Communications of the ACM
The Rare Find: Reinventing Recruiting
In late 2006, 22-year-old Adam D'Angelo confronted a serious problem. Facebook, then a small Silicon Valley startup, had picked him to be its chief technology officer. He was bursting with ideas about how to make the social-networking site bigger, faster, and more appealing. To make those dreams come true, Facebook relied on a couple dozen scruffy young engineers. Reinforcements were desperately needed, but old-fashioned hiring channels weren't paying off fast enough. Something quicker and more nimble was needed.
D'Angelo proposed that Facebook publish gnarly programming challenges and invite engineers anywhere to solve them. Facebook engineer Yishan Wong volunteered to draft puzzles so hard that he couldn't solve them.
A new era of talent hunting has begun. It's happening not only at high-tech companies such as Facebook, but also at Army bases, investment banks, corporate boardrooms, college admissions offices, and even at nanny agencies. In all these fields, experts don't just sort résumés. They pick people and build teams in a profoundly different way. Traditional measures of past achievement, such as test scores and academic degrees, are losing power, and companies are getting better at looking for those future superstars who deliver many times the value of someone who is merely good.
From Bloomberg Businessweek
View Full Article
No entries found