Attention is your scarcest resource at any company. You hire people to add to this resource. Bad hires do not add, but subtract from this pool, by forcing you to pay attention to them rather than on running your business.
No amount of "hard data" can make that untrue.
I'm an engineer; one always needs data to support something.
> Attention is your scarcest resource at any company. You hire people to add to this resource.
Not sure what you mean by "attention", but I think it is the same thing I would call "throughput": the rate at which the company can turn customer requirements into engineering products (and thus money). If so, I would agree, as pretty much all resources of the company combine to affect this.
> Bad hires do not add, but subtract from this pool, by forcing you to pay attention to them rather than on running your business.
Still on board with you. I would agree that someone whose net throughput contribution is negative is a bad hire.
The problem is, this has nothing to do with the statement I was originally reacting to: "Avoiding false positives is much more important than eliminating all the false negatives." That statement needs hard data about:
- The expected number of false positives
- The expected magnitude of the throughput loss from each false positive
- The expected number of false negatives
- The expected magnitude of the lost potential throughput due to the false negatives
You don't quantify the impact of false positives the same way you do the false negatives. A false negative simply means you take more time to look for a candidate. A false positive's impact is so huge that you can't come up with numbers large enough for false negatives to outweigh it.
To make a broader point, not everything can be tracked and measured. Things that can be tracked and measured often can't be compared to each other usefully.
I vehemently disagree with this.
A false negative means either work isn't getting done or current people are overworked. This is costing your business. If it isn't, why are you hiring in the first place?
As for the cost of false positives being "huge", how? All you have stated is that a bad hire brings down the net productivity of a team. How much is very relevant and something you can get a rough feel for. If I hire someone who has a slight net negative impact on team productivity, and they show no signs of improving, I fire them and move on. Is it a worse outcome than not hiring them or anyone else for that period of time? Yes. Is it a huge impact? Not at all.
You can come up with a hypothetical worst-case, company-destroying false positive, but that would be comparing apples to oranges based on your position concerning false negatives. The worst-case false negative situation is also company-destroying.
Discusses the correlation between high intelligence and higher incomes - key point, the scatter diagram showing a clear correlation. http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlations...