I think it's interesting that we pretty much can't predict people's job performance ahead of time. Academics don't matter, intelligence doesn't matter, personality tests don't matter, traditional job interviews don't matter.
I was reading What the dog saw: and other adventure stories by Malcolm Gladwell. He talked about researchers at Harvard studying the effectiveness of teachers.
Apparently, if you watch a 10 second video-tape of someone teaching, you can rate their effectiveness as accurately as a class who's had that teacher for a semester. In other words, your snap judgment is pretty accurate.
Same with job interviews. People who watched a video of the first 20 seconds of a meeting between a candidate and the interviewer, judged the candidate just the same as the interviewer did.
Yet job interviews are a rite of passage in our society. I've had dozens and dozens of them. They're a sham, and generally pointless. They're not related to job performance and they're superfluous since you can make up your mind on whether you like a candidate within 20 seconds anyway.*
(*Note: I'm just talking "traditional" job interviews here. Structured, behavioural interviews are shown to be a better predictor of performance. The problem is almost no companies use them. I've had 2 in my life - and I failed to get the job in both of them.)
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