Everyone dreams of hiring the perfect candidate – someone
who’s already a star performer, who has the ideal background, qualities and
qualifications for the job. Job
descriptions tend to be explicitly based around perfect candidate descriptions,
and ATS systems filter candidates based on how well they match this keyword
summary of perfection.
There’s only one problem: hiring the perfect candidate never
works out.
Here’s why…
Not every kind of perfect matters
One of the biggest mistakes in hiring is looking at too many
factors. Not only is it hugely complex
and time-consuming to pull together different sorts of data, but much of the information
commonly gathered in the search for a perfect candidate is actually destructive
to your chances of ending up with a high-performing employee.
It’s all about relevance.
If you base your hiring decisions on irrelevant data, you may as well
write each candidate’s name on a piece of paper, drop them all into a glass bowl
and pick one at random, Hunger Games style.
Letting in any irrelevant data will weaken the reliability of your
candidate selection, skewing your results further towards the chancy end of the
predictive scale.
Let’s look at an example.
Most recruiters salivate if the résumé of a candidate who has already
done the job in question lands on their desk.
But when you look at the research into high performance, you’ll find
that prior experience of the job is a pretty weak performance predictor, with a
correlation of only 0.13 with future success . It’s better than using graphology (the
correlation coefficient there is 0.02) but it’s nothing like as high as the
0.71 or better correlation you get if you focus on the most highly predictive
factors.
No wonder nearly half of all
new hires are gone within eighteen months, if their recruitment was based
around such weakly predictive selection methods.
But some other common selection tools are even worse than
the résumé. How relevant to someone’s
job performance do you honestly think their Facebook photos are going to
be? How relevant is their height or hair
color? Their face shape? Their answer to a question asking them to
describe their closet?
There’s worrying evidence that these sort of obviously irrelevant things are often taken into account in candidate selection,
but there’s not a single research study out there that shows any link between
these factors and genuine high performance.
We’re all biased
Why, then, do we continue using these random factors when
we’re choosing future employees?
Because we’re human, and humans aren’t always logical.
We all have treasured values and beliefs, some of them so
deep we hardly know how to put them into words.
But we have no problem putting them into action. Malcolm Gladwell tells a lovely story about a
screened orchestra audition where the head of the Munich Symphony was so
enraptured by the performance of a French Horn player that he leapt up and
yelled out “We’re hiring that man!”, only to nearly faint from shock when the
screen was removed to reveal a woman.
The
whole reason the Munch Symphony was conducting screened auditions was because
the head of the orchestra wanted to make sure there was no gender bias in hiring. I’m sure if you had asked him in advance
whether a woman could be as strong a French Horn player as a man, he would have
agreed vigorously. Yet when it came down
to it, he heard an excellent French Horn player and immediately associated a
bunch of other qualities with that individual, including the possession of a Y
chromosome.
It’s easy to laugh at such anecdotes, but we are all
biased. If you think you are not, just
take one or two of these short tests which reveal the implicit prejudices many of
us have on a whole range of issues. Choose
the tests that focus on areas where you are sure you are not prejudiced, for maximum impact.
How come we’re all so prejudiced? It’s not – usually – because we’re terrible
people. Many scientists suspect instead
that many common prejudices simply reflect outdated thinking. Back in the Stone Age, for instance, it might
have made sense to choose the biggest person in the tribe to be the
leader. But as the nature of leadership
challenges morphed from “Kill the saber-toothed cat before it eats the baby” to
“Improve shareholder value”, height simply became less relevant. Maybe in another few thousand years our
instinctive reactions to leaders will have changed, by which time perhaps
leadership itself will demand very different qualities.
We also develop biases based on the information we
receive. Most of the stories we hear
about salespeople feature charming, back-slapping characters, the type of fun
and energizing person whom everyone likes to be around, the life and soul of
the party.
The thing is, evidence from high performing salespeople in
real jobs shows exactly the opposite.
It turns out that great salespeople, particularly for
high-value sales, tend to be introverts.
They listen more than they talk.
They get their energy not from being in the thick of social interactions
but from reflecting and planning alone. Glad-handing
does not result in higher sales.
