Crowdsourcing and the end of job interviews by Panos Ipeirotis.
From the post:
When you discuss crowdsourcing solutions with people that have not heard the concept before, they tend to ask the question: “Why is crowdsourcing so much cheaper than existing solutions that depend on ‘classic’ outsourcing?”
Interestingly enough, this is not a phenomenon that appears only in crowdsourcing. The Sunday edition of the New York Times has an article titled Why Are Harvard Graduates in the Mailroom?. The article discusses the job searching strategy in some fields (e.g., Hollywood, academic, etc), where talented young applicants are willing to start with jobs that are paying well below what their skills deserve, in exchange for having the ability to make it big later in the future:
[This is] the model lottery industry. For most companies in the business, it doesn’t make economic sense to, as Google does, put promising young applicants through a series of tests and then hire only the small number who pass. Instead, it’s cheaper for talent agencies and studios to hire a lot of young workers and run them through a few years of low-paying drudgery…. This occupational centrifuge allows workers to effectively sort themselves out based on skill and drive. Over time, some will lose their commitment; others will realize that they don’t have the right talent set; others will find that they’re better at something else.
Interestingly enough, this occupational centrifuge is very close to the model of employment in crowdsourcing.
The author’s take is that esoteric interview questions aren’t as effective as using a crowdsourcing model. I suspect he may be right.
If that is true, how would you go about structuring a topic map authoring project for crowdsourcing? What framework would you erect going into the project? What sort of quality checks would you implement? Would you “prime the pump” with already public data to be refined?
Are we on the verge of a meritocracy of performance?
As opposed to once meritocracies of performance, now the lands of clannish and odd questions in interviews?