Malcolm Gladwell on the Challenge of Hiring in the Modern World | The New Yorker

the first speaker is a special pleasure of mine I've known Malcolm Gladwell's since we were both baby reporters at the Washington Post he's a dear dear friend I knew him before he was Malcolm Gladwell in fact I knew him when his haircut was what it was used to be called a Philadelphia fadeaway very closely cropped until well you'll see in a minute Malcolm is a special kind of thinker and writer what he does is a kind of magical alchemy of storytelling and original thought there was absolutely no one who does what he does with such intelligence and such charm you know him because of his books the tipping point and blink he has a new book coming out I think early next year it has already sold two and a half trillion copies it's an amazing amazing phenomenon he's going to talk to you on a subject that he couldn't possibly explain to me as we sat there two minutes before so I'm going to let him do his work he's going to talk about the challenge of hiring people in the modern world and the way it relates in a way to sports please welcome my friend and colleague Malcolm Gladwell it's a real pleasure to be the opening act in the conference I am as David said I'm not going to talk about what I said I was going to talk about in the in your program which was reinventing invention as I'm sure many of you realized when you saw that that's the thing that people say that they're going to talk about when they don't know what they're going to talk about along with if ever you see that or imagining the future or some noun and then towards a new beginning you know that this speaker has no clue so I'm going to I'm going to talk about what I what David said which is this whole question one of my favorite topics which is this question of how you hire the right person which if we went around this room and we asked all of you what you thought your biggest challenge was in your organization in the years going going forth I'm sure we would come to a consensus that that was probably it and what I want argue is that the American economy American business in particular but all aspects of our of our society or a kind of collective crisis when it comes to hiring and that relates to something that I like to call the mismatch problem so what's the mismatch problem well as David said promised I want to start by using an analogy from sports every major professional sport has every year something they call the combine and it happens just before the draft just before they choose which players from the college ranks or the minor-league ranks they want to play for their team and what happens is they there's a central location and all of the players who are eligible for the draft are invited to that central location and every team sends their smartest and most senior people and under the gaze of those experts the scouts and the and the coaches and the general managers the players perform a series of diagnostic exercises right they they lift weights they they run up and down they jump in the air they do intelligence tests and and how they perform at those series of very specific tasks ends up making an enormous difference in how highly they're drafted so to give you an example last year I went to the National Hockey League's Scouting Combine which was at a big conference center right by the Toronto Airport and and they invited they had their every promising 17 18 and 19 year old hockey player in the world so Russians Czechs finns americans and of course canadians so imagine this you know enormous roomful of incredibly sweaty teenagers with you know with teeth nothing missing and there's all of these is a big room and all around the room there are these stations and each each station you perform a certain task you have your body fat measured or you do bench press or you you run up and down through an obstacle course where you jump do a vertical jump and and there's a small room off to the side where you might take an intelligence test or or a psychological examination and through the room every single NFL team has NHL team has sent their senior scout people who have been studying players for 30 and 40 years and all their with their clipboards and their little note-taking machines and and what they're there to do is to find additional evidence to improve the assessments they make of players they're going to gamble ten or fifteen million dollars on an 18 year old and before you gamble I mean if you can imagine how terrifying that is take the typical 18 year old and ask yourself are they worth 15 million or nothing and before they do that quite properly they would like to get to know the player to do what we always do when it comes to hiring which is to have a kind of sit-down a face to face right so one of the players they were looking at was this Russian Russian called Alexi chirping off and Alexi chirping off was this was this silky good-looking incredibly talented player in fact he had played in the previous year he had broken Pawel be raised junior hockey scoring record in in Russia probably right one of the great players of the last 20 years this kid was a better player at 18 and Pavel Bure was at 18 so everyone's really really interested in how Alexi chirp enough does in the combine and what he does at one point one of the the tests they have is you get on a stationary bike and you're supposed to bike as hard as you can for 15 minutes and blow into this kind of tube and what it does is it measures your oxygen capacity over the course of a highly stressful aerobic workout right so all the Canadians have been doing it before chair paint off and you can imagine these kids from Moose Jaw and you know Flin Flon Saskatchewan and you know with mullets and they get in there and you know as Canadians would they try their absolute hardest and by the end of the 15 minutes they're exhausted they know it's a big bucket next to them to the and a cue key to the bucket and you know it's like this is like what kids go through to prove their mettle to the scouts well anyway chirpin off gets up gets up there and he's flanked by these two absolutely stunning translators and he gets on the bike you know and he's just incredibly good-looking kid and he starts in starts to start biking he bikes really hard for about two minutes and then he just runs out of gas and he quits just quit after five minutes he just quits and the all of the scouts in a room look at him and they just go oh right and then one of the scouts turns to me and says isn't that just like a Russian right no heart no endurance no you know and that's what they're you know they they were gathering what they felt to be an extraordinarily valuable piece of evidence about this kid they want to know whether you're going to go all out