Can jelly beans help you improve recruitment?

In an excellent BBC series called "The Code -- Wisdom of the Crowd" prof. Marcus du Sautoy, used a classic experiment to explain crowd wisdom.

First he filled a jar with 4,510 jelly beans.   Then he asked 160 people to estimate the number of jelly beans in the jar.

The estimates given varied wildly, from 400 to 50,000, with most people being way off the mark.

But then he did something which produced an amazing result.  He added up all the estimates and divided them by 160 to produce the average, which was 4,514 -- just 4 jelly beans over the exact total.

When I first saw that experiment I recall thinking there were two important truths in it that we should use in recruitment.

1. Individuals are generally not great at making predictions, but the collective predictions of a group are generally more accurate.
2. The larger and more diverse the pool from which you make predictions is, the better the prediction will likely be.

This is further evidenced by Scott E. Page, a contemporary American social scientist best known for his research on diversity, complexity, and modeling the social sciences, who in 2007 introduced the 'Diversity Prediction Theorem':

..."The squared error of the collective prediction equals the average squared error minus the predictive diversity".

Which put simply, means that when diversity in a group is large, the error of the group is small.

The theorem may have been new, but research shows that the general concept can be traced as far back as an observation by Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton in 1907. when he noted that the average of all the entries in a 'guess the weight of the ox’ competition at a country fair was amazingly accurate – beating not only most of the individual guesses but also those of cattle experts.

The essence of the wisdom of crowds is that their average judgement converges on the correct solution.

So what can this mean for recruitment and diversity?

1. Whilst we can't run around with candidate details and ask 160 people to estimate their likely success in positions, we can instead approach the solution from the opposite side (connect with me and I'll tell you how)
2. We can use this example to underline another key reason diversity is good for business, and in particular, why its great for businesses where teams of people must work together to produce solutions.

A word of warning though, the wisdom of the crowd has an arch enemy, called the 'undermining effect of social influence' (or misplaced bias)

This was shown by a team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 2011 when they asked groups to estimate certain quantities in geography or crime, about which none of them could be expected to have perfect knowledge, but could guess, such as the length of the Swiss-Italian border, or the annual number of murders in Switzerland. Participants were offered financial rewards for good group guesses to ensure they took the challenge seriously.

The researchers found that, as the amount of information participants were given about each others guesses increased, the range of their guesses narrowed, and the average of the range would drift further from the true value.

Put simply, the groups tended towards a consensus opinion, which was shown to be to the detriment of 'Wisdom of the Crowd' accuracy.

So if you're looking to tap into the Wisdom of the Crowd, its far better to seek that wisdom from individuals in the crowd and use an algorithm to converge on the result, than it is to ask the crowd collectively and allow social influence and misplaced bias to reduce the accuracy of the crowds wisdom.

With this in mind, I think companies currently have an amazing opportunity to benefit from cutting edge recruitment tools which use correlation models, and data drawn from large and diverse groups, to make scarily accurate hiring predictions, whilst at the same time removing misplaced bias from recruitment processes.

Keen to know more?   Connect with me, and I'll explain how Allegis Global Solutions can bring this approach to you, and what it could mean for your business.