But can brain imaging research really be applied practically in the workplace? And can it solve America’s multi-billion-dollar mis-hire problem?
Let’s take a look at the evidence…
Hiring today: a $$$ no-brainer
One thing everyone can agree on: hiring today needs some
serious fixing. Almost half of new hires don’t last even eighteen months in the job. The costs of these thousands of mis-hires
– and they happen even at highly regarded companies – are frightening.
No
other core business process would be allowed to get away with these kinds of
inefficiencies. It’s time to get hiring
to work.
First, though, we have to understand why hiring isn’t delivering
great results. It is unlikely to be
because of under-investment – hiring costs continue to rise year-on-year and are up by 7% in 2014. Much more likely is that too much time
and money is being spent on activities that do not accurately predict
performance in the job.
Hiring, after all, is making a prediction – choosing in
advance the best performer from a pool of potential candidates. There has been a lot of research into which factors predict success at work, and many common selection inputs
such as the résumé, the traditional interview, a candidate’s years of
experience have been shown to be at best weakly reliable pointers to future success.
Of course, it is not only recruiters who are getting things
wrong. Not every job candidate has great
self-knowledge. It’s easy to get seduced
by the idea of being a leader, for example, even if you rarely demonstrate the
characteristics and abilities that typify great leadership in action. And if we know ourselves only partially, we
hardly know jobs at all. Most of us have
limited and distorted ideas about what different jobs and organizations are really
like, about which factors reliably drive success and which are less relevant.
Neuroscientists are convinced they can do better. They point to the scientific research behind
their approaches and to the ease and accuracy of assessment. Let’s take a look at what they do:
The case for neuroscientific hiring
We may not yet have the technology to create the World’s First Bionic Man, but using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and other new
approaches we can see with increasing clarity what’s popping in our brains.
Researchers have peered inside people’s heads while they play games,
make decisions, solve problems and experience emotions. They have also looked at the interaction of
brain processes with physical actions – how people’s faces or pulse rates
change when experiencing specific emotions, for example. From these experiments they have found
evidence for four broad categories of neurological activity: mental processing
speed and accuracy, memory, executive control, perception and social
cognition.
Companies have taken these research findings, and the
experiments which reveal them, and used them to assess job and career fit. Candidates take anything from two to twelve assessment
exercises that feel like 1980’s videogames or lab experiments. They
get feedback, which is sometimes quantitative (“You solved the problem faster
than 60% of our peers”) and more often qualitative (“You’re risk-averse”; “You’re
a quick thinker”). Results are matched
against jobs and careers, based on profiles determined by an employer and/or by
data from similar jobs. Typically, an
individual is given career recommendations and perhaps development suggestions while
an employer gets presented with the profiles and contact details of candidates
who match well to the job.
Neuroscience companies claim that this approach solves key
problems with the hiring process: assessments that rely on candidates’ limited
and often inaccurate self-knowledge, assessments that can be gamed by savvy
candidates, and assessments that are subject to bias on the part of recruiters
and hiring managers. By using
brain-games, they say, they can get at the real truth about a candidate to help
individuals go beyond their prejudices to find the right career and help
employers identify the right, high-performing new hire.
Does it work?
Before we look at the specific claims made for
neuroscientific hiring, I have a more fundamental question: does what is revealed
by the neuroscience tests genuinely predict performance at work?
The evidence is mixed.
When we compare neuroscience data to other research linking ways of
thinking to work outputs, we find some overlap, but also some differences. Cognitive ability – mental processing speed
and accuracy – is a big area of neuro-investigation and has been shown to be
highly predictive of future work success.
But the evidence is much less clear when it comes to other factors. We can measure someone’s short-term memory
capability quite accurately, for example, but it’s much less clear how
important short-term memory is for success at work, or success in particular
kinds of work, or how it operates outside the calm, one-on-one conditions of a
laboratory experiment. It may well be
that short-term memory ability really does distinguish the best from the rest,
but so far nobody has proved it.
There is also an issue of whether the tests are measuring
what the researchers think they measure.
It’s a fascinating idea that we can peer into someone’s brain and see
what they are thinking – including which celebrities they obsess over – but the reality of brain imaging is a little more complex.
Take emotional states. Recent meta-analysis has found no reliable evidence that the brains of people experiencing an emotion
all react in the same parts, or in the same way. Brain scans of people experiencing fear, for
instance, show different patterns and intensities of electrical activity. Back in 1996 Daniel Goleman coined the catchy term
Amygdala Hijack to describe an overwhelming fight-or-flight response, but more
recent research has suggested that he got it wrong.
Only a quarter of studies since 2009 showed
an increase in amygdala activity during fear, and many studies showed amygdala
activity increasing during non-emotional thoughts and experiences. Even more significantly, individuals whose
amygdalae have been destroyed can often still experience full emotional
lives. The seductive idea that we can
measure electrical activity in the amygdala and thereby discover the intensity
of someone’s terror is just not true.
People may experience the fight-or-flight response, but that experience
does not happen only or perhaps at all in their amygdalae.
These mistakes variations in the experimental data
exist because the brain is extraordinarily adaptive. Different parts of our cerebral cortex cantake on different functions well into adulthood. The
reality – so far as we currently understand it – is that the brain is a bunch of
multi-purpose networks that come together in a variety of ways to make our
minds and bodies work. Mapping those
networks and pathways is work still to be done, and perhaps needs more advanced
imaging technology to be feasible.
It’s not just brain imagery that has been often
misinterpreted, but all kinds of other physical-response-derived neuroscience
data. We may kid ourselves we can recognize lying and emotions by micro-analyzing facial expressions,
but the evidence just isn’t there. Big-data
comparisons of facial analysis research studies find no consistent emotional facial expressions – different people experiencing the same emotion will show a
range of expressions (and a range of other physical symptoms such as heart
rate).
Given the uncertainties around the research on which these
games and tests are based, and the lack of solid evidence linking their results to
actual successful performance in specific jobs, they cannot demonstrate that
they get around candidate self-ignorance or lying, or that they are less
subject to bias than other recruiting methods.
You may believe they are better, but there is simply no evidence either
way to justify that belief.
What really works
When it comes to something as important as hiring, we really
should trust the evidence and not our prejudices. There have been decades of research into
predicting work performance, and the right combination of assessments can get
you correlations with future performance of over 0.7 – an outstandingly high
predictive value which some selection experts believe can be increased to over 0.8 for certain roles when
supplemented with the right mix of focused interviewing and other techniques.
Of course, assessments don’t sound quite as cool as
neuroscience games (and neuroscience gaming is a real market competitor with
the likes of Candy Crush, never mind the fact that earlier claims around developing brainpower or protecting against
Alzheimer’s have been proved false). But
would you rather have a fun recruiting approach, or get genuinely
business-transforming results?
I know which I’d want used when it came to my career.
