Imagine if at the time of interviewing a new potential team member, you could tell exactly how suitable they are for the position. Are you interviewing a true talent or an empty suit? Will they thrive in your organisation and perform to their full potential? We invited Dr Gorkan Ahmetoglu, Associate Professor of Business Psychology at University College London (UCL) to the ALTO annual conference in Dubai to help us with this topic, that is often overlooked but should be on your top priority list.
Hiring the right people is one of the most important roles of a leader. No matter how competent you are, if you do not put together the right team, you will not succeed. Yet, leaders rarely spend adequate time and attention on this issue. So how do we get hiring right? To answer this question, we need to first figure out why we get hiring wrong. And the answer is: because we overuse our intuition.
Most of our hiring decisions (and in fact most human capital decisions) are based primarily on intuition. When we scan a CV, interview someone, or check a reference, we use our intuition to guide us about what indicates high versus low potential. Yet, our intuitions are highly contaminated with biases. For instance, we are more likely to hire people who have similar education and experience to us, even if we know that the best candidate needs slightly different education and experience. We are more likely to hire attractive, tall, male candidates even if we believe these attributes are not important for performance. These biases are hard-wired into us, so they are very difficult to detect or ignore.
This session explained how to deal with these biases, with some very practical decision tools. These include the use of science based (rather than intuitive) talent frameworks, ranking the characteristics of successful candidates using evidence (rather than intuition), and standardizing as a means to reduce bias and the use of heuristics.
The use of intuition in business is endemic. It needn’t be. Leaders can improve their hiring (and human capital) decisions by using these highly effective and cost-efficient methods.
To learn more about Gorkan’s session, ALTO members please contact Reka for the full video recording and presentation slides.
