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Then he gave everyone a short programming puzzle. For the rest of the hour-long meeting, Partovi asked questions. He remembers that Myers did well on the programming test, and after talking to him for thirty to forty minutes he became convinced that Myers had, as he puts it, “the right stuff.” Partovi spent even less time with Myers than I did. He didn’t talk to Myers’s family, or see him ecstatic or angry or depressed, either. He knew that Myers had spent last summer as an intern at Microsoft and was about to graduate from an Ivy League school. But virtually everyone recruited by a place like Tellme has graduated from an elite university, and the Microsoft summer-internship program has more than six hundred people in it. Partovi didn’t even know why he liked Myers so much. He just did. “It was very much a gut call,” he says.

This wasn’t so very different from the experience Nolan Myers had with Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft. Earlier that year, Myers attended a party for former Microsoft interns called Gradbash. Ballmer gave a speech there, and at the end of his remarks Myers raised his hand. “He was talking a lot about aligning the company in certain directions,” Myers told me, “and I asked him about how that influences his ability to make bets on other directions. Are they still going to make small bets?” Afterward, a Microsoft recruiter came up to Myers and said, “Steve wants your e-mail address.” Myers gave it to him, and soon he and Ballmer were e-mailing. Ballmer, it seems, badly wanted Myers to come to Microsoft. “He did research on me,” Myers says. “He knew which group I was interviewing with, and knew a lot about me personally. He sent me an e-mail saying that he’d love to have me come to Microsoft, and if I had any questions I should contact him. So I sent him a response, saying thank you. After I visited Tellme, I sent him an e-mail saying I was interested in Tellme, here were the reasons, that I wasn’t sure yet, and if he had anything to say I said I’d love to talk to him. I gave him my number. So he called, and after playing phone tag we talked — about career trajectory, how Microsoft would influence my career, what he thought of Tellme. I was extremely impressed with him, and he seemed very genuinely interested in me.”

What convinced Ballmer he wanted Myers? A glimpse! He caught a little slice of Nolan Myers in action and — just like that — the CEO of a $400 billion company was calling a college senior in his dorm room. Ballmer somehow knew he liked Myers, the same way Hadi Partovi knew, and the same way I knew after our little chat at Au Bon Pain. But what did we know? What could we know? By any reasonable measure, surely none of us knew Nolan Myers at all.

It is a truism of the new economy that the ultimate success of any enterprise lies with the quality of the people it hires. At many technology companies, employees are asked to all but live at the office, in conditions of intimacy that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. The artifacts of the prototypical Silicon Valley office — the videogames, the espresso bar, the bunk beds, the basketball hoops — are the elements of the rec room, not the workplace. And in the rec room you want to play only with your friends. But how do you find out who your friends are? Today, recruiters canvas the country for résumés. They analyze employment histories and their competitors’ staff listings. They call references and then do what I did with Nolan Myers: sit down with a perfect stranger for an hour and a half and attempt to draw conclusions about that stranger’s intelligence and personality. The job interview has become one of the central conventions of the modern economy. But what, exactly, can you know about a stranger after sitting down and talking with him for an hour?

2.

Some years ago, an experimental psychologist at Harvard University, Nalini Ambady, together with Robert Rosenthal, set out to examine the nonverbal aspects of good teaching. As the basis of her research, she used videotapes of teaching fellows that had been made during a training