Ususally I try to stay away from politics, but it’s hard to ignore the US Presidential election. Whether you support Clinton, Obama or McCain, you can’t help noticing what candidates have to go through to win elections.

If you’ve ever made a hiring decision based on interviews, you realize how tough it is to get to the “real” person. Some candidates make great impressions during interviews but can’t survive six months on the job. And every so often a lower-ranked interviewee gets hired by mistake and surprises everyone by doing a terrific job. I’ve seen research suggesting that a linear combination of hard numbers (such as GPA and experience) will predict success more effectively than interviewer recommendations.

Conversely, some companies make employees jump through hoops that don’t seem related to career success. Dinners. Group interviews. Stress interviews.

The problem, of course, is that we tend to hire and vote for likeable, attractive people. We’ve all worked for and around some of those likeable, attractive people. If we’re especially unlucky, we have been forced to cover for these people and do their work.

Ideally, we would look at what candidates (and hiring prospects) have accomplished in similar roles. Unfortunately we rarely have access to this information. So we make do with whatever information we can get. And we ask candidates to demonstrate skills that have little relationship to what they’ll do on the job.

Remember the old joke about the drunk who was looking for his keys under a lamp post? “I lost them in the street,” he says, “but it’s too dark to look there.”

It happens a lot in real life, too.