This One Recruitment Mistake Could Be Costing You Talent

Over recent years, the process of recruitment has been heavily influenced by the same pressures that all business processes have experienced. The constant need for ever greater productivity and efficiency. A focus on common metrics such as Time to Hire and Cost to Fill and the ever-present debate between insourcing and outsourcing recruitment requires more rapid judgements when making hiring decisions.

When making filtering decisions, weeding out candidates who'll not be a good fit, how often do you make judgements based on experience or broad assumptions such as the candidate's degree choice?

How relying on averages & assumptions crashes planes

Trust me, this is completely related and hopefully also somewhat interesting too!

In the late 1940s, the US Airforce was going through a crisis. With aircraft incidents and accidents occurring daily, with upwards of 17 crashes or near misses a day, they needed to do something.

The loss of aircraft, time, money and not to mention human life was not sustainable. The question was what was going wrong so often? The engineers could show that the planes were mechanically sound, no fault with electronics or engines and such. And the pilots were the most highly skilled and trained available. The pilots themselves were sure that pilot error could not be to blame. Not at the levels being experienced.

So what then was the problem?

A team was formed to investigate the issue. Amongst them a young Lieutenant by the name of Gilbert Daniels. Daniels had studied physical anthropology at university and had an unusual theory.

For decades the cockpits of airforce planes had been designed around an average-sized pilot. 100 men had been used as part of the original design input which included more than 10 bodily measurements from height and waist size to arm length and distance from ear to eye.

However, Daniels suspected that no actual pilot would conform to this list of average dimensions. That the basic cockpit design was flawed and the key cause of accidents.

After studying the complete set of measurements across 4,063 pilots, Daniels found that not a single one met the defined ‘average pilot’. Even when allowing for a 30% margin from the base measurement value, not a single pilot was ‘average’. Daniels even went so far as to take what he deemed to be the 3 most relevant measurements for pilot safety and yet only 3% of the pilots measured ‘average’.

Daniels’ work helped not only save countless lives and resources for the US Airforce but also to highlight the flaw of averages. In simple terms, the greater the number of averages based assumptions you make, the more likely you are to be wrong.

On average candidates…

Probably don’t meet your expectations as much as you think they will. Consider your process for recruitment and selection, do you follow a standardised approach to prefiltering candidates for each role?

Do you set a series of hurdles or criteria that every candidate must meet to get to the next step in the process? These could be as simple as the degree or course choice or the university they attended.

Do you offer standardised testing and require a minimum ‘pass mark’ to be considered for selection? Whether it’s before or post-interview, standardised tests don’t always work equally for all candidates.

Just as we saw from the work of Daniels, all your candidates will have different physical dimensions, but they also have different cognitive traits, strengths and weaknesses, experiences and interests. When you apply standardised approaches to non-standardised humans you diminish the diversity within your candidate pool.

Why diversity matters

You can see the result of standardised measures for selection at work best in your local supermarket. When you’re next out grocery shopping, take a moment to take a look at the fruit and vegetables.

Notice how consistent each apple is. How the oranges are all practically the same size and colour. That every bunch of celery is the same length and thickness. Supermarkets go to great length to filter out produce that is not both consistent and visually appealing. A core of their sales strategy is to ‘wow’ you with first impressions. The sight of visually appealing fruit and vegetables, that all look equally as good as each other is designed to convince you of the quality of the produce.

Does that mean that they are more nutritious than those that are not as appealing? Will a straight carrot taste nice than a gnarly one? Spend some time pulling up carrots and you’ll see the absolute variety of shapes and sizes they come in. All giving you the same carroty goodness, just in a different ‘package’.

Oh, and don’t forget the by-product of the highly selective buying behaviour of supermarkets. Lower prices for producers and often food waste for the produce that doesn’t meet their criteria.

Obviously, at least I hope obviously, we can’t compare people to carrots and celery quite so simply. People are so much more complex and complicated. But therein lies both the great opportunity and the challenge.

How many people have you weeded out and left on the ‘waste’ pile of veg who perhaps did have something more to offer. A little like that gnarly carrot that perhaps was 15% more nutritious and just a whole lot tastier.

When like the supermarkets you apply standardised grading and selection criteria to your candidates, you will be discarding people who could bring something different and unique to your organisation. The mix of perspectives and insights that come from different educations, backgrounds and life experiences cannot be underestimated.

Sure it can be much quicker and cheaper to hire people that conform to a standardised assessment process. Having an office filled with like-minded, educated and skilled people may seem like a great idea, but, on average are they going to be as ideal as you hope? How much more interesting might it be with more variation in the team? What new connections and ideas could be generated from intermixing people who don’t actually all ‘look’ the same?

Conclusion

Finding a way to balance the cost and efficiency demands of business with the ability to inject variety and find true hidden talent is the key to ensuring your talent acquisition isn’t another plane crash waiting to happen.

The moment you start applying standardised recruitment approaches means the likelihood of you missing out on true talent will increase. You’ll be driving down diversity, cutting it off at the pass and whilst a tray full of ‘perfect’ carrots might like nice, how much better of might you been with the odd gnarly one too?

What could you be doing to allow for natural variation within your recruitment process? Find that balance between efficiency and true effectiveness in the way you select and hire can have a massive impact on your existing staff’s engagement, business performance and your bottom line.

Let me know if you want some help with getting started.