How to spot a good candidate in just 5 minutes....

You can’t. 

Or can you? 

If you have been around people making hiring decisions for any length of time, then you will have often heard phrases like “I know a good candidate as soon as they enter the room”, or “you can tell within the first 5 minutes of an interview if they are any good....”.  Being an HR professional, of course,  I have always had a tendency to be rather irked by these suggestions. It’s either pure arrogance or just a very basic human reaction to recognise, and be positive about, those who are like ourselves. So, I have been drawn to the conclusion that what happens in these snap judgements is that people recognise themselves quickly and that is what is attractive, and they spend the rest of the interview "screening in" and justifying their decision. Confirmation bias. Understandable, but something we always attempt to construct an assessment process around that is reliable and valid, and gives us lots of data points, because we know that will is what will get us the best result. (Much research - Pilburn and Corbridge etc.) 

However recently it was said to me again and in an idle moment I thought to myself that maybe I was wrong, and they were right.  Maybe it is possible to make a recruitment decision quickly and be every bit as reliable as a more considered decision.  So I started to ponder this in a slightly different way.  What we have in every single hiring appointment is a complex decision, in a complex system. There are variables on both sides of the equation, company culture, candidate personal life, perception of brand, mood of the interviewer, fatigue of the candidate and so on that make any window of assessment subject to immense variability.  So I sought some academic support and asked a leading psychologist what academic work there had been done in the science of human thinking about complex decisions.  

I was more than a little surprised by what I read from his response. 

I was directed to an academic piece of work entitled “On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect” ( Ap Dijksterhuis*, Maarten W. Bos, Loran F. Nordgren, Rick B. van Baaren, 2006).  Without summarizing the whole study, they studied product consumer behaviour and concluded that “conscious thinkers were better able to make the best choice among simple products, whereas unconscious thinkers were able to make the best choice among complex products”.  In essence the human brain can’t quite assimilate all that complex data when it comes to making an important decision and deep consideration is no more (in fact less) likely to get a result you will ultimately be satisfied with.  This would appear to be a) counter intuitive and b) rather a poke in the eye for the level of rigour and measurement that we put into making our complex recruitment decisions, if (big if) we can make the jump from consumer products to people and behaviour predictions.  Indeed their paper concludes that there is “…no reason that (the theory) does not generalize to other types of choice ….political, managerial…”. Food for thought. 

So what conclusions did I draw from this? I’m not sure it tells me to cancel the next few assessment centres, abandon every sacred cow I have held on to and throw out my text books, but it might be telling me that “gut feel” would apparently play a more significant part than technically we would like it to.  But of course, our “gut” may understand one half of the complex system better than analysis can, because much of it is based on very human interaction and factors.  Also the study doesn’t say that you reduce the amount of information to consider, but it does say that actually we can’t really process effectively all the different elements in a complex decision terribly efficiently. I’d like to think that there is an academic study waiting to be done to look at this in a recruitment context. That would be really interesting. In consumer product decisions, the product isn't actually making an equally complex decision.  In recruitment there is a double complex decision to be made. Does this mean our chances of failure are doubled? Should we be really surprised by the multitude of reports telling us how many recruitment decisions are bad?

I like this a lot. Not because of any reason other than it is challenging. It will not change the way I operate (for now) but reading the study has certainly made me think about that decision making process a bit differently. If we aren’t actually able to manufacture a way of making complex decisions better, then is there a way we can make the decision less complex? I’ll take the paper author’s advice regarding that, and sleep on it.