Keith Rabois: evaluation

Transcript context

…What's just one tip when you're looking for undiscovered talent that's a sign of, okay, this person is really special? I know you have a lot to talk about here, but just what's one tip? I think it's basically isolating why other people aren't going to process them correctly. Most recruiting at large organizations becomes a homogenous function. And so if you understand why this person is going to get thrown into this black box thing and not get processed accurately, it's pretty easy. So I always think about, let's say this person was interviewing at Meta or Google or Block these days or Coinbase, what are they going to miss and then why? And then that leads to, oh, perfect. So sometimes it's just lack of information. Sometimes it's controversial to say this, but one of the reasons why the net impact of my higher undiscovered talent is you wind up skewing younger. It's not because you need young people, it's that younger people have, by definition, less data. It's like we use credit scoring, FICA scores. It's the same thing for employment. By the time you're over 30-some odd things, there's so many data points about you that this black box machine is usually going to process you like many other people. If there's no data points, it's very hard for a black box machine that does homogenous evaluation to evaluate you. So there is alpha, so to speak, by definition for people who have no data points. It's interesting how this is the same skill as being an investor, picking startups to invest in.…

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