Do you have the 'biller' instinct?

The other morning at 7.35am I was standing in line at a widely known coffee establishment, on my phone skimming through my inbox for anything I absolutely needed to read. I was a bit distracted thinking about the time, the people around me and my ‘to-do list’ for the day when suddenly I was asked, “What can I get you?”

My mind blanked and I had no idea what to say.

The barista was asking me to make a decision. A decision I should have already made when I had been too busy pondering emails.

A long moment of silence followed before I mindlessly ordered my drink and did my best to return her warm smile.

As I burnt my tongue on the Americano it got me thinking; every day we are required to make quick decisions. In fact, more often than not, we are forced to make them.

Whether it is placing a coffee order, deciding which client to call or which candidate to shortlist there are imminent deadlines to our decisions. We have to be prepared for how we handle them so we can make them quickly and effectively but like it or not, your emotions will drive the decisions you make today and your success may depend upon your ability to understand and interpret them.

SO HOW DO WE MAKE THE RIGHT DECISIONS?

When making a decision, you will often think about the outcome, whether it be short or long term.

Here at SSG we are all about the long-term and as you know, we do not ask for any long-winded business plans when launching our budding entrepreneurs. Fortunately, over the years, we have been able to fairly accurately estimate how our clients are going to perform against their business objectives and we like to think we can take a pretty good stab at how a new recruitment business will perform against their projections.

Within your business, I would assume things aren’t going to be much different? I would hazard a guess that most days you will instinctively use your intuition when making key decisions. A reality of running your own business, of course, is that you will often act on your intuition. All the empirical data you’ve collected over the years as a Recruiter, coupled with all the objective data, will have a very important part to play when making a final judgement. Great information is the basis for great decisions after all!

Having worked in recruitment for over 13 years, I would say that there is no doubt that my sixth sense has a large part to play in my decision making. If something is niggling away at me, there is usually a reason for it. Something is up, but I don’t know why. Dig a little deeper and I often find out the reason. This helps me feel more at ease, certainly when making an important decision as I can justify to myself more than anyone, that I have made the right decision and of course, when doing so I can feel confident knowing that I did the right thing.

WHEN?

So recruiters, when you are selecting candidates to interview for example, when should you trust your gut, even if it doesn’t make sense? And how do you explain that to a client? When that voice in your head says, “The client is the real market expert, not me” – Why should you push ahead with your decision?

This is why. When you know enough about the job market to argue that the hiring manager’s mental picture of ‘what fits best’ is flawed.

How many times has a candidate been offered the job but your client was initially reluctant to meet them? Following a rigorous search process, you select your top 3 candidates for interview. It really is astounding that time after time, the outlier, the person we as recruiters initially had a ‘hunch’ about ended up being offered. If a client has never seen that outlier succeed, they will inadvertently rule them out. If we as recruiters just accept that, then we haven’t done our job properly.

It is a recruiter’s responsibility to educate their client based on their knowledge and the ability to think flexibly on how to solve recruitment challenges. After all, your ‘gut instinct’ is actually a calculated risk based on a deep understanding of all the factors involved in recruitment. In other words, you’re the expert and the more of an expert someone is, the more they should trust their gut when making decisions.

So let’s stay with this then…

HOW DO GOOD RECRUITERS SELECT CANDIDATES FOR INTERVIEW?

Good recruiters understand their market. They know what skills are hard to find and which ones are not and we instinctively say to ourselves, “Let’s focus on what we can find” and not the impossible.

Good recruiters look beyond the CV and are prepared to kiss a lot of frogs along the way.

Good recruiters talk to hundreds of people and have learned to detect patterns in candidate behaviour.

Good recruiters track results and use that data as the basis for their decisions.

HOW RELIABLE IS INTUITION?

In my opinion, intuition gives you the ability to make the right decision quickly and the reliability of it, greatly depends on past knowledge and specific experiences.

Steve Jobs based his career on it, Richard Branson is a big fan and it helps Alan Sugar pick his apprentices!

The saying goes “Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first and the lesson afterwards”. I quite like that.

My interpretation of Mr Wilde’s rather inspirational quote tells me that experience is how you figure things out by trial and error. It is this, that helps build a more reliable intuition. Therefore, you could argue that decision making improves with experience and the more experience and knowledge one brings to the table, the more reliable their intuition will be.

But do we trust our instinct? When we completely ignore our gut, we are more than likely to draw the wrong conclusions. Conversely, the downside to intuition, and logical reasoning for that matter, is an inclination for bias and a natural tendency to ignore all the facts.

For these reasons, we need to learn to read our instincts, listen, trust and understand what they are telling us. Of course, like with many recruiting situations, the best solution is to try and strike a balance.

AND FINALLY…

At SSG, we listen to our instincts and trust yours.

When have you seen great recruitment and terrible recruitment? Do you make your decisions in a different or unusual way? I’d love to hear your comments.