Malcolm Gladwell’s next book apparently will be about the challenge of hiring in the modern world. Amazon lists his next book as Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don’t, which doesn’t sound exactly like the topic he talked about at the recent New Yorker Stories from the Near Future Conference. Kotke.org reports that the topic is “the future of the workplace with subtopics of education and genius,” which sounds a bit more like what Gladwell talked about at the New Yorker conference. In any case, the book comes out in November, as Gladwell affirms in the video.
You can see and hear his story-rich New Yorker presentation here or download the conference free from iTunes.
He uses sports-recruiting analogies to illustrate what he calls “the mismatch problem,” the use of poor, non-predictive, hard, outdated, simplistic, objective criteria and tests to supposedly hire the right people. Only subjective on-the-job evaluation of performance actually works — largely because the demands of the workplace have so dramatically changed. We want certainty in hiring, so we uses these objective measures — but they don’t work, Gladwell asserts.
