Hiring with your gut

Big companies hire based on experience, education, docility, and quality of handshake. A company can probably do better by "trusting their gut" and taking slightly riskier applicants, because risk is proportional to reward. Makes sense.

But I think there's a level beyond that where a company uses a hiring process designed to avoid biases. Biases based on age, gender, race, nationality, physical appearance, accent, etc. inevitably play a role in hiring decisions, and a company that could neutralize those effects could win big. This is the opposite of trusting your gut.

In fact, a company that specifically recruited ugly people (and other victims of biases) could probably get the same quality employees as their competitors, but much cheaper. It's like value investing. I'm not sure how legal that would be, though.

(This reminds me of Moneyball, by Michael Lewis.)