A public speed contest let a new clerical trade replace family connections in hiring

问题

Office clerking jobs went to whoever had the right family name, with no way to test anyone's actual typing skill

背景

换别人会怎么做

Keep hiring clerks the way offices always had: on a recommendation letter and a sample of handwriting judged for its appearance rather than any measured, comparable performance number.

他们看到了什么

A stopwatch and an audience turned typing into a number nobody's name could argue with — once speed was the visible proof, whose family you belonged to stopped being the question employers were actually answering.

那一手

At the 1888 Cincinnati contest, Frank McGurrin publicly typed over 100 words per minute using touch typing on a QWERTY keyboard, beating a hunt-and-peck rival in front of witnesses; the recorded score, not McGurrin's background, was what businesses and manufacturers then used to recruit and advertise typists.

为什么管用

A public contest works as a hiring filter because the score is witnessed and hard to fake in the moment, so it substitutes a verifiable performance number for an unverifiable social claim; any employer reading the newspaper coverage could recruit directly off the result without needing a personal introduction to the winner at all.

值了多少

By 1900 women, nearly shut out of clerical work two decades before, were three-quarters of the nation's 100,000 typists, hired on speed.

什么时候会失灵

A speed score only measures speed — it says nothing about accuracy, judgment, or discretion with sensitive correspondence, and a trade that hires purely on the contest number risks missing those qualities entirely unless the test is paired with some check on the parts of the job a stopwatch cannot see.

后来呢

The typing test became a permanent fixture of clerical hiring for the next century, and the public contest that established it is credited as one of the first times an entire white-collar occupation opened to whoever could pass a measurable performance test instead of whoever had the right connections.

资料来源

1. [1]Woman's Place is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers 1870-1930Temple University Press / North Broad Press, 2020temple.manifoldapp.org
2. [2]Women and the Typewritertype-writer.org, 2019type-writer.org

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