looked at from the employer’s perspective.
I think the thing we’re missing in this discussion — and the thing we’re unlikely to get any time soon — is any sort of aggregate data on hiring practices, preferably broken down by region and industry. Right now, we’re all speaking from personal experience: I got into my career field by sending out resumes and doing interviews, so I’m more sanguine. Others have had a tougher time and are more pessimistic. Neither, I think, is unreasonable, but neither has any better claim to accuracy.
In other words: Data! Who’s got the data? (And charts too, ideally.)
— Peter Suderman · Jul 13, 05:16 PM · #
If nepotism were really as inefficient as Freddie claims, and if it caused businesses to forgo worthy candidates in favor of well-connected but unworthy ones, I doubt it would be quite so widespread. The only reason to root out the last vestiges of connection-based hiring, as the biggest firms and governments try to do, is out of fairness as a principle.
You can make the case that we aren’t yet at that vestigial point, and that there’s a lot of inefficiency left to be cut out of the system, but at some point avoiding favoritism causes more drag than favoritism itself.
— Matt Frost · Jul 13, 06:13 PM · #
Particularly noxious is hiring at public universities, where very often the people hiring will have already decided whom to hire for the position based on personal connections, but are legally required to publicly post the job, so they do so, knowing full well none of the people who apply for it have any shot at all.
To me, Matt, it’s certainly true that the argument towards fairness is more salient than the one towards efficiency. Partly this is a reaction to the typical Republican saw that if you’re smart and work hard, you’ll get the job you want or deserve.
I think that the idea that, because markets are efficient, individual businesses will be efficient, is contrary to most people’s experience in real life. I think most people have just sort of looked around at where the worked and said “My god, the inefficiency.” I know I have.The other possibility is that there simply isn’t that much difference between hiring a more qualified candidate or a less qualified candidate. We all like to think our jobs are important, and that we do it better than another person would, but for some jobs a well-trained monkey could do close to as well. Again, this eliminates the argument to efficiency, but the argument about fairness remains.
— Freddie · Jul 13, 07:29 PM · #
Particularly noxious is hiring at public universities, where very often the people hiring will have already decided whom to hire for the position based on personal connections, but are legally required to publicly post the job, so they do so, knowing full well none of the people who apply for it have any shot at all.
I think this is an over-generalization—at least, it doesn’t match my experience with faculty hiring at public universities. Other kinds of positions above and below that level, though, I don’t know about.
— RSA · Jul 13, 10:17 PM · #
Information in the job market is grossly asymmetric between employee and employer: the employee knows vastly more about his ability, work ethic, and sociability than any prospective boss; the latter usually has nothing more to go on than a cover letter, resume, and maybe one or two face-to-face, highly artificial meetings around which an entire “how-to” literature has arisen, advising the job candidate how to given sincere-seeming stock answers to sincere-seeming stock questions.
Faced with this gross asymmetry, employers often put great emphasis on information from “reliable” channels — friends, family, coworkers, etc. In fact, of course they do.
The implication of this theory, if it’s correct (and I’m relying on Nobel-laureate Michael Spence, so I’m assuming it’s pretty good), is that blogging and social networking — i.e., publicly accessible, name-tagged webpages holding a large amount of autobiographical, psychological, and sociological data — will be used by prospective employers as a supplement to, but not replacement for, the “old-boy network” of yore.
That’s because there is a great deal of social-value in favor-giving that can’t quite be categorized as information, and therefore can’t quite be replaced by the “public transparency” of the Myspace generation.
— JA · Jul 13, 10:28 PM · #
at least, it doesn’t match my experience with faculty hiring at public universities.
Should have been clearer— that’s exactly what I’m talking about, non-faculty positions. Faculty searches tend to have way too many cooks in the kitchen to allow for nepotism. But jobs handed out by administrators? Definitely.
— Freddie · Jul 13, 10:35 PM · #
One issue is that courts and Congress over the years have made it harder for employers to give objective written tests to employees that have “disparate impact” on protected groups.
