There is a moment in many recruitment processes when the decision seems to become obvious. The candidate has interviewed well, the conversation flowed easily, they appeared confident and capable, and the people around the table leave the room thinking much the same thing: this person feels right. The problem is that feeling right and being right are not necessarily the same thing.
An episode of ABC Radio National’s
This Working Life explored this problem some years ago in a discussion about making better hiring decisions. The program began with a sobering estimate that the cost of a bad hire can amount to around a year’s compensation once recruitment, training, the time required to bring someone up to speed and subsequent underperformance are taken into account.
The interesting part, however, was not simply the cost of getting recruitment wrong. It was the suggestion that better decisions come from introducing quantitative data into the hiring process and having the discipline to revisit that evidence.
Most organisations collect quite a lot of information during recruitment. They have the candidate’s CV, application, experience, qualifications, references and interview responses. Some will also have work samples, ability assessments, personality measures or other psychometric testing.
The problem is often not a lack of information. It is the weight we give different pieces of information when making the final decision.
An interview is particularly powerful because it creates an immediate human experience. We meet someone, we form impressions, we notice whether we like them, whether they communicate confidently and whether we can imagine working with them. Those impressions are not irrelevant, but they can become disproportionately influential because they are emotionally compelling.
A test score sitting quietly on a page does not have quite the same psychological impact as a candidate sitting opposite you making a convincing case for why they should get the job.
This is why recruitment needs to be treated as a process of gathering evidence rather than searching for the moment when we become convinced.
At Fermion, we often talk about the
convergence of data. No single source of information about a candidate is perfect. CVs contain error. Interviews contain error. Reference checks contain error. Psychometric assessments also contain measurement error. The objective is therefore not to find one perfect recruitment tool, because one does not exist. Instead, we want different sources of evidence pointing in broadly the same direction.
Imagine a candidate whose experience looks appropriate, whose cognitive assessment suggests they have the capacity to deal with the complexity of the role, whose personality profile appears consistent with the behavioural demands of the position, and whose structured interview provides strong behavioural evidence supporting those findings.
You can never know with certainty that this person will succeed, but the decision is becoming considerably easier to defend.
Now imagine the opposite. The candidate gives an outstanding interview, but the other evidence raises questions about their capacity, behavioural tendencies or likely fit with the demands of the role; that is where recruitment becomes difficult.
It is also where the discipline becomes particularly important.
Rather than allowing an impressive interview to erase contradictory evidence, the discrepancy should make us curious. Why are the different sources telling us different things? What additional questions should we ask? What should we explore with referees? Is there another piece of evidence we can collect?
The contradiction itself becomes useful information.
This is also why there is a strong argument for conducting the major face-to-face interview later in the selection process. Screen first, assess next and then interview the stronger candidates. By the time you meet them, you already have objective information that can help shape the interview and identify the areas requiring deeper investigation.
The interview then becomes more valuable, not less.
No assessment method can perfectly predict job performance, and psychometric testing should never make the hiring decision for you, just as an interview should never make the hiring decision for you. The strength comes from combining information from multiple sources and looking for consistency, contradictions and patterns.
For a small business, this discipline can be particularly important. A large organisation may be able to absorb a poor hiring decision. In a team of six, ten or twenty people, one poor appointment can affect productivity, morale, customers and the business owner personally.
The goal of a good recruitment process is not to eliminate judgement. Human judgement will always be part of hiring, instead the goal is to give that judgement better evidence.
Summary
The candidates who become poor hires rarely look like poor hires during recruitment. More often, they interview well and create enough confidence for decision makers to overlook conflicting information. Better hiring decisions come from combining multiple sources of evidence, including psychometric testing, structured interviews, experience and reference information, and looking for convergence across the data rather than allowing any single source to dominate the decision.
If your recruitment process still relies heavily on CVs and interviews, it may be worth asking how much evidence you actually have before making the final decision. Fermion helps organisations introduce psychometric testing and structured assessment into recruitment so that hiring decisions are based on a broader and more reliable picture of each candidate. If you would like to discuss how this could work within your recruitment process, contact Fermion.
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.
