I think anything too different from the standard manner of hiring is going to come off creepy to some extent. Much of the way we hire people is probably a deeply ingrained cultural ritual, and large deviations from that script would be disorienting.

Not to say that cultural rituals are a bad thing. Manners and etiquette keep the machinery of society well lubricated and running smoothly, so I'm not a fan of tossing them out and starting anew, tabula rasa.

At the same time, it wouldn't surprise me if the way America does hiring could be improved. In particular, my experience of hiring in tech has been that it's pretty tough to do much better than having 60%-70% of your hires work out. But not only do companies have a tough time with hiring, there's this weird phenomenon where large swathes of seemingly qualified people also have a hard time getting hired. So I'm all for innovation in hiring to the extent that it can fix these problems.

But are these problems really addressable by changes in hiring? It seems like that would be pretty low hanging fruit, so I would expect businesses to have figured this out already. The fact that they haven't makes me wonder if there are other systemic explanations for the problems we're seeing.

For instance, in tech, relatively little filtering is done up front by education and credentialing institutions. Sure, it helps to have a degree from MIT, but there are substantial numbers of successful high-performers in this field without a college education. By contrast, only around 40% of the people who apply to medical school get in, but my understanding is that >99% of all physician and surgeon hires work out. So perhaps tech businesses would experience a similar rate of successful hires if there was something like the medical school filter in the tech world.

As for the tech workers who have trouble getting hired, there are numerous possible explanations. One could be the Dunning-Kruger effect, where low-competence workers are unable to recognize their own skills gaps. Vivek Wadhwa has previously argued that ageism is to blame here, and that tech is really an up-or-out industry. Norm Matloff makes the case -- and granted it's quite controversial and potentially inflammatory -- that abuses of the H1B visa system are too blame.

Clear as mud.

Still, although I don't think the solution lies in this particular hiring innovation -- which wasn't for tech, I'll grant, but the spirit of the preceeding applies to the larger US economy, struggling as it is -- the solution can only emerge from many different actors trying many different things. In that regard, the guy gets my respect. I'm reminded of something Linus Torvalds once said:

"I'm deadly serious: we humans have never been able to replicate something more complicated than what we ourselves are, yet natural selection did it without even thinking. Don't underestimate the power of survival of the fittest. And don't ever make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit. Quite frankly, Sun is doomed. And it has nothing to do with their engineering practices or their coding style."