This eBook is designed to educate you on all aspects of building a hiring process — errors to avoid, the pros and cons of various tools, and best practices for developing and implementing a system of your own.
Preview
Making a great hire is tough. In what is typically just a few short meetings, you must accurately predict whether or not a person can do the job and fit in with your company’s culture. The whole situation almost seems setup to fail. How could you possibly get to know someone that well in such a short time and still be right most of the time about who they are, what they can do, and what motivates them? If marriage were setup so that you had to decide who you would marry in only one date, I doubt most people would participate in such an abhorrent process. This, however, is the world we live in. We are bound by practical limitations of time, money, and availability. As a result, hiring is difficult – but this isn’t where the difficulty ends.
Cognitive Errors and Hiring
People aren’t very good at evaluating other people. In fact, they tend to be quite bad at it. The reason essentially boils down to the fact that humans are predisposed to cognitive errors, or “traps,” when making decisions, especially in a hiring context. To explain, let’s start with the fact that our brains are constantly flooded with tons of information throughout our lives. This flood of information has made it essential for humans to take short cuts to make sense of it all. While those short cuts can help you in some situations, they can also cause you to make mistakes when evaluating information. These mistakes can happen in a variety of ways, even without a person realizing it, and those same mistakes are particularly impactful in a hiring context. The 6 common errors are:
1. We tend to assume that people with some positive characteristics have other “positive” characteristics, such as abilities on the job, even when the two things are not at all related.
2. We tend to seek out information that confirms conclusions we’ve already drawn.
3. We are frequently wrong about what factors are actually related to producing the result we want.
4. We assign value to how much effort or time we’ve put into something.
5. We make decisions based on the first piece of information we acquire.
6. We rely more on our recent, available memories, instead of a comprehensive set of facts.
In short, hiring is tough. The logistics of it mean you are under very heavy time constraints and at the same time, your natural tendencies predispose you to make rash and incomplete decisions about others when evaluating them. So what can you do? Fortunately, just as much research has gone into solving this problem as there has in identifying the many ways we can get it wrong.
In this eBook, we outline the four major steps to creating and implementing a hiring process that minimize cognitive errors and traps that otherwise can cause you to hire incorrectly, while at the same time, taking into account the practical limitations associated with hiring in the real world.
To learn the 4 steps to build a hiring process. Download our free eBook: How To Build A Hiring Process