I could cite multiple examples from other fields of work
that prove the same point: when it comes to looking for perfect, most of us see
only what we want to see. Our gut feel in hiring is often (even usually) wrong.
Perfect candidate ≠perfect employee
There’s another reason why you should never set out to hire
the perfect candidate, even if you focus only on factors with proven relevance
to performance and rigorously take steps to eliminate your own biases.
It’s because the perfect candidate is very, very rarely the
perfect employee.
Of course every business wants great employees. But the way to get them is not to look for
perfection in a candidate, even if you are only considering the factors whichare proven-relevant to performance on the job.
The reason you don’t need perfection is that two different
types of factor predict job performance.
The first group are Baselines, the second Differentiators.
Baselines: pass/fail courses
Baselines are the technical skills, knowledge or
qualifications that a candidate has to have to be credible in a specific job – a
clean driver’s license for a chauffeur, knowledge of HTML for a website
programmer, Series 7 and Series 63 qualifications for a stock broker. Every job has its own specific baselines, and
in many jobs if you don’t have the baselines, you can’t even get your foot in
the door.
But baselines only take you so far. When researchers looked at the differences
between top performers and the rest, they found very little evidence that
superior baseline mastery predicts superior work performance. Some top performers have high-level baseline
skills, it’s true, but others scraped through at the third or fourth attempt. It seems that baselines work like pass/fail
courses in college – what matters is covering the ground, not whether or not
you excel.
Differentiators: what it says on the can
Differentiators are, well, different. They tend to be more complex constructs than
Baselines – behavioral and thinking competencies such as Strategic Thinking,
for example, rather than a Baseline like passing the GMAT. They encompass not just an individual’s
capabilities but also his or her preferences and motivations. They dig beneath the surface of technical
skills to profound truths about how people solve problems, how they work with
others, how they get things done.
Differentiators genuinely do differentiate performance. Research over decades has shown strong
correlations between the level of mastery of a particular Differentiator and
success in at work. Each job has its own
set of predictive Differentiators, corresponding to the consistent differences
research has found between the best and the rest. The more proactive and decisive a salesperson
is at work, for example, the better his or her results.
While different things matter for different jobs, there are
three broad Differentiators that are highly predictive of performance:
- Cognitive ability – how you process information and solve problems
- Competencies – the ways of working that lead to high performance
- Culture fit – how well the working environment engages and motivates individuals
Every job will draw on a different mix of these three Differentiators. Some have high requirements in terms of
cognitive ability, for instance, while in others success is driven much more by
competencies. There is no reliable way
to guess these requirements; you have to look at real data from high
performers, or use assessment methods which have already incorporated such
data.
The real trick is to know what is a baseline and what is a
differentiator, and measure them differently.
If a factor is a baseline, just make sure your candidate checks the
box. If it’s a differentiator, look for
depth of mastery and make sure it is relevant for your particular job.
Check your perfect
So, instead of hiring an all-round perfect candidate, focus
on just two things: the baseline requirements and the specific differentiators
for that particular job, and measure them differently as outlined above. This doesn’t add up to many factors – maybe
ten in total. Most can be easily and
accurately measured by assessments and a half-hour focused interview. Using this approach will cut the time and
effort that goes into hiring, and get you, if not the perfect candidate, then
as-close-as-you-can-get-to-perfect employees.
The trick is to resist the temptation of perfection. It’s tempting to think that we should consider
all the factors, that we should trust our gut feel, that we should always look
for more and more data. This only leads
to more work for worse results. Don’t do
it.
Also, remember that people can change. You aren’t going to get a perfect future
employee. You’re going to get someone
who has great potential strengths, but might need to develop more competence in
a couple of areas. Then it’s a matter of
what the person wants to do – are they willing to develop the mismatched
characteristics, do they genuinely want the job and are they ready to start
work? So long as you get someone with
good potential in the most important drivers of performance in the job, and
with the motivation to work hard to be really good, you can work on the
details. You will probably increase
their engagement by doing so – high performers usually want to learn from each
job, and what better learning than increasing their capability to do well?
Nobody’s perfect, and in the end that’s a very good thing
for employers and employees.
