Thomas Friedman has a nice description of Google's hiring practices in this past Sunday's New York Times. In a nutshell, Google's senior vice president of "people operations" (such a great Google way of putting it) said "G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict anything.”
Instead of grades and Ivy League degrees, Google focuses on general cognitive skills, which Google says is the "ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we validate to make sure they’re predictive."
Google also looks for "emergent" leadership -- knowing when to step up and lead and when to step back -- as well as intellectual humility (the willingness to admit to error) and the willingness to take ownership of problems and finding solutions. That's just a summary; Friedman offers a lot of helpful context.
So imagine that a law firm wanted to hire like Google instead of using law school grades and pedigree. What would that hiring process look like? And would that law firm end up being more or less competitive?
Imagine that law schools wanted to admit students this way (i.e., instead of focusing on GPA and LSAT scores). What would the admissions process look like? And would law schools that used such a process produce more successful graduates?
And imagine that law schools hired faculty like Google (i.e., not fixating on law school grades and pedigree). What would the process look like? And would those schools be better off? (I'm certainly not the first to ask these kinds of questions. See, e.g., here and here.)
Billy Beane and Google have been successful looking for non-traditional predictors of success. But in law, we still pretty much look for the same traditional credentials. I think we can, and eventually will, do better.
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