A really interesting section in Ross Perlin’s Intern Nation discusses the role credentials play in recruitment as proxies for sought qualities in potential employees. Once this process of credentialisation-as-filtering is embedded in organisations, surely data science (‘human analytics’) is the logical next step? From loc 2482:
The way job markets actually work, argue some economists, is that graduating from college or completing an internship, regardless of the skills learned, sends a signal to employers, most of whom have little ability to gauge the human capital of a prospective hire. “We have an information problem in the society and the problem of allocating the right people to the right jobs,” writes economist Michael Spence, whose early work on “signaling” has been as influential in its own way as Becker’s theory of human capital. At first, employers may have to guess whether any given signal—a high GPA, for instance—will make for a useful predictor of future success, but Spence posits “a feedback loop” in which employer expectations are revised over time, as the productivity of different types of workers reveals itself.
Mark Carrigan 