Living ~400lbs

Having job-hunted recently I found this article in The Economist interesting:

Evolv mines mountains of data. If a client operates call centres, for example, Evolv keeps daily tabs on such things as how long each employee takes to answer a customer’s query. It then relates actual performance to traits that were visible during recruitment.
Some insights are counter-intuitive. For instance, firms routinely cull job candidates with a criminal record. Yet the data suggest that for certain jobs there is no correlation with work performance. Indeed, for customer-support calls, people with a criminal background actually perform a bit better.

Also are observations about trying to gauge honesty and that folks with higher “honesty” scores often aren’t as good at sales.  Ahem?

I was amused at the assumption that folks who use a non-default browser to fill out job applications are better candidates.  I can’t count the number of times a job application form would crash in non-IE browsers!