Summary: Most hiring decisions are made intuitively, in only four minutes — with 75% of those hires resulting in costly mis-hires. Those who follow Topgrading disciplines enjoy 80%+
excellent hires. By following Topgrading disciplines, Topgraders do trust their intuition … but only AFTER gathering a huge amount of candidate information.
Background: Intuition as a basis of decision-making is enjoying a rebirth. Google “intuitive decision making” and up pops a Boston College press release advocating, “trust your gut.” Or study an article by Burke and Miller, who in an extensive research project, reported the following statistics that should scare the heck out of hiring managers:
Almost all respondents (91.5 percent) said that they had combined intuition with data analysis in their history of workplace decision-making …
Forty percent of the professionals used intuition to make personnel, or people-related, decisions. Such decisions included interviewing, hiring …
Little research has been done on the ultimate quality of intuitively driven decisions. We asked practitioners to rate the quality of the intuitive decisions
they had made and then categorized their open-ended responses. Two-thirds of the respondents felt that intuition led to better decisions. Yeah, good luck, hiring managers! Intuitive hiring is commonplace, but there’s no research on how well it works? Huh? Actually, it was the McGill University studies from decades ago that showed that most managers make hiring decision in four minutes … and spend the rest of the time in interviews selling the candidate on joining the company or unconsciously justifying the hiring decision they already made. I have personally done a lot of informal research over many decades on quality of hires and decision-making approaches, including more than 6,500,
5 hour Topgrading Interviews, with the average executive reporting 10 jobs. So … 65,000 times I’ve asked what methods were used to hire and with what results.
Bottom line: The vast majority of hiring managers trusted their gut with very shallow information (i.e., competency interviews with questions like, “tell me about a time you were well organized”). And 75% of the people they hired turned out to be mis-hires — costly mis-hires. Jonathan Haidt's recent treatise on intuition scares me. In his book,
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012: Vintage), he takes a huge history of human thought and concludes that humans are almost totally emotional in our decisions. He compares emotion to an elephant and rationality as a rider sitting astride the elephant trying unsuccessfully to guide it to a desired destination. In one example, subjects in a study looked at pictures of unknown Republican and Democrat candidates for offices in far-away states, and with no more information than the photos, they favored 70% of the candidates elected. So much for an informed, rational electorate. Fortunately the situation for hiring managers is not hopeless. We can recognize that maybe we are VERY intuitive, but embrace disciplines that make the elephant (intuition) controlled by the rider (rationality).
How Topgraders Beat the “Intuitive” Hiring Approaches. In a sense, they don’t! Topgraders use their intuition, their unconscious deduction and extrapolation, from their extensive career experience, but only
after gathering extensive candidate information. Specifically, Topgraders study the candidate’s extensive Topgrading Career History Form and
Topgrading Snapshot (multi-color picture of the candidate’s total career with accurate boss ratings, full salary history, and more); conduct a tandem Topgrading Interview (two interviewers); and finally, make extensive reference calls with former managers and others … but they don’t play telephone tag because the
candidate arranges the calls. More evidence: In 2012's 3rd edition of
Topgrading, 40 case studies show companies more than tripling their hiring success, from 26% to 85% high performers hired. How? They followed the advice of all the CEOs who said, at the end of each case study, 1) the company is more successful because of Topgrading; and 2) DON’T CUT CORNERS; STICK WITH THE TOPGRADING DISCIPLINES! You can read the advice Topgrading CEOs give would-be Topgraders by
clicking here and reading our Case Studies.
Summary: Follow the advice of managers achieving 85% hiring success and you will use your valuable intuition the right way — after you have gathered a huge amount of information about how the candidate has performed, including their successes, failures, decision approaches, and key relationships.
Published September 10, 2013