What monkeys have to do with recruitment?

Once upon a time Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist and a specialist in primate behavior, started to conduct researches on groups of primates.?

It was noted that the number of social group members a primate can track appears to be limited by the volume of the neocortex (it is a set of layers of the mammalian cerebral cortex involved in higher-order brain functions such as sensory perception, cognition, and generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning and language). This suggests that there is a species-specific index of the social group size, computable from the species' mean neocortical volume.

Or to put it in other words: there is a correlation between the size of this certain brain area in primates which is responsible largely for the social behavior and the size of the respective social groups formed by these primates.?

So Dunbar decided to use this correlation observed for non-human primates to predict a social group size for humans.

And what it has to do with recruitment? Just a moment, we are getting there.

Beginning with the assumption that the current mean size of the human neocortex had developed about 250,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene, Dunbar searched the anthropological and ethnographical literature for census-like group size information for various hunter–gatherer societies, the closest existing approximations to how anthropology reconstructs the Pleistocene societies. Dunbar noted that the groups fell into three categories—small, medium and large, equivalent to bands, cultural lineage groups and tribes—with respective size ranges of 30–50, 100–200 and 500–2500 members each.

Dunbar's surveys of village and tribe sizes also appeared to approximate this predicted value, including 150 as the estimated size of a Neolithic farming village; 150 as the splitting point of Hutterite settlements; 200 as the upper bound on the number of academics in a discipline's sub-specialization; 150 as the basic unit size of professional armies in Roman antiquity and in modern times since the 16th century; and notions of appropriate company size.

So basically by conducting this research Dunbar was trying to calculate a number of meaningful social connections that our brain is able to sustain.?

In 1992 he finally calculated this number, it was called Dunbar's number.?

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.??

So what is this number, according to Dunbar?

He proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.

So there is some evidence that brain structure predicts the number of friends one has.

Dunbar explained that:???

“this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this, in turn, limits group size [...] the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained”.

In the age of the social networks the researches went on to conduct examinations on our social connections and our close relationships: Dunbar’s number accuracy received another confirmation. It turned out that no matter how many “friends” on Facebook we have, we still end up with grouping them according to the inner circles proximity: family, close friends, relatives, good friends, colleagues, up to someone I met at this or that event but hardly remember anything else about them …. And those inner circles on our social networks fall exactly within Dunbar’s estimations.?

Now back to recruitment. You are in a customer facing role and need to build networks and interact with multiple candidates, not only interact but get to know them, build rapport, evaluate their soft skills, have a nice human conversation (without sounding robotic, though I know, you have been repeating some parts of the speech times and times again), you need to remember them somehow to share your impressions with the hiring team, you need to keep in touch with them for the future opportunities… Anyone who worked in a customer facing role knows how tiresome it is with this kaleidoscope of people. I bet you had it: realizing you forgot your customer’s name in the middle of the conversation though you know for sure you were introduced to each other. Remember about Dunbar’s number? So we actually have a natural limit on how many people we can really be close with, meaningfully close: understanding their personalities, maintaining relationships, having real close human connection.?

If you think that you are an “expert” in reading people and rely on your almighty intuition to know and read this candidate in 30-60 minutes of pre-screen, please think twice. It is proved by the scientists that already several seconds before we consciously make a decision its outcome can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain, in about 7 seconds. In the study, participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their left or right hand. They were free to make this decision whenever they wanted, but had to remember at which time they felt they had made up their mind. The aim of the experiment was to find out what happens in the brain in the period just before the person felt the decision was made. The researchers found that it was possible to predict from brain signals which option participants would take already seven seconds before they consciously made their decision. So are we sure we know ourselves enough, with all the tricks of the subconscious iceberg that makes the decisions and 7 seconds later feeds them into our consciousness to be so confident in classifying people into “fit” or “no fit” just after a first 30 minutes encounter?

Here are just some of the most well-known biases: Affinity Bias, Halo Effect, Horns Effect, Attribution Bias, Confirmation Bias etc. But of course there are much more of them, encoded in our brain and staying there even if we know for sure it is wrong.?

A simple metaphor of how even after having studied in details all the possible biases and being so sure that you are aware and immune to them, your consciousness keeps being fed by the same biases from your brain with 7 seconds delay. Just look at the picture with the three lines, it is a well-known optical illusion (The Muller-Lyer), and you know for sure the lines are of the same length, and yet…you still perceive them having different length. This is just the way our brain works. So even knowing for sure they are of the same length, you cannot see them differently, and they still appear visually to you having different length.

So how do we remain personal and human having those limits in our brain and facing unlimited numbers of people we have to interact with and pre-screen, basically largely determining the outcomes of their personality assessment and influencing their destiny in a way: they can be hired or rejected based on this conversation with us??

And how to remain “human” with all this science? How to be natural and friendly and just be “yourself”??

So in order to get away from the transactional recruitment model to the human centric one, we need more than just determination and will, we need to equip ourselves with at least basic understanding of our human psychology and brain functions. We need to shift the paradigm and perceive our job of recruiters as a unique higly technical skill that requires a lot of knowledge, dedication and preparation.

If you got curious about various aspects of decision making and why our predictions often times are so inaccurate and even contradicting, I recommend to read Thinking, Fast and Slow of Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner, and in my opinion, a mind changing book.

My true believe that recruitment requires a more solid scientific foundation, and aligning the hiring skills with the modern knowledge base of neuroscience will alleviate?so many roadblocks and would really boost the recruitment industry forward.

Resources for the article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

https://www.mpg.de/research/unconscious-decisions-in-the-brain#:~:text=The%20researchers%20found%20that%20it,atwhat%20happens%20several%20seconds%20before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow