What the NFL Can Teach Us About Recruitment Decisions

While watching the NFL playoffs recently, a commentator made a remark that grabbed my attention: “a team and head coach are only as good as their recruitment choices”.

As someone who works in recruitment and workplace psychology, that comment piqued my interest immediately.

Comparisons between elite sporting teams and businesses are often overdone. Elite athletes benefit from genetics, resources, and full-time training that most people simply don’t have access to. Likewise, businesses don’t get to watch candidates perform their role live before making a hiring decision.

However, one comparison holds true across sport and business:

Recruitment decisions matter — enormously.

Why Recruitment Decisions Determine Business Performance

In Good to Great, Jim Collins uses the metaphor of having the “right people on the bus.” Without the right people, even the best strategy struggles. With the right people, organisations adapt, grow, and outperform competitors.

Elite sports teams obsess over selection. Businesses often don’t.

Instead, many organisations still rely on:

• CV screening
• One or two interviews
• Gut feel

That approach forces you to interview strangers, armed only with information the candidate has chosen to tell you.

That’s not recruitment — that’s guesswork.

Why Interviews Alone Don’t Work

·        A CV is marketing.

·        An interview is performance.

·        Neither reliably predicts on-the-job success.

·        Candidates naturally present themselves in the best possible light. That’s understandable — but it leaves employers making critical decisions with insufficient data.

The solution isn’t more interviews.

The solution is better information before the interview even begins.

Psychometric Testing for Recruitment: A Smarter Approach

An effective recruitment process follows a simple structure:

Screen → Test → Interview

Psychometric testing for recruitment allows you to:

• Understand a candidate’s personality profile
• Assess cognitive ability (IQ)
• Measure emotional intelligence (EQ)
• Identify behavioural risks and strengths
• Compare candidates objectively

This means you walk into interviews already knowing:

• How a candidate is likely to behave at work
• How they make decisions
• How they respond to pressure
• Whether they fit the role and culture

At that point, the interview becomes a confirmation tool, not a gamble.

You Don’t Have to Interview Strangers

With proper screening and psychometric testing:

• Poor-fit candidates are filtered out early
• Strong candidates rise quickly
• Interviews become shorter and more meaningful
• Hiring decisions are defensible and evidence-based

While businesses can’t recruit exactly like the NFL, they can adopt a more rigorous, data-driven selection process — one that consistently improves hiring outcomes.

Final Thought: Objective Data Beats Gut Feel

When we talk about “testing,” we usually mean psychometric testing for recruitment, but even role-specific assessments can improve hiring quality.

Any objective data point is better than relying solely on intuition.

Screen → Test → Interview.



Simple. Repeatable. Effective.

About the Author:

Christopher Apps is an Organisational Psychologist and the owner of Fermion. He stays updated on the latest psychology research and shares evidence-based insights. 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.