The Evidence For An Evidence-Based Approach To Hiring

“The people I hire for key positions are the most important people in my company. Why would I trust an outsider to find the right person? I’m the one who knows my company and knows the demands of the job. I should just interview the top applicants and listen to my gut.”

                   – Many Second Stage Business Owners

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

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