Follow your gut feeling when recruiting

Managers are familiar with sitting on the more pleasant side of an interview table. But how often have you had a ‘gut feel’ within the first couple of minutes about how right the candidate was for the role? It’s not whether you like them, or whether they are attractive, well-dressed or whether they smile nicely, but whether they are right.

Yet you still have a process to follow. Others may need to be involved, and while you know the candidate will be successful, nothing can speed up the outcome. That is the kind of gut feel you should listen to.

Intuition is one of the most underrated business tools that exists for managers, with all successful leaders using it automatically in their day to day decision making. 

Nowhere is this more pronounced than in recruitment. Best practice recruitment and selection since the 80’s has been guided by position descriptions, selection criteria, competencies and structured interview processes. These processes were designed to take out the subjective nature of recruitment and to remove hidden discriminatory processes. The problem was that it also attempted to remove intuition from the process. 

We have seen many recruitment processes where ‘on paper’ one applicant came up on top, but the panel member’s gut feel told them to be cautious. Generally when they didn’t listen to their gut, they lived to regret their decision. They later reflect they had a funny feeling about the employee but allowed this feeling to be ignored because everything else just looked OK and they had good references. 

So how do you hire someone successfully? Try to have more than one person on the interview panel so you can compare notes e.g. try having a peer or a direct report to the position being recruited for.

Listen to both the rational and intuitive sides of the panel members. Certainly follow the logical processes – they are proven to help create a level playing field for candidates, but at the end of the process, ask each panel member to jot down silently what they feel/think about the candidates and whether or not they would they like working with them. 

The panel should then share their notes and if there is even one concern, then trust this hunch and use additional logical processes to check this hunch out. These processes can include asking for additional referees, re-interviewing the top few candidates with new questions or supplementing the applicant pool with additional candidates for comparison. 

Life is too short for a bad hiring decision.  They are also highly costly mistakes in terms of impact on your team. Listen to your gut and hopefully it won’t let you down!