Chances are that you think you’re a pretty good judge of character, don’t you?

It’s ok, we all feel this way.  We make a first impression about somebody within a fