Hiring the right talent can be tricky. You want the candidate to fit into your organization’s culture and you also want someone who can be effective on the job. Ideally, the person you hire will be a top performer and with your organization for a good period of time. The tricky part comes in when you consider all these variables and factor in how human beings make decisions.

In his best-selling book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell discusses how people are wired to make decisions and often make them in the blink of an eye. An adaptive mechanism goes off called the adaptive unconscious to allow for faster decisions; this mechanism limits the multitude of variables you could possibly consider. Turns out we can collect too much data and suffer from analysis paralysis. In learning to survive, humans have adapted themselves to look at a more limited number of factors so that we can act more swiftly. If we are skilled at knowing the best variables to select for, we can do well in hiring. If we look for the wrong things, we can make an expensive mistake. In our work with organization on hiring and selection, here are some of the common selection problems that hiring managers make:

(more…)