There's an interesting article in last week's New York Times about pre-hire assessments called "Google Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm."

"As we get bigger, we find it harder and harder to find enough people," Google’s Laszlo Bock, told the Times. "With traditional hiring methods, we were worried we will overlook some of the best candidates."

Google had been focusing on engineers with high college GPAs who interviewed well, but, Bock said, "Interviews are a terrible predictor of performance."

To find out what kind of people they needed, they asked the people they had -- with a 300 item questionnaire asking about knowledge, personaility, and behavior. It even asked about pets and reading habits. They compared the data to their employees' reviews and performance, analyzing two million data points. From that, Google analyst Dr. Todd Carlisle made surveys to give potential employees.

Then again, conceded Carlisle, "It’s like telling someone that you have the perfect data about who they should marry." But this ought to illustrate the importance of using all the information one can to make a sound hiring decision. No one's expecting that companies will cease to do interviews. But college grades aren't the only measure of potential, and neither are interviews.

Fortunately for the call center industry, there are well-established firms that have done the work for you so you don't have to come up with your own surveys and testing algorithms. We'll be talking to some of them in the next few days and we'll post some of their wisdom on the blog.