For example, when I applied to a small but super fast-growing marketing research firm in 1982, they gave me the the Marketing Research 302 final devised by one of the cofounders, a Big Ten professor. I sweated over it for three hours, and got hired. When the firm got big enough, however, that they came on the radar of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, they had to stop using this test because it would cost a fortune to validate that they had a compelling “business interest” in using it. The quality of employees hired dropped noticeably.
When I was at Dun & Bradstreet, I needed to hire a programmer, so I asked HR for the programmer’s test. They replied that they had no such thing because it would cause a nightmare with the EEOC and DOJ, but I was free to orally ask any programming questions I liked.
Paradoxically, but hardly surprisingly, all this legal bias against objective written tests makes employers more likely to rely upon old boys’ networks.
— Steve Sailer · Jul 14, 12:54 AM · #
Please try the classic work “Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers” by Mark Granovetter. Also, his prior very famous paper on this subject, “The Strength of Weak Ties.” I understand there is a large follow-up literature, so much is known.
— Will Wilkinson · Jul 14, 01:06 AM · #
I second Will, and also recommend Granovetter’s empirical follow-up to “The Strength of Weak Ties”, found here in .pdf.
On the idea of “strong vs. weak” ties between people, take a look at Barabasi & Albert, Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks).pdf, and Complex Network Theory in general — particularly the information-theoretical idea of flux of reaction in biological and human interactions. Good stuff.
— JA · Jul 14, 01:24 AM · #
A lot of universities have a policy of official nepotism for faculty members. If they go through the usual rigorous and objective process to hire Candidate Z, they will try to find a job for Z’s spouse if s/he also has the appropriate degree and credentials to be a faculty member. Dunno if there is anything quite like it in private companies.
BTW, some years ago the WSJ had an article telling how societies that have no rule of law will often tend to use family connections to run its businesses. The family member is someone who can be depended on. And there are also implicit understandings, such as “Yes, we’d be glad to have you marry our sister and come into the business. You can do what you want with your marital relationship, but if you publicly embarrass her, we’ll break your kneecaps.”
— The Reticulator · Jul 14, 01:30 AM · #
I thought that Monster et al might be increasing hiring pools, but who you know is one way to offer a little more information about the hirees.
I mostly see lawyers getting hired, and in addition to who you know, a bunch of lawyers get hired (1) based on on-campus recruiting of graduating law students, (2) based on paper resume fodder (law review, grades, etc.), even several years after law school, and (3) through recruiter/headhunters.
Microsoft is famous for being one of the most ruthlessly meritocratic employers around – how to they get their employees?
— J Mann · Jul 14, 01:42 AM · #
J Mann observes, very very accurately: “I mostly see lawyers getting hired, and in addition to who you know, a bunch of lawyers get hired (1) based on on-campus recruiting of graduating law students, (2) based on paper resume fodder (law review, grades, etc.), even several years after law school, and (3) through recruiter/headhunters.” [emphasis mine]
All my eggs, meet basket.
— JA · Jul 14, 01:54 AM · #
I don’t know what significance this has, but I was involved in hiring a paralegal earlier this year. We posted the position publicly, but people who knew we were posting also let their friends know that the position was open.
Based on the resumes we got, we picked the 6 most apparently qualified and interviewed them. Two people stood out in terms of background and personality, but everyone agreed that based on what we could tell, there was no way to tell which of the two finalists would ultimately have been better. (Steve would point out that we could have given them a law firm version of the civil service exam, but we didn’t.)
If one person had been more diverse that the other, we would have given the edge on diversity, but they were also equal in that regard. Ultimately, we picked the candidate who had worked with one of our lawyers before, and who the lawyer enthusiastically recommended.
So I guess in that example, who you know counted twice. On the front end, people who knew someone in our group were more likely to find out about the position. (I.e., they found out even if they weren’t checking Monster periodically). On the back end, once we hit the limit of what we could find out from paper and interviews, a recommendation from someone we knew was the tiebreaker.
— J Mann · Jul 14, 02:09 PM · #