in a game and sure enough sure paying off before the Scouting Combine had been ranked number one in the draft and he ended up being taken 17th by the New York Rangers so that's an evidence of just how much that kind of thing matters now that sounds as I've said like a perfectly logical exercise because all you've got going in are these incredibly subjective evaluations of how seventeen-year-olds many of whom are playing in countries far away match up against other seventeen-year-olds but you want to know something that's very different which is how does this seventeen-year-old project into the future a and B how will he fare when he plays against adults grown men and in order to do that to make that very very difficult assessment you feel quite properly you need to gather some objective data about who this kid is and what he can do now is that true as much as that makes sense is that true well as it turns out if you look closely at the Scouting Combine as an institution and as a kind of metaphor for hiring it turns out it doesn't make sense at all in fact Scouting Combine czar for lack of a better word a disaster now let me give you a couple of other examples basketball basketball is the same thing Scouting Combine they invite last year they invited the 81 top college basketball players in the country to one place and they put them through the same thing all of these various drills to measure their their larger their physical attributes how high do they jump all those same all the same questions and what you see when you look at their performance on those kinds of things is that these kids this group of 81 kids are enormous ly variable on those metrics so on the vertical jump for example which you would think could be an incredibly important thing to measure in a basketball player there are a bunch of players who can jump more than 40 inches and there are a bunch of players who can jump less than 25 inches right well that's an enormous spread and you think you'd really want to know who can jump 15 inches if you want to give them a 15 million dollar contract and who can jump 40 inches well as it turns out those kinds of measures are an incredibly poor predictor of how well you play basketball so what they do at the end of the combine is they give you a score that combines all of your attributes on these various tests and so we have a ranking of how the players did in the combine well what I'm gonna do is the top I'm going to walk through the top five rookies taken in the draft last year and tell them how they did in the combine write the absolute top player in the draft a man who everyone thinks is going to be one of the great players in the history of the NBA it's a guy named Greg Oden out of the 81 players tested in the combine Oden ranked 62 on that test of various physical effectiveness second player take in the draft and a person who won the working of the Year this year in the NBA and is considered a slam dunk an absolute certainty to be one of the great players of the next generation is a guy named Durant right where did Durant rank out of 81 players in the combine 78 ok Al Horford considered to be the third best player in the draft a guy who dominated in the playoffs this year as a rookie for the Atlanta Hawks an absolute monster a player everyone wants on his team where did he rank right 21st daddy is young considered to be the fourth best player in the draft right where did he write he ranked seventh he was it he did very well in that right there's a rare exception Yannick Noah the fifth best player taken last year where did he do in the combine 43rd out of 81 meanwhile who the players who ranked first second and third on those tests of physical skills DJ strawberry Russell Carter and Dominic James I have not heard of either of of all of those three names because they're not any good right DJ strawberry played 2 minutes a game for the Phoenix Suns this year and as other two guys didn't even make the NBA this is an absolutely useless predictor of whether someone can actually perform at the professional level now you say okay that's a nice little case maybe that's just football and that's just basketball and hockey well let's look at football okay one of the things they do in the football combine is they take all the kids who are going to be quarterbacks and they give them an intelligence test now that would seem on paper to be a really good idea being a quarterback today in the NFL is an extraordinarily cognitively demanding task you may not think so but it is they have to master not just hundreds but thousands of different plays right play books are this big every week before they play a new team they have to watch not just dozens of hours but in many cases a hundred hours of film I mean incredible amount of study that's necessary to prepare themselves for the extraordinary complexity of the defense's they're going to face and the offense that they're going to run more than that as well when they're on the field they have to make an extraordinary number of sophisticated decisions in the spur of the moment you cannot be dumb it would seem and be a good quarterback so you'd think well absolutely you've got players coming out of college very very unsophisticated primitive environments you want to put them into the most cognitively demanding environment in all of professional sports give them an intelligence test right seem to make sense so to give them this test is called the Wonderlic and the Wunderlich is the test that's been given to every pro quarterback for the last 40 or 50 years and let me give you a list of the five quarterbacks who have scored the highest on the Wonderlic drew Hansen Alex Smith Eli Manning Tony Romo Drew Bledsoe probably the seven players Drew Bledsoe Matt lineart and Callum Clemens now let me give you the list of the seven players who have scored the lowest on the Wonderlic Tavares Jackson Derrick Anderson Vince Young Dan Marino Terry Bradshaw Donovan McNabb and David Gerard now many of you in this room I suspect don't know much about football so let me let you in on a secret the second list of players I gave you the dumb players right are players who are the guys who by any measure would be considered of marginal intelligence let me just tell you a secret about the Wonderlic it's not the SAT right it is really really easy to get below 20 on the Wonderlic which all of those seven players in the second list I gave you you've got to be like you must be staring out the window you can't act be paying any attention all right so those seven players are players who have failed at one of the most rudimentary intelligence tests ever devised who are they those lists of seven dumb players well they include two of the greatest quarterbacks of all time one of the greatest quarterbacks of the