How Do You Rank Employee Skill?

Pick the best man or women for the job, but how do you do that?

One of the classic attacks on quotas or affirmative action to benefit disadvantaged groups is the claim that by hiring a women or person of color a company is getting lesser talent and is worse off for it.

The implication in this argument is that skill is this linear quantity we can easily rank. We all have some number stamped on our forehead that says how good we are.

This is of course nonsense. “The best employee” or “the most skilled employee” has no clear definition apart from the most primitive and simple jobs you can imagine. If a job only involved picking potatoes as fast as possible then you might be able to rank people on skill.

However most real jobs today involve the use of a multitude of skills. How do you decide who is the best teacher for instance? Who is the better CEO or the best programmer?

Please note that I am not suggesting that such rankings are completely subjective and we cannot know anything. We can tell if somebody is really bad at their job and if somebody is really good. That is not what I am arguing against here. What I am arguing is that if you have a group of very competent employees it will be very hard to rank them from best to worst.