HR pro­fes­sion­als are falling over them­selves pro­fess­ing alle­giance to the lat­est and great­est idea to grace the pages of the New York Times and The Econ­o­mist among oth­ers — “Big Data.” Appar­ently HR hasn’t been doing much of a job with assist­ing orga­ni­za­tions on the best way to hire and retain peo­ple, so now the promise of shiny new selec­tion algo­rithms and aggre­ga­tions of “quizzes and games” promise to turn hir­ing into a “sci­ence.” One blog­ger writes “No longer are we just try­ing to fill empty seats as quickly as pos­si­ble. Instead, we’re try­ing to effi­ciently iden­tify the right can­di­date for the job,” an admis­sion of past prac­tice which might say some­thing about the healthy skep­ti­cism devel­oped toward HR by the cor­ner office.

By using moun­tains of data regard­ing every­thing from online habits to text mes­sages to rela­tion­ships on eHar­mony, com­pa­nies can now avoid pesky inter­view ques­tions about past per­for­mance and spe­cific behav­iors. For exam­ple, Big Data tells us that job hop­pers really aren’t a risky hire, they just prob­a­bly weren’t tested prop­erly (assum­ing they stick around long enough to val­i­date the results).

Cer­tainly this approach is new, but rev­o­lu­tion­ary? More likely this is just scal­ing up prac­tices that are of lim­ited value to begin with, a form of per­son­al­ity test­ing on steroids. No doubt it’s hard to make good hir­ing deci­sions, and hir­ing man­agers need to con­tin­u­ally and self crit­i­cally assess their capa­bil­i­ties. HR’s best bet is to help make them more effec­tive, but “Big Data” instead rein­forces ten­den­cies that, although highly placed in the pan­theon of con­ven­tional wis­dom, only con­tribute to HR’s lack of per­ceived value.