Don’t fall (for) first (impressions)

As humans we fall prey to first impressions. We have traditionally given way too importance to what our eyes and ears signal than what our heart and brain do. We see someone, with a pleasing personality (good looks, well dressed, etc.) and we directly conclude that the person must be nice. We hear someone speak nicely, confidently, with command over the spoken language and once again we immediately conclude that the person must be intelligent. Have started to think, how correct have we been or to give justice to the majority sentiment, how wrong have we been all this time!

How many times have we experienced that the ‘nice’ person is not so intelligent after all and the ‘intelligent’ person turns out to be shallow and there’s nothing cerebral after your scratch the surface? So, when recruiters spend on an average 7 seconds to go through any CV, or any major decision to hire the person gets made in the first 5 minutes of a F2F meeting, what do we end up with. Is that one important reason why overall our early attrition rates are on the higher side across companies and geographies, but we generally lay the blame on rushing through the process because of time pressure from the business?

So, here’s the thing, let’s not be presumptuous about all such things. Let’s not get carried away only by what we see and/or hear. Let’s think if this is for real, let’s give it more time when possible. Let’s give space to what we feel in addition to what we think. Hopefully, this will help get to the right decisions!