> Suppose that you need to hire a sales representative for your firm. If you are serious about hiring the best possible person for the job, this is what you should do. First, select a few traits that are prerequisites for success in this position (technical proficiency, engaging personality, reliability, and so on. Don't overdo it — six dimensions is a good number. The traits you choose should be as independent as possible from each other, and you should feel that you can assess them reliably by asking a few factual questions. Next, make a list of those questions for each trait and think about how you will score it, say on a 1-5 scale. You should have an idea of what you will call "very weak" or "very strong."
> These preparations should take you half an hour or so, a small investment that can make a significant difference in the quality of the people you hire. To avoid halo effects, you must collect the information on one trait at a time, scoring each before you move on to the next one. Do not skip around. To evaluate each candidate add up the six scores ... Firmly resolve that you will hire the candidate whose final score is the highest, even if there is another one whom you like better — try to resist your wish to invent broken legs to change the ranking. A vast amount of research offers a promise: you are much more likely to find the best candidate if you use this procedure than if you do what people normally do in such situations, which is to go into the interview unprepared and to make choices by an overall intuitive judgment such as "I looked into his eyes and liked what I saw."
But just to be a little bit contrarian for the sake of conversation: Has it been shown that ignoring your gut instinct or even who you like most if inherently wrong? That kind of testing definitely removes a lot of bias, but it just assumes that biases are inherently bad.
There certainly ARE bad biases (sexism, racism, etc). But you may also need to work with the individual you're recruiting, so how well you think you can get along with them or work with them is likely important too.
Plus if this method was common, do you think candidates would prep specifically for those scores? Seems like something very easily gamed. Not to mention that scoring itself can be biased.
As I said at the start, I actually like that, and think they're on the right track. But I'd likely want to combine it with something LESS subjective to get a fuller picture of a candidate.
One thing to consider is that the gut is a collection of relationships and groupings based on experiences and cognitive processes.
This is great for some circumstances. I don't need to take a tally of all the stats to ensure I'm making the most educated choice (based on reviews, calories, health safety, longitudinal studies, etc.) of which sandwich to buy at the deli.
On the flipside, our gut can betray us. One of the chapters of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink talks about a story of New York Cops whose instant reaction caused the wrongful death of a innocent because their heuristics that formed assumption after assumption were just flat out imprecise. Signs that should've flagged them to check their assumptions actually only reinforced their view. From their perspective they truly believed their conduct was in line with what they expected. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman provides numerous gambles where our intuition guides us to make suboptimal or imprecise choices due to loss-aversion, endowment theory, et al.
I have to go but I don't have a perfect answer for you. But I will provide a Kindle two highlights that I highlighted in a book I'm reading called Rational Choice in an Uncertain World:
> Our decision-making capacities are not simply “wired in,” following some evolutionary design. Choosing wisely is a learned skill, which, like any other skill, can be improved with experience. An analogy can be drawn with swimming. When most of us enter the water for the first time, we do so with a set of muscular skills that we use to keep ourselves from drowning. We also have one important bias: We want to keep our heads above water. That bias leads us to assume a vertical position, which is one of the few possible ways to drown. Even if we know better, in moments of panic or confusion we attempt to keep our heads wholly free of the water, despite the obvious effort involved compared with that of lying flat in a “jellyfish float.” The first step in helping people learn to swim, therefore, is to make them feel comfortable with their head under water. Anybody who has managed to overcome the head-up bias can survive for hours by simply lying face forward on the water with arms and legs dangling—and lifting the head only when it is necessary to breathe (provided, of course, the waves are not too strong or the water too cold). Ordinary skills can thus be modified to cope effectively with the situation by removing a pernicious bias.
> The greatest obstacle to using external aids, such as the ones we will illustrate in this chapter, is the difficulty of convincing ourselves that we should take precautions against ourselves as Ulysses did. The idea that a self-imposed external constraint on action can actually enhance our freedom by releasing us from predictable and undesirable internal constraints is not an obvious one. It is hard to be Ulysses. The idea that such internal constraints can be cognitive, as well as emotional, is even less palatable. Thus, to allow our judgment to be constrained by the “mere numbers” or pictures or external aids offered by computer printouts is anathema to many people. In fact, there is even evidence that when such aids are offered, many experts attempt intuitively to improve upon these aids’ predictions—and then they do worse than they would have had they “mindlessly” adhered to them. Estimating likelihood does in fact involve mere numbers, but as Paul Meehl (1986) pointed out, “When you come out of a supermarket, you don’t eyeball a heap of purchases and say to the clerk, ‘Well, it looks to me as if it’s about $17.00 worth; what do you think?’ No, you add it up” (p. 372). Adding, keeping track, and writing down the rules of probabilistic inference explicitly are of great help in overcoming the systematic errors introduced by representative thinking, availability, anchor-and-adjust, and other biases. If we do so, we might even be able to learn a little bit from experience.
Sounds more like it would take thousands of years if not eternity to prepare, as it involves a) accurately identifying personal characteristics related to professional success and b) predicting the future.
They ask interviewers and hiring managers to ignore "future potential". Humans are incredibly bad at predicting the future. Even if you think you can say how a person will perform in 5 years, the role might change, the market might change, customers preferences, personal developments, etc...
For more junior candidates I'd go the "take home test" route, for senior candidates I don't see any other solution than sitting down and design the process properly.
Finally, companies never pay you back appropriately for your time investment. If you fail the question, they don't give you a detailed report of why you failed. I'll always politely turn down a take home test.