There is a moment in many recruitment processes when someone says, “I really liked her...she seemed genuine”, or the opposite, “there was something about them I just did not trust.”
These impressions can carry a lot of weight because interviewing feels personal. We sit opposite someone, listen to them talk, watch how they respond, notice their confidence, eye contact and body language, and gradually develop a sense that we understand the person in front of us. It’s natural and we all do it and we are hard-wired to do it.
The difficulty is that we may not be nearly as good at reading people as we believe. We are all confident in our judgements, it’s just that our judgements aren’t always accurate.
A recent episode on ABC’s Radio National’s
All in the Mind examined the psychology of lie detection and highlighted that people tend to be confident in their ability to recognise when someone is being deceptive, yet research suggests our actual ability to detect lying is only marginally better than chance.
This has an obvious relevance to recruitment and selection because interviews rely heavily on our interpretation of behaviour.
A nervous candidate may be interpreted as lacking confidence when they are simply nervous about an important interview. Someone who maintains strong eye contact and speaks fluently may be seen as trustworthy and competent when what we are really observing is a good interviewee. A quieter candidate may appear less capable than a charismatic competitor despite having stronger underlying ability and a much better fit with the role.
The problem is not that hiring managers are foolish or incapable of judgement. The problem is that human judgement comes with predictable limitations, particularly when we believe we are better at reading people than we are.
This matters because candidates also understand what an interview requires. They prepare examples, anticipate questions, practise answers and naturally present themselves in the best possible light. There is nothing inappropriate about this. It is simply part of the recruitment environment.
The challenge for the organisation is to distinguish between someone who presents well and someone who will perform well. That distinction is at the heart of evidence-based recruitment.
No single source should make the hiring decision
Perhaps the biggest recruitment lesson is that interviews should never be expected to carry the entire decision.
A CV provides one source of information. Screening provides another. Psychometric testing for recruitment can provide independent evidence about characteristics relevant to performance. Reference checking adds another perspective, while the final face to face interview allows the organisation to investigate areas already identified through the broader candidate assessment process.
The objective is not to find one perfect assessment method because there is no such thing: the objective is a “convergence of data”.
When several independent sources begin pointing in the same direction, we can have greater confidence in the hiring decision. When they disagree, that disagreement is also valuable because it tells us where further investigation is required.
This is a much safer approach than allowing a single impressive interview to dominate the decision.
For a small business, the consequences can be particularly significant. A poor hire does not disappear into a workforce of thousands. The effects can be felt directly through performance problems, disruption to other employees, lost management time and ultimately the expense of starting the recruitment process again. Anything that can reduce hiring risk therefore deserves careful consideration.
Summary
We often believe we can read candidates through confidence, eye contact, body language and the general feeling created during an interview, yet research into deception suggests people are far less accurate at interpreting these cues than they believe. Recruitment becomes safer when organisations reduce their dependence on intuition and instead gather evidence through structured interviews, psychometric testing, reference checking and other independent sources. The objective is not to remove human judgement, but to support it with enough evidence that one convincing candidate or one strong impression cannot determine the entire hiring decision.
Call to action
If your recruitment process still depends heavily on whether a candidate feels right at interview, it may be worth asking how much evidence sits behind that feeling. Fermion helps organisations combine psychometric testing with structured recruitment processes so hiring decisions are based on multiple sources of evidence rather than intuition alone.
Small Changes, Big Results: The Tiny Tweaks That Transform Recruitment:
The
small change that delivers dramatically better hiring decisions is simple:
- Screen candidates first
- Test second
- Interview last
Better hiring decisions come from better evidence. Psychometric assessment helps you understand how candidates are likely to perform, not just how they present.
The focus of Fermion is
"Psychometric Testing for Recruitment" and
“Recruitment to Retention: How to Select Good Staff & Keep Them”. If you would like to learn how to select good staff and keep them, please
contact us at Fermion.
“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”
Eleanor Roosevelt.
NB: I use ChatGPT as a writing and editing tool, but the ideas, judgement and final views in this article are my own.
