The NBA season is over and we are in the middle of an exciting
playoff. On June 24th the NBA will announce the winners of the
individual awards, among them the Rookie of the Year award (ROY) that is
awarded to an outstanding first-year player. One of the leading candidates this
year is Luca Duncic.
Luca Duncic is averaging 21 points, almost 8 rebounds and 6
assists per game. Those are exceptionally rare numbers that are no worse (if
not better) than Lebron James' rookie season. Luca was chosen in the final draft in third place and
opinions about his pick number in the draft were mixed.
On one hand, he is an experienced player who started his
adult career at age 15-16 in a leading Euro league team. He was a key player in
Real Madrid, and by the end of his fourth and final season he was a superstar
with impressive stats. At age 18 he played a major role in winning the EuroBasket
(European national championship) with the Slovenian team.
On the other hand, NBA teams have always viewed young
Europeans with some suspicion, valuing their experience less than NCAA players.
Drazen Petrovic and Vlada Divac, two former Yugoslav basketball stars, who came
to the league as winners of European national titles and European team titles, were
ranked low in the NBA draft (60 and 26, respectively), despite the fact that Petrovich
was considered the European Michael Jordan and Divac was one of the smartest centers
who ever played.
NBA teams constantly search for any way to gain advantage over
their rivals and are considered early adopters of sports technologies and statistics-based
approaches to improving results. Despite this, they still have not overcome
their bias when evaluating experience that is from outside the US, which is to
their disadvantage.
Similar bias in the recruitment process exists in the
workplace. Google and other companies have already realized a few years ago (on
the basis of research) that academic institutions and grades have limited
ability to predict success in the workplace beyond the first two years. In fact, a long study by Hunter
& Schmidt examined the variables that can help predict success at work (an
elusive concept in itself) and found that the GMA test (GMAT, SAT, IQ) has the best
ability to predict job performance.
It can be seen from the above graph that interviews of any kind, peer rating, job knowledge tests, and even just biographical data are all better predictors of job performance than candidates grades.
Organizations can no longer afford to pass up on an experienced candidate just because they lack an academic education, studied at a college and not at a university, or did not graduate with honors. In a competitive market, companies must be creative in increasing
the number of recruitment sources. Reducing the number of recruitment sources harms the ability of a company to create diversity that brings new ideas, and to a
certain extent such behavior degenerates the organization.
Leading companies that ostensibly could recruit only
leading candidates with high average scores from specific academic institutions
are already leading the trend of waiving these limitations in the recruitment process, and hopefully more companies will follow.
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