Harvard Business Review | By Oren Danieli (Ph.D. candidate in Business Economics), Andrew Hillis, and Michael Luca (Assistant Professor of Business Administration). Algorithms have the potential to improve hiring and promotion decisions, the authors argue, but need to be managed.
"We explored that potential in a recent study (American Economic Review, May 2016) on selecting teachers and policemen. We used machine learning algorithms to transform data about teacher and police characteristics – for example, educational background, surveys, and test performance – into predictions about their likely performance in the future. Our results demonstrate that students and communities alike could benefit from a more data-driven selection process. Algorithms can help with some of the nation’s most challenging personnel issues. For example, the data suggest that police departments can predict, at the time of hire, which officers are most likely to be involved in a shooting or accused of abuse."
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