How to hire people reliably
You are biased.
This is not an accusation.
In fact, it’s neither good or bad, it’s just a statement of fact.
Last week I wrote about how bias is one of the ways your brain works, and it’s part of how we can make sense of the world around us. And so: all of us are biased. It’s how the equipment works.
A place where we need to be particularly aware of the consequences of this is recruitment.
The question ‘will this candidate contribute to our success in this role?’ is a really hard one to answer. So, in keeping with the way it works, your brain will try and answer an easy one instead, without telling you. Like: ‘how familiar does this person seem?’ — IE are they like me? Do they talk like me? Do we have interests in common? Does their facial structure fit the template of faces I was regularly exposed to in my early life?
We will also tend to try and see things coherently and to minimise our experience of contradictions. If a candidate gives a really good answer to one question, this makes us more likely to look for the favourable features of their other answers. This can change not only our perception of the answers that follow, but our memories of the answers that came before.
It’s important to remember that you’re not doing anything wrong if this happens: it’s how your brain works. Where you are at fault is if you don’t catch yourself in the act of doing these things. Because at that point you’ve stopped being effective: you’re no longer trying to serve the purpose of the recruitment process, which is find someone who will do well in this role.
The good news is there is a tool that can help you — and not only is it free, it’s almost disconcertingly simple. That tool is: a score sheet.
Each interviewer independently scores each question that gets asked to the candidate. They make notes of the key points the candidate makes to help them decide on the score. At the end, each interviewer adds up their scores for all the questions to reach a total. This total score is not the ‘end goal’, but is an aid to your decision-making discussion.
For instance, if different interviewers ranked candidates differently by total score — why did they do that? Did they observe different things? Or did they weight factors differently? If interviewers ranked candidates the same (or, at least, had the same top score candidate) — would there be any problem with offering that candidate the job? Are there any details that the simple score might have missed? Or is the agreement clearly justified?
The score is not the end of the process. It is the beginning. It is how you can start to see - and share, and potentially change - not what you think but why you think it.
By following a structured process in this way, you can direct your energies towards a more focused, fairer and more effective decision-making process.
