I came up with many reasons why this approach might fail. The fact there are so many suggests that I don’t have very a good model and/or may be engaging in motivated reasoning.
In the general case, the recipients of the signals may not understand what is being signalled, or that signalling is involved at all, so they won’t accept a substitute signal. E.g., most people are unaware or disbelieve that education serves for signalling more than teaching. They would not hire people who were merely accepted to MIT and would have received good grades, because they think MIT teaches important job skills.
There are several other potential problems with the given example, which may not be problems with the general approach:
Most employers don’t want to innovate in recruiting strategies. They’re already trying to innovate in R&D or product design or marketing. It makes sense to be conservative elsewhere, due to limited resources (you need good HR to execute an unconventional recruitment strategy) and to hedge risk. They will not want to be the first to adopt a new strategy unless they think it will be wildly better than the standard one. But hiring non-graduates is only better in that it saves money, and that’s not usually a big enough advantage unless the company simply can’t afford to hire graduates. (See: startups founded and staffed by college dropouts.)
There are many potential principal-agent problems. An individual recruiter or project manager may not want to make unconventional choices because they’ll be blamed personally if it turns out badly (“no-one gets fired for buying IBM”). A team or division lead may not want to hire non-grads because their peers and bosses don’t understand their logic, so they’ll be looked down on for having a team with more “junior” people. College graduates on the regular career track may be hostile to non-grads because they perceive them as unfairly being allowed to skip the hard work that the graduates put in.
Large companies (and government agencies, etc.) often regulate the positions offered to company employees in terms of job title, compensation, job progression, and requirements like diplomas. A large company may be the best place to experiment with new, nonstandard approaches to hiring, because it can survive a small experiment failing. But it may be less able to do so in practice, because HR and related departments are vertically integrated, and a software programming team doesn’t have the formal authority to create a new type of position with customized entry criteria and salary.
I came up with many reasons why this approach might fail. The fact there are so many suggests that I don’t have very a good model and/or may be engaging in motivated reasoning.
In the general case, the recipients of the signals may not understand what is being signalled, or that signalling is involved at all, so they won’t accept a substitute signal. E.g., most people are unaware or disbelieve that education serves for signalling more than teaching. They would not hire people who were merely accepted to MIT and would have received good grades, because they think MIT teaches important job skills.
There are several other potential problems with the given example, which may not be problems with the general approach:
Most employers don’t want to innovate in recruiting strategies. They’re already trying to innovate in R&D or product design or marketing. It makes sense to be conservative elsewhere, due to limited resources (you need good HR to execute an unconventional recruitment strategy) and to hedge risk. They will not want to be the first to adopt a new strategy unless they think it will be wildly better than the standard one. But hiring non-graduates is only better in that it saves money, and that’s not usually a big enough advantage unless the company simply can’t afford to hire graduates. (See: startups founded and staffed by college dropouts.)
There are many potential principal-agent problems. An individual recruiter or project manager may not want to make unconventional choices because they’ll be blamed personally if it turns out badly (“no-one gets fired for buying IBM”). A team or division lead may not want to hire non-grads because their peers and bosses don’t understand their logic, so they’ll be looked down on for having a team with more “junior” people. College graduates on the regular career track may be hostile to non-grads because they perceive them as unfairly being allowed to skip the hard work that the graduates put in.
Large companies (and government agencies, etc.) often regulate the positions offered to company employees in terms of job title, compensation, job progression, and requirements like diplomas. A large company may be the best place to experiment with new, nonstandard approaches to hiring, because it can survive a small experiment failing. But it may be less able to do so in practice, because HR and related departments are vertically integrated, and a software programming team doesn’t have the formal authority to create a new type of position with customized entry criteria and salary.