Most hiring managers believe they are accurate assessors of talent. Even when confronted with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they still trust their hiring ability over someone else’s. Why is this disconnect so prevalent?
I believe it comes down simply to gut-level hiring. If you rely on your gut to tell you if a candidate is strong, there is no appreciable way to outsource your decision to another. You can’t place your feelings into an HR person, an external recruiter or a different process. You simply have to meet candidates face-to-face and hope you aren’t being snowed over by a disingenuous salesperson.
Sounds high risk, doesn’t it? Yet it permeates hiring decisions to this day. What we attempt to do with our customers is move them away from emotional, subjective decisions and towards informational, objective decisions. This approach is best served by keeping the subjective decisions to a minimum, or at least to a later stage in the hiring process. If the objective filtering can occur before the final subjective decision, the over-reliance upon gut-level decisions is greatly neutralized.
The gut will always play a key role in successful hiring and we are not suggesting it be abandoned. However, this subjective manner for hiring is a tremendous hindrance when it comprises the majority of the input in a hiring decision.