HR insights from the NFL draft
“Take all the [NFL football] players picked at a certain position, and rank them in the order in which they’ve been picked. Now ask yourself, ‘What’s the chance that nth player is better than the n + 1?’ If teams were perfect, it would be 100 percent. If they were coin flipping, it would be 50 percent. Across all the drafts and all the positions, the answer is 52 percent. The next time you’re hiring somebody and you’re absolutely sure that this person is the answer, ask yourself whether you have as much information as NFL teams, who got to watch the guy play [in college] for three years.”
—Chicago Booth’s Richard H. Thaler, speaking at “Nudging Now: How Behavioral Economics Explains US Politics,” part of the Chicago Booth Insights series, in May
