Metrics are the Problem Around Majors – Not Hiring Philosophy

One of the re-occurring themes of last year was the debate around liberal arts vs. more technical education as it relates to hiring. While a consensus that we need more STEM majors to fill STEM jobs in the US, there is still an active debate around which type of graduate is best to hire. Both the New York Times and the Harvard Business Review have recently discussed the issue.

One side of the debate: liberal arts folks are the “creative innovators” The other side: The creative aspect is great – while the rest of the world pumps out engineers in droves who can actually build things, we are building a nation of “creative types” with no tangible real skills.

Who is right?

As with most debatable/interesting questions, both ideas are “right”. Creativity and innovation can be produced by both liberal arts majors and pure engineers, and liberal arts majors can usually be taught the skills that are necessary to do the tasks that technical majors can achieve (within reason).

Many business owners will tell you they don’t care about majors, schools, and backgrounds as long a candidate has a “good head on their shoulders.” This is really not realistic – the initial HR resume screen is based on those metrics – so they actually do matter. It’s not that those companies want to hire based on “academics” vs. “well roundedness” – but this is the hiring dat a they are presented before they can travel to campuses to interview candidates. In other words, companies would love to really inspect a candidate’s well-rounded workplace personality & creativity, but it gets really expensive. Until there is a scalable way to measure both the hard skills and soft skills companies care about – the system will remain the same.

What’s the solution?

Let’s start measuring what we can in consistent way so we can get some hard data on the issue. Soft skills are tough to judge via a set number – but given the current influx of degree holders and grade inflation, so are hard skills. Instead of focusing on which type of higher education is better, we should be focusing on which aspects of each trait we can measure consistently across candidates. In my biased opinion, believe we should start with the easier and more understandable metrics around hard skills and knowledge, then move towards a systemic ranking of the soft skills once that’s achieved.