Hiring Via "Gut Feeling"
If ever you wondered why hiring is such a gamble, feast your eyes on these 4 paragraphs from Inc.com’s Survey: Hiring Often Based on “Gut Feeling”:
Most small-business owners hire employees based on likeability, rather than qualifications, according to a recent survey.
In a survey of 500 small businesses nationwide conducted by The Price Group, a Texas-based marketing firm, 90 percent of owners said they decide whether or not to hire job applicants based on a gut feeling. Many reported having no formal hiring assessment process.
The reason is that most small employers find hiring assessments too costly, according to Bette Price, president of The Price Group. “Unfortunately, they fail to look at the high cost of making a hiring mistake,” Price said in a statement.
In addition, 75 percent of employers surveyed said that didn’t offer formal training for new employees.
That is the entirety of the news brief. My suggestion, always use an objective assessment and follow a hiring process that limits gut-level decisions. Once you hire them, have an onramping program to get the greatest return out of your investment.
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Posted By Derrick Moe | Assessing, Hiring, Hiring Salespeople | |
This comes as no surprise to me. It’s not just small companies. I have sat on the panel of interviews in mid size (1000 FTE+) companies where other panel members have given gut-feeling as the reason for not employing a prospective sales person (I have also been in one where the sales director said the candidate had “funny hands”, but that’s another (sad) story).
Interestingly, Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink” convincingly argues for the use of gut feeling in more important decisions. I would be very interested to see some kind of measure of how effective using gut feeling is in successful recruitment. Until I see the evidence though, I’ll want objective assesments.
Hiring by ‘gut feeling’ is the most effective recruiting strategy I’ve found over the years. A test does not indicate how well someone is going to ‘fit in’ and do the job. It doesn’t measure their likeability or the many intangibles that are aspects of many positions.
Think about what the ‘gut feeling’ really means though and how it comes about. Yes, there are those silly instances where you hear of someone just not liking a candidates shoes or style of dress or whatever, but that is really rare.
Usually the ‘gut feeling’ is a sharply honed intuition specific to the job at hand and the feeling comes from the hiring manager talking to the candidate about what they’ve done and how they could do the job they’re looking to fill. If they like what they hear, and like the person, and the references check out…then the ‘gut feeling’ makes a lot of sense. And in most successful hires, this is what I see happening.
Pam
Not sure what happened, but that should have read,
A test DOESN’T indicate how well someone is going to ‘fit in’ and do the job.
sorry about that.
Hmmm, just noticed that several words have been cut out of the post…strange glitch
First off, I apologize for the text issues with the blog. If you hit refresh, it reloads all the words.
In terms of gut-level hiring, we work exclusively in the sales hiring world where your gut can be fooled by a smooth sales candidate. Many hiring managers think they can survive solely on their feelings about a candidate - this is where we see the bad hires occurring.
The approach we advocate is not to abandon your intuition. Instead, we introduce objective data into the process BEFORE intuition is introduced.
The role of the test is to provide a view of a candidate that even the best interviewers cannot see. Their natural aptitudes, preferred rewards and subtle motivations are all revealed in the test. Now, if you take that information and combine it into a hiring process, you will greatly decrease your wrong hires (which come at a huge cost).
I’ll stop here since this topic warrants a follow-up post which I’ll write tomorrow. Thanks to all of you for weighing in. I’ll try to write something provocative tomorrow!