What You Do Every Day

Tyler Cowen offered this as a hiring question in a 2022 AEI interview about Talent, the book on spotting ability he wrote with Daniel Gross. The heuristic is simple: don’t rank a candidate by the numbers everyone can already see, like blog readers or follower counts, because “Everyone else sees those numbers too.” Look instead at what they do every day.

The book’s best-known question works the same way: it asks what tabs you have open in your browser. Open tabs are a record of what you actually read and return to, which is harder to stage than a stated interest. Cowen’s confidence in this approach comes from years of screening applicants for Emergent Ventures, the grants program he runs. Applicants come from all over the world, many of them young, self-taught, or from places where a résumé means little, so there is no pedigree to fall back on. What a person has actually made is all that is left to judge, and it proves to be the better signal anyway.