Do You Really Know Who You’re Following?

Image by 'Pong via Flickr

I was reading Fast Company Magazine this weekend, in print form, and felt compelled to write a follow-up post to my recent question about twitter auto-following being good or bad.  Especially after reading some of the comments in Peter Kim’s post, Some thoughts on Twitter autofollowing.

To make a long story short, Dan and Chip Heath (authors of Made to Stick) wrote a piece on the fact that interviewing potential employees is almost a complete waste of time.

What was cited in the Heath brother’s article was the study conducted by psychologist Robyn Dawes, where in 1979 the University of Texas Medical School had to admit 350 of 800 applicants into their program.  With grades being relatively equal, the school used an interview rating system as their means to determine who would be admitted into the program.

They picked their top 350 and were later forced to admit an additional 50 applicants into the program at the last minute, due to a mandate from the Texas State Legislature. Because it was late in the year, these next 50 applicants were among the “worst interviewees” in the bunch who had not been accepted elsewhere to date.  They were the people in the 700-800 interview scale range.

What was discovered was that interview skills had neither a noticeable positive or negative effect on a student’s grades or on their ability to practice medicine after graduation. The interview was a worthless criterion for judging potential.

Here is the connection:

I bring this up because there seems to be a mentality within the twitter platform, that if you aren’t screening the people you follow, by at least reading their 140 character bio, then you aren’t getting to know them. My question is: If interviewing somebody for an hour is not a good way to understand an individual’s capabilities, then how can scanning keywords in a sentence that an individual wrote about themselves be a good way to understand their capabilities?

It’s silly to think that’s possible… or superior in some way.

Which is why I’ve adopted the approach of following everybody and unfollowing as people fill my tweet stream up with clutter.

What do you do?