By Bill Caswell
Special to Ontario Construction News
The moment you interview an employment candidate, your emotions come into play. The fact is that in our human systems, emotions trump logic. Such an emotional foray during recruiting often has us select individuals for emotional rather than logical reasons, contributing to the North America-wide 47 per cent failure rate in hiring. Is there an alternative? Yes, there is. Why not scan the thoughts below?
Emotions trump logic
Dr. Daniel Kahneman put across a point so cleverly in his 2011 best-selling book, Thinking Fast and Slow. It is that we humans do not have nearly the control over our thoughts and actions as we think we do, leading us, frequently, to take actions that do not serve us well. CCCC has been putting out a similar message for 20 years, calling it “The Greatest Secret in the World”, which is that emotions trump logic. Therefore, we say that businesspeople must take that factor into consideration and invoke alternatives if possible. Nowhere is this difficulty more apparent than in the hiring process.
If we don’t interview prospects how on earth, do we select them?
You select them by giving the competitive candidates a day-long trial. And to the winner belongs the spoils (the job). We explain the details later in this paper.
How is it that our emotions dominate our logic?
It is very logical to choose alternatives facing you, weighing the pros and cons of each at a time when you are cool, calm, and collected. All well and good.
Christmas has just provided us with an example of emotion over logic. We all know that we are in a climate crisis. At the going rate of power usage, the world may collapse around us from global warming within a generation. This is serious and imminent. The logical thing to do is to restrict our power usage only to things that we need. While Christmas lights are pretty, no one will suffer without them. However, what do we find? Every house on my street and all the streets of my city and most of the cities in this country, and around the world have decided Christmas illuminations are more important than our pending crisis.
That is, our emotions have quickly jumped in to dominate our logical choice of how we should react to the global warming situation. And we rationalize this choice at Christmas. That is, our logic processor colludes with our emotional processor with justifications for using lights: “It’s only a tiny bit of electricity.” “I don’t want my children thinking I’m a grinch.” “After all, Christmas is only once per year.” “I like the lights, so I will do what I want.” And, on and on.
I suspect that many readers while scanning this paragraph will think “For God’s sake why does he worry about this tiny thing of Christmas lights” the emotions kicking in at the mere suggestion of such light reductions. But, collectively, this small power usage, demands gigawatts, folks, adding millions of tons of unneeded atmospheric pollution.
Why are emotions dominant?
Mother Nature built all creatures to put survival at the top of their life’s priorities for obvious reasons. Humans have been blessed with two amygdale glands in the brain that react in microseconds to any perceived threat, real or imagined. It fires off nearly 50 physiological changes to the body to better ensure our chance of survival – adrenaline is up, eyes dilate to see farther, the blood is reorganized for a fight, and so on.
Among those almost-instantaneous changes is a closing down of body actions we don’t need for survival including logical thinking. That is, it shuts down our logical processor in favor of us simply taking quick action for fight or flight without thought. Just do it!
The reason that we have difficulty formulating answers when under stress is because our thinking has deserted us in favor of action-oriented survival behaviour. In short, during an emergency, emotions (reaction to new situations) trump logic.
How the emotions affect hiring
When hiring, first, we are emotionally affected by a candidate who is particularly pleasant, attractive and whose intelligence parallels our own. An attractive female candidate makes most men more accommodating towards her with his questions, tone of voice, attitude, etc. A tall good-looking male candidate becomes more appealing to many women interviewers than a short ugly male.
The interviewer listens more intently, extends the interview time, and shows other favoritisms that have been scientifically measured as significant towards the chance of winning the job.
Second, our brain is built to make quick decisions by connecting the dots. That is, from the bits of information gleaned in a one or two-hour interview we believe we have enough information to decide who, among the candidates, fits our organization best. Even by spreading opinions among multiple interviewers, the joining-the-dots syndrome still takes place individually. The reality is that it usually takes us many months working with the person to find out if they fit or not. (Studies suggest we are bang on only 14 per cent of the time.)
Those two factors are a large contributor to the 47 per cent failure rate in hiring employees whom we want for the long term.
It is the belief of CCCC that even the CV’s introduce emotional reactions that are not helpful. “Look, he speaks four languages; that makes him more interesting to us.” “She uses the same HP laptop as me; she must be smart.” These give the candidates emotional points when languages or type of laptop have nothing whatsoever to do with the jobs. CCCC recommends a system for vetting CV’s unemotionally, but space does not permit an expansion here.
The hidden factor
There is a third hidden factor that often upsets the hiring apple cart and that is that we do not test the candidates for their temperamental suitability for the job. This would take another paper to explain clearly but in the interest of mentioning something and not leaving you in a fog, I will share a brief description with you.
If an electronics engineer (or any individual) whose temperament is to be very active, always in a hurry, gets things done in a jiffy, is full of ideas, likes variety in her work and will take chances lands the electrical engineering job that demands her to slow down, has stretches of time where there is little to do (and she has to look for work), has her new ideas quashed continually, and is chastised for taking chances, the odds are that she will not be happy in this job – and will soon join the 47 per cent statistic. The CCCC remedy (again in brief form) is to study the job for its temperamental demands and make sure those are placed in the job advertisement itself: i. e. “The job will appeal to an engineer who is very active, always in a hurry, gets things done in a jiffy, is full of ideas, and likes variety of work.” This will not only attract such people, but also, it will chase away those who find such characteristics unappealing.
Above I have referred to two of the four temperaments (P and V); more details about them and the other two (A and F), which make up P, A, V and F in total, can be found (at no charge) by contacting CCCC.
The interview
We suggest you request from the short-list of candidates an agreement to provide you with one day of their time for ‘an interview’ for which the individual would receive a fair day’s wage, $200, say.
Then you need to rack your brain to determine the kind of action that will demonstrate if the individuals have what you need for this job. Designing a meaningful action test is where you must put attention. It will be the most challenging aspect of the hiring process.
Imagine it is a sales position that is open. You know very well that in your business, it takes weeks, if not months, to close a sale, so what test can you give in one day that will demonstrate sales ability? In such a case, we suggest that you have the candidates line up sales visits for your existing sales staff.
Each candidate would be given a different list of 40 names (or so) to call and make appointments. There are so many variables at play, if two candidates are close you must assume that they are near equal. If, for example, in the test day the four candidates score 22, 19, 8 and 3 interviews, you can eliminate those with 8 and 3 and choose between the 22 and 19 achievers. Or you might arrange one more day of testing of 22 and 19 to see if the gap between them widens. (And if it doesn’t, I suggest you hire them both because finding a good salesperson is known to be very difficult.)
While paying several people a day’s wage as part of the hiring process may seem extravagant, it is barely a fraction of the cost of hiring the wrong person and starting all over again.
Conclusion
Businesspeople are well advised to re-examine their method of hiring to avoid making emotional mistakes that the human psyche automatically leads us to. That is, we suggest you take three emotional-defence steps:
- Don’t focus on the CV at first. Later in the hiring stage you can examine it more carefully.
- Define the temperament of the position in the job ad.
- The ‘interview’ would consist of engaging the finalists in a one-day meaningful action test.
Good luck!
Bill Caswell leads the Caswell Corporate Coaching Company (CCCC) in Ottawa, www.caswellccc.com or email bill@caswellccc.com