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Hiring is hard. General managers know it. Startup founders know it. School principals and casting directors know it. But for readers who are none of those things, consider America’s most public hiring processes—aside from presidential elections, perhaps—which are sports drafts.

Every year, millions of Americans watch professional talent evaluators try to predict who will be the best future athletes in the NBA and NFL Drafts. Again and again, audiences get valuable lessons in the inability of experts to divine future talent. Scouts aren’t dumb. Overall, the first pick tends to be better than the tenth pick, and he tends to be better than 100th pick. But years after the draft, at least one squad almost always looks foolish. For every top five team that can’t believe it picked a Darko Milicic or Ryan Leaf, there is a top five team that can’t believe it missed a Stephen Curry or Tom Brady.

Hiring is hard for the same reason that dating is hard: Both sides are in the dark. "The fundamental economic problem in hiring is one of matching with costly search and bilateral asymmetric information,” Paul Oyer and Scott Schaefer write in "Personnel Economics.” In English, that means hiring is expensive, time-consuming, and inherently uncertain, because the hirer doesn't know what workers are the right fit, and the worker don’t know what hirers are the right fit.

But hiring is not hopeless. Like any consequential business decision, it has been exhaustively studied. The companies with the most successful hiring practices are the ones who learn which metrics and processes reliably help to predict performance and quickly identify the metrics and processes that are complete wastes of everybody’s time.

Here again, sports are instructive. One of the most important jobs of a scout is to isolate skills (which are inherent) from outcomes (which depend on a zillion variables). In baseball, for example, it’s impressive for any young pitcher to have far more wins than losses. But wins rely on factors like the team’s fielding and runs scored, which don’t have much or anything do with pitching quality. It’s far better for scouts to focus on metrics that the pitcher controls exclusively, like strikeouts and walks. In basketball, scouts have historically been seduced by high scorers on successful college teams. But work by David Berri has shown that raw points and Final Four appearances aren’t good predictors of NBA talent, at all. Instead, subtler statistics like rebounding, assists, and field-goal percentage were much more consistent metrics from year to year.

This is a fundamental challenge in hiring: identifying the metrics that actually predict employee success, rather than relying on the most available pieces of information. The gap between these two groups is quite clear in one of the most popular industries to study the science of hiring: American schools.