last ten years and three of the most promising young quarterbacks in the league in fact on absolutely every measure the seven dumb quarterbacks are instantly superior to the seven smart quarterbacks right what good is the Wonderlic it's no good at all right it is something that if you took it seriously actually impairs your ability to find some and you can actually play the game right that's the mismatch problem that is a beautiful example of this thing I call the mismatch problem it is when the criteria we use to prepare to assess someone's ability to do a job is radically out of step with the actual demands of the job itself okay now many of you I don't think any of you in here are from the sporting world and perhaps you have the kind of biases that people from Manhattan have about the sporting world and so you say well that's just a bunch of jocks running their own little crazy show we smart non jockey people would never do such a silly thing as to have a mismatch problem well that's where you're wrong turns out there are mismatched problems wherever you look these days in the professions let's start with the biggest and most serious case teachers I think everyone in this room would agree that the single most important element in revitalizing the educational system in this country is having better teachers right that's the key to giving kids a good education have the highest quality teachers possible in the school and in fact the evidence backs us up there's nothing nothing you can do to improve school more than by improving the teachers and let me give you an example you know how we always talk about reducing class size as a good way of improving quality well if you reduce class size dramatically so if you take a class from 22 kids to 16 kids which is a really really big jump under the very best of circumstances you move the average performance of the kids in that class five percentile points so if that class is at the 50th percentile when there's 22 kids in it if you shrink to 16 you'll get to 55 not trivial right but I would point out that in the real world absolutely impossible to do that why because if we shrank every class in this city from 22 kids to 16 kids we would have to hire 38% more teachers right there is no there is no government municipalities school board in the world that has the money to hire 38% more teach about late not just 38% more teachers we would need 38% more classrooms okay never ever going to happen okay now compare that thing that we always talk about is if it's a reality as if it's what we really want compare that to teacher quality well we have some really useful measures now of teacher quality basically we can we just measure how the performance of kids on in a given class changes over the course of the year so how much does their teacher affect their performance as a group and what you find when you do that is that teachers who are in the top quartile so 75th percentile or above the difference we know teaching a top quartile and the difference between a teacher in the bottom quartile is 10 percentile points 10 right in other words if your kid has a teacher who is in the 25th percentile or lower your kid will will regress 5 percentage about 5 percent up once over the course of the year if they start out in the 50 percent tell W in the 45th by the end of the year if on the other hand your kid has is that the 70 is at the 50th and has a good teacher they'll be at the 55th by the end of the year that is a massive swing absolutely massive swing you think about it the black/white test-score difference in this country is about 30 percent I'll points and that says that we could close that gap with 3 years of good teachers for black kids right key we're talking about huge differences here ok so now that we've all been convinced that it's all about quality of teachers what's the best way to ensure that teachers are of top quality well we think we know the answer there you want to ensure the teachers are top-quality you want to get the best educated smartest most experienced people possible into the classroom right who's gonna argue that when we pass the No Child Left Behind law a couple years ago that codification of all that was common sensical about education and joking of course but I say that but what did that law state about teacher quality it said that if you're going to teach in a core subject you know one of the things that we really care about you've got to have a BA you've got to have you've got to be certified you have to have some additional teacher training on top of that you must have you must be licensed by the state and you must have done specific academic or F must have done academic work specific to your specialty over and above the requirements of standard teacher training owners we raise the bar really dramatically on a number of academic levels because we felt that was the surest way to ensure that we had better quality teachers in the classroom okay so to the critical question what is the relationship between those kinds of credentials that I've been talking about and teacher quality there isn't any none zero goose egg it doesn't exist right I can take the most credential teachers in the world and the most on a random sample of people in this room and after two years in the classroom there would be no difference between the performance of those two groups when it comes to actually increasing student performance right whether you have a master's degree or not whether you scored 1400 in your SAT or 1200 or SAT makes absolutely no difference in how you perform at the task of relating to and teaching kids it's the Scouting Combine all over again in the name of trying to make a better decision we're spending all this money and spending all this time and none of it is having any effect in fact we are doing the very thing that actually defeats the cause of finding better teachers we're narrowing what we should be doing is broadening the pool to as much as possible right as many of these people with this with this ineffable elusive gift called being a good teacher but instead what we do is we narrow the pool we say to most people out there who could be teachers no no you can't be teachers you have to meet this very very narrow set of requirements in order to become one okay so teaching is a profession that is every bit as screwed up as as professional sports alright let's look at another case the legal profession you think that lawyers would do better at this lawyers are very very smart Riz lawyers have a lot at stake they're not gambling on small amounts are gambling on large amounts surely they would know would have a good sense about what correlates to the things that make for a good lawyer well a couple years ago University of Michigan law school decided to do a little