Don Peck's They Re Watching You At Work

The search for meaningful patterns in data has always been at the forefront for curiosity. From scientists examining the infinite blackness of space to find a set of laws in an otherwise chaotic universe, to children exploring their small ecosystem in search of reasons as to why Mother always responds positively to laughter, analytics is deeply ingrained in all of society. This phenomenon of humanity's recent obsession of metrics have now invaded the work environment. For companies that have accepted this recent shift, every action that an organization does is calculated and methodical. In Don Peck's They're Watching You at Work, Peck questions the strength of predictive and statistical analysis in the workplace. Intrusive and expensive,

By relying on people analytics, hiring managers will be able to absolve themselves of direct liability, as they would blame the algorithm, stagnating the market and not incentivizing the workplace to improve. In a traditional setting, if a hiring manager were to hire bad workers repeatedly, the corporation would simply fire the manager and hire a new, hopefully better one; management would be able to see immediately any improvements to their newly hired employees. On the other hand, companies who utilize people analytics would have to complain to the analytics company, who would then have to change their algorithm, and then send it back to the company for further testing. Since algorithms rely on a large amount of data points and metrics in order to hire good candidates, it would take much longer than the traditional interview to see results. Removing people analytics entirely will force the responsibility for recruiters to hire, in their minds, the very best candidates. Peck would counter this argument by arguing that without people analytics, the tools to hire the very best would not exist, as utilizing people analytics makes it much easier to hire exceptional workers. One advantage to using people analytics is that it is difficult to know exactly what the algorithm is looking for, making it difficult to fake any qualifications. Additionally, to support the argument for people analytics, if “we all... [were] liable to be observed, our morals would be reformed”, which may be beneficial in looking for honest workers (Singer 6). However, traditional interviews have been utilized for a very long time to great success as it is difficult to perceive what the interviewer is exactly looking for; thus, candidates are more likely to act true to