Many CEOs and owners of second stage businesses routinely use their intuition to make important decisions. In fact, research has proven that our intuition—our “gut” reactions—are an integral part of our decision-making process, linking our physiological states to the executive centers of our brain.

If you're hiring for a key position, you may tend to put even more importance on being a "good judge of character"--how you feel about the candidate when he or she looks you in the eye, shakes your hand, and answers a direct question.

But research has also proven some things about intuition that relate directly to hiring:

• intuition can be fooled
• intuition is only as good as the inputs it has to work with
• intuition favors snap decisions and first impressions
• intuition doesn’t understand objective data like rankings, scorings, and numerical evaluations
• intuition accepts non-rational inputs, e.g., "he looks like that guy in high school that I never liked"

Given all that, there are clearly some decisions where even the best intuition needs to take a back seat to systematic evidence-gathering, testing and analysis. The recruitment and selection process to fill key positions in your company is one of these.

You're Already  Doing This Elsewhere

You probably already use this kind of systematic approach to make other important decisions.  If you need to choose among several raw materials for a new process or product, do you select the one with the best advertising? Not likely. You'd probably conduct a rigorous evaluation. You'd probably start by ranking the importance of the functional properties the material needs to have, and working out a scoring system for cost, availability, quality, ease of use, shelf life, etc. Then you’d gather sufficient samples of the materials, subject the materials to consistent testing and analysis, capture the same metrics for each and create scorecards. Finally, you might seek outside confirmation of your results by asking others about their experience.

In the end you’d be confident that you’d picked the best material, and you’d know what to expect from using it.

Evidence-based hiring applies the same sort of process to filling key positions. You start with relevant, unbiased standards and requirements for the job. You decide on the nature and number of interviews, the kinds of assessments or tests to use, the means of checking references, background, etc.  You develop a scoring and ranking system for candidate's strengths and weaknesses. Most significantly, you interact with and evaluate all the candidates in a consistent way.

Next: A Closer Look At Evidence-Based Hiring

We hear this quite often. And we understand the frustration.

You finally step up to the plate and spend the money to make that key hire, the one you've been putting off. Maybe it's the phenom sales manager known for leading teams to triple-digit gains. The production leader who trained at P&G. The logistics guru you lured away from Amazon. Whatever the particular role, this was the big one: the functional area specialist who can solve the problem holding you back from true greatness.  The one who can make things happen.

Except they aren't working out. And things aren't happening.  So now you’ve got a new problem: do you keep them or let them go? And if you let them go, how do you avoid making the same kind of mistake next time?

Prevention Beats Intervention

Let's answer the last question first.  Make a commitment that from now on you'll use a systematic, evidence-based hiring process to find, evaluate, and select the right candidates for your key positions. No matter how urgent the need. No matter what a great first impression someone makes. Anything less is too risky. A systematic hiring process will add some time and cost up front. The added time and cost required to ensure you make a good hire is pocket change compared to the costs of hiring an unsuitable person.

In fact, without a validated evidence-based approach to hiring, you may have difficulty even figuring out if you made a good hiring decision. Your new hire may be an expert at his job, but the job doesn't exist in isolation, and a second stage company is a unique environment.  It's small, fast-moving, and let's face it, quirky. A lot of the processes are home-grown, a lot of the expertise has yet to move from brains to systems, and a lot of the dynamics are more "family tradition" than functional practices.

There's a learning curve with all that. So if your new hire hasn't hit their stride after three or fourth months, is that just part of the learning process or do you need to look for a new replacement? By doing your homework before making the hire, you'll be a lot more confident in "trusting the process" as your new hire gets oriented and comes up to full speed.

Next: The Evidence For An Evidence-Based Approach To Hiring