Discretion in Hiring*
研究了企业是否及如何采用岗位测试技术，发现测试能提升员工匹配质量约14%，但收益主要来自遵循测试建议的经理，而非频繁例外者，建议企业利用测试分数限制经理自由裁量权。
Please do not cite or circulate without permission This paper examines whether and how firms should adopt job testing technologies. If hiring managers have other sources of information about a worker’s quality (e.g. interviews), then firms may want to allow managers to overrule test recommendations for candidates they believe show promise. Yet if firms are concerned that managers are biased or have misaligned objectives, it may be optimal to impose hiring rules even if this means ignoring potentially valuable soft information. We evaluate the staggered introduction of a job test across 130 locations of 15 firms employing service sector workers. We show that testing improves the match-quality of hired workers, as measured by their completed tenure, by about 14%. These gains largely come from managers who follow test recommendations, as opposed to those who frequently make exceptions to test recommendations. That is, when faced with similar applicant pools, managers who make more exceptions systematically end up with workers with lower tenure. In this setting, our results suggest that firms can improve productivity by taking advantage of the verifiability of test scores to limit managerial discretion. 1 1