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Job hunting is a matter of Big Data, not how you perform at an interview

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Category: Blog

Created on Monday, 12 May 2014 07:32

Firms crunching numbers and algorithms offer a hi-tech route to employees who will fit in – and not quit.

How do we end up in the jobs we end up in? And why did we miss those opportunities we had set our hearts on? If most of us look back, the reality is likely to be as fraught with chance as any other aspect of our biography. Our working lives are essentially fictive constructs, born out of the fantasy and chemistry of CV and interview, the lucky break or wrong call, the age-old laws of square pegs and round holes, or, just occasionally, of "perfect fit".

Where such randomness exists now, of course, "big data" – that amalgam of all that we and our fellow digital citizens do online, the gigabyte human traces we bequeath second by second to machines – is certain to follow.

None of us would like to think of our essential self – our talents and skills, traits and quirks, education and experience, those all-important extracurricular passions and hobbies – as being reducible to a series of data points, a set of numbers and correlations. But what if such information could help us find our perfect workplace, our ideal match?

The full article by Tim Adams on The Guardian