>The only good indicator of what somebody knows, is to ask them to demonstrate facility.
That's true. But not making the pool as concentrated as possible before asking them is a waste of limited resources.
Candidates cost money. When resources are limited, such as money to fly candidates out, time spent screening instead of building, time for senior people to work on interviews instead of getting billable work done, time to get a project done, then it is very valuable to winnow the search to places where there is a higher chance of finding a candidate.
So, one doesn't interview people randomly sampled from the entire populace for a reason. Sure you will get the best candidate, eventually, but the cost to do so is silly. Finding predictors that make your search smaller is extremely valuable.
Thus many jobs have educational requirements. Having hired probably 100ish people in my career, (as well as many friends of mine who have hired similarly), I can without a doubt tell you that demonstrated academic aptitude is a good predictor of overall candidate quality for these types of jobs.
>Having a degree does diddly-squat to the requirement to interview.
So you would claim for jobs using advanced math there is zero difference in mean skill among those with only a 6th grade education and those with a PhD?
Pointless strawman. I'd take evidence of working successfully with math, regardless of degree. Choose your pool that way, instead of lazily reading only the first two lines of the resume.
How so? Do you think for some jobs without requiring a PhD they'd find the candidate they want without having to interview more people?
>I'd take evidence of working successfully with math, regardless of degree.
A PhD in math, especially from a good school, most certainly gives evidence of working successfully with math. It's easier to fake resume experience than to get a PhD, something that I've found quite common when interviewing people. And it's trivial to check someone actually got PhD - I've yet to find a candidate lie about that part.
I've probably interviewed a ~100 people over the years. I've found from experience that anything to reduce the pool quickly saves time and money, and I've still ended up with excellent candidates. Before learning how to weed quickly, I spent far more time and money on people that had very little ability to solve the problems we wanted solved.
That's true. But not making the pool as concentrated as possible before asking them is a waste of limited resources.
Candidates cost money. When resources are limited, such as money to fly candidates out, time spent screening instead of building, time for senior people to work on interviews instead of getting billable work done, time to get a project done, then it is very valuable to winnow the search to places where there is a higher chance of finding a candidate.
So, one doesn't interview people randomly sampled from the entire populace for a reason. Sure you will get the best candidate, eventually, but the cost to do so is silly. Finding predictors that make your search smaller is extremely valuable.
Thus many jobs have educational requirements. Having hired probably 100ish people in my career, (as well as many friends of mine who have hired similarly), I can without a doubt tell you that demonstrated academic aptitude is a good predictor of overall candidate quality for these types of jobs.
>Having a degree does diddly-squat to the requirement to interview.
So you would claim for jobs using advanced math there is zero difference in mean skill among those with only a 6th grade education and those with a PhD?