Blink
Paul in Cannon Beach
4,703 Posts
Have any of you read "Blink" by Malcom Gladwell, author of "The Tipping Point"?
Its about our ability to make extremely accurate assessments almost instantly with little information.
There is a chapter that deals with a hospital that changed its approach to diagnosing potential heart attack victims that came to the ER. This hospital (Cook County - the hospital that the show "ER" was based on) was extremely busy and would have as many as 30 patients come through complaining of potential heart attacks.
The doctors used traditional means of determinging whether a patient is going to have a heart attack (interview, test, EKG, take blood pressure, etc). This process was lengthy and not very accurate.
Using an algorithm designed by a doctor in the 1970s, the hospital tried a radical new approach. Instead of seeking out AS MUCH information as possible, the doctor focused on only three areas: 1) Is the pain felt by the patient unstable angina 2) Is there fluid in the patients lung and 3) Is the patient's systolic blood pressure below 100?
Excluding all other information that was traditionally considered VITAL to diagnosing a probable heart attack (age, race, medical history, etc), the doctors increased the accuracy of their diagnosis from 70 to 95 percent.
95 percent accuracy is impressive. The results showed conclusively that having MORE information was not necessarily helpful in making an accurate diagnosis.
This got me thinking about the hiring process. Conventional wisdom says that the more information you can have about an applicant, the better. But is it possible that all the extra information could work against us when making a hiring decision?
Perhaps there are some KEY factors that could more accurately predict which applicants will be successful, effective employees.
What if you could identify just 3-4 key responses that would allow you to hire the RIGHT person 95 percent of the time? All of us have hired someone that looked great on paper, interviewed well, and then turned out to be a very dissapointing as an employee.
For example, what if you evaluated your all star employees and you determined that all of them were answered the question "how soon could you start working?" with the response "I need to give my current employer a 2 week notice" instead of "Immediately" or "Anytime".
What if you determined three or four other areas that you could use to assess potential applicants with much greater accuracy than your current process? This would allow you to work through LARGE stacks of applications extremely quickly.
Sound like voodoo hiring? Possibly discriminatory? Nonsense?
Possibly, but what hospital would you want to go to if you thought you were having a heart attack? The one with 70 percent accuracy or 95 percent?
Its about our ability to make extremely accurate assessments almost instantly with little information.
There is a chapter that deals with a hospital that changed its approach to diagnosing potential heart attack victims that came to the ER. This hospital (Cook County - the hospital that the show "ER" was based on) was extremely busy and would have as many as 30 patients come through complaining of potential heart attacks.
The doctors used traditional means of determinging whether a patient is going to have a heart attack (interview, test, EKG, take blood pressure, etc). This process was lengthy and not very accurate.
Using an algorithm designed by a doctor in the 1970s, the hospital tried a radical new approach. Instead of seeking out AS MUCH information as possible, the doctor focused on only three areas: 1) Is the pain felt by the patient unstable angina 2) Is there fluid in the patients lung and 3) Is the patient's systolic blood pressure below 100?
Excluding all other information that was traditionally considered VITAL to diagnosing a probable heart attack (age, race, medical history, etc), the doctors increased the accuracy of their diagnosis from 70 to 95 percent.
95 percent accuracy is impressive. The results showed conclusively that having MORE information was not necessarily helpful in making an accurate diagnosis.
This got me thinking about the hiring process. Conventional wisdom says that the more information you can have about an applicant, the better. But is it possible that all the extra information could work against us when making a hiring decision?
Perhaps there are some KEY factors that could more accurately predict which applicants will be successful, effective employees.
What if you could identify just 3-4 key responses that would allow you to hire the RIGHT person 95 percent of the time? All of us have hired someone that looked great on paper, interviewed well, and then turned out to be a very dissapointing as an employee.
For example, what if you evaluated your all star employees and you determined that all of them were answered the question "how soon could you start working?" with the response "I need to give my current employer a 2 week notice" instead of "Immediately" or "Anytime".
What if you determined three or four other areas that you could use to assess potential applicants with much greater accuracy than your current process? This would allow you to work through LARGE stacks of applications extremely quickly.
Sound like voodoo hiring? Possibly discriminatory? Nonsense?
Possibly, but what hospital would you want to go to if you thought you were having a heart attack? The one with 70 percent accuracy or 95 percent?
Comments
When I train our supervisors, I remind them of that. Ask all the questions on the interview form, write down all the answers. When all is done and the applicant walks away, ask your self "would I leave my kids with this person?"
I also try to get them be honest with themselves about their own biases. We all have them. As long as their reason for not wanting to hire has nothing to do with any of the protected classes, then when the gut says "no," don't hire them. We are caring for children and if someone gives you the creeps, you have to listen to that instinct.
Unfortunately, our applicant pool is not as large or as qualified as we'd like, so I also train them to at least KNOW what they've hired, and have a plan to develop the person into something resembling a decent employee. Still working on that plan...
We will either find some trends that we might be able to use in the future to determine the applicants who will be most likely to succeed in our organization or we have wasted a lot of time.
I use my "gut" or "intuition" all the time and I find it pretty accurate. I know that doesnt sound very "HR" but I think most of us actually do the same thing.
For example, an applicant recently happened to mention "working with children" during a brief initial interview. This caught my attention and I followed up on it with a reference. The reference confirmed the applicant had a "fixation" with children.
What the applicant said wasn't necessarily odd or creepy but it rang my alarm bells.
Given my organization has a resort-style family environment, I will not be hiring this individual.