study what they want to do is they want to look at how the students admitted to the law school through their affirmative action program fared in the real world seems like a reasonable thing to ask now I would point out to you that the University of Michigan law school a very elite law school has got an exceedingly generous affirmative action program if you are a member of a minority they give you a big break on terms of your test scores and your grades in terms of admission right so it's really a kind of a two-tier system and their question was well does that make a difference in the real world and everyone assumed it did but the question there on their mind was really maybe we just have to see how much of a difference it makes so they go out and do this exhaustive survey on graduates of the University of Michigan law school going back 25 and 30 years and they measure absolutely everything that they can ever conceive of measuring about how well someone is doing in their profession and you know what they found nothing no difference right turns out the people admitted under this dramatically lower standard and affirmative action turned out to be just as good and successful in the real world as lawyers as the people admitted under the higher standard now think about this what this means you know we were absolutely certain about what it took to be a good lawyer no one ever argued with the proposition that in order to be an elite law school the University of Michigan had to have the high possible intellectual standards for those it admits but along comes affirmative action and it creates this wonderful little subversive natural experiment and all of a sudden we discover actually no this thing that we thought was beautifully correlated with success at the business of law isn't correlated at all the legal profession has a mismatch problem right so not going about I only have eight minutes left but I could go on for hours about mismatches I'm currently one of my little obsessions mismatches and in my book which David very kindly plugged in which is actually coming out at the end of November in which all of you should buy in bulk I have a series of arguments about mismatches I argue for example for reasons that I won't go into right now but will simply tantalize you with that the airline profession has got a massive mismatch problem with pilots think about that next time when you're it gets really bumpy in the air right they are really bad at matching the skills they used to hire with the skills they need to fly right think about police officers right 99% of the work that police officers do is relational it is about resolving in the peaceful manner disputes among ordinary citizens that's what their job is so why are all cops big beefy people right ever wonder about that it's a mismatch problem right or look at the way in which we choose you know the president United States I don't know if anyone can look at the record of the last eight years and conclude that we don't have a massive mismatch problem in that area as well right ok so why do mismatch problems exist let's get to the kind of final lesson to two reasons one has to do I think with our desire for certainty all of the things that we do in Scouting combines right and with certification for teachers and with test scores for law students they all have the same thing in common they are these hard objective reliable standardized predictors of performance right but the truth is that in all those cases if you want to know how good someone is those kinds of hard objec if seemingly useful statistics aren't useful at all and that all you can do when it comes to lawyers and teachers and professional quarterbacks if you want to know how good they are is to wait until they actually do the job and analyze them when they're on their job and use your own subjective evaluation right it's a case where we are we are drawn to these kinds of objective standardized measures we have a desire to impose certainty on something that is inherently uncertain and that's why we get these mismatches because we can't give up on the notion that we should be able to use these wonderfully clear and reliable statistics and analyzing human performance there's a second and more critical issue here and that is that mismatch problems grow as the workplace or the complexity of occupations grows you know if you're picking a basketball team of 10 year-olds you absolutely can use the combine right with 10 year-olds their level of actual basketball knowledge is so low that you might as well just pick the tall really coordinated kids right because that's all basketball is at that age similarly if you're teaching the 3 R's in a one-room schoolhouse you pick the person who did well in school right because you just need somebody who knows how to read and knows some basic math and can communicate that on a very rudimentary level to the kids and if all you're doing as a police officer is wrestling with drunks right like we were a hundred years ago then pick the big beefy guy right because he actually he does a really good job of wrestling with the drunk but if you are living in a world where the standards have changed and where the cognitive demands have changed you can't use those kinds of simplistic measures anymore right and that's the that is my final I think most important lesson and that is that you know the demands of every profession in the workplace have changed dramatically over the last couple of years and they're going to continue to change at an accelerating rate in the future and we want profoundly different things from workers today than we wanted in the past we want them to be more flexible we want people who can work in teams we want people who can think abstract ly we want teachers who can just teach the 3 R's we want teachers who can communicate effectively very complex topics to a very diverse group of students and also motivate and inspire those students we want lawyers who do more than process paperwork but they want lawyers who are engines of imagination when it comes to dreaming up you know big deals on Wall Street right the world has profoundly changed but the way we hire people hasn't changed along with it we want to cling to these incredibly outdated and simplistic measures of ability you know the great irony of this of course is that we have this sense that progress broadly speaking has the effect of reducing uncertainty but the opposite is true as the world changes we have to accept the idea that people cannot be understood and summed up easily and cleanly it's time to shut down the combine thank you very much

Channel: The New Yorker

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Id: gLQC3EzDGr4

Length: 27min 47sec (1667 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 22 2014