You’ve been interviewing all wrong (and here's what to do about it)
TLDR: It’s about fusion.
Boldly redesign interviews to avoid this psychological trap, hire successfully, and make your business earn more.
How many interviews are taking place at your business today?
Interviews are at the core of so many critical talent decisions; and therefore they’re a critical factor in determining your decisions—and business outcomes.
Research shows these interviews wreak havoc on your business.
Simply, they are the weakest link.
Here’s why.
According to research, this is what happens when you interview a person for a job, program, promotion, etc:
The interviewer makes up his/her mind quickly: meaning, the interviewer “gets a feeling”, “has an intuition”, or “made up his mind” quickly.
The interviewer feels competent—and confident—as in “I know it when I see it”, “I’ve seen this before”, “I am always right”.
The interviewer spends the rest of the interview to “prove” and “confirm” to himself/herself that their “intuition” is (well, what else?) correct.
You’re setting yourself up in a trap
Here’s why it’s a predictable trap of your own making:
Once people “have” an intuition about someone/something, they feel “attached” to it, and they won’t let go (meaning, they won’t change their mind easily!).
Making up your mind quickly, without the thorough information you need to evaluate a person’s suitability, produces (as you might expect) poor/wrong decisions, leading to hiring the least suitable candidates.
Consuming time to “prove” and “confirm” my thinking is correct is a massive waste, because nothing is going to change anyway, except that the interviewer will feel more confident in his intuition and decision.
Multiply this harmful effect by the number of interviews taking place every day at your business and you should see how destructive this is to the bottom line.
Your Solution: Apply Judgment to {Hard Data + Soft Cues}
Quickly-formed intuition is the easy and lazy way to make (unsound) decisions.
Nobel prizewinner psychologist Daniel Kahneman says, “delay your intuition” until you have gathered the necessary information.
Here’s how to do it:
First, get hard data on the relevant decision criteria (eg, skills, abilities) before you interview, which means: before you have a chance to get trapped in premature intuition
Second, use such hard data to guide and inform your questions and gathering of soft cues via interview interaction
Third, apply judgment (which includes your intuition and experience!) to the sum total of hard data and soft cues in order to form your evaluation and decision
Research shows that applying judgment to hard data and soft cues produces the highest quality decisions and outcomes.
For this, we very much like this insight from Steve Lohr of The New York Times:
Listening to the data is important... but so is experience and intuition. After all, what is intuition at its best but large amounts of data of all kinds filtered through a human brain rather than a math model?
Time to Apply Judgment to Data.
Data transform business.
It’s proven, by data.
Use your judgment to make your choice.
Questions? Comments? Message us at business@knackapp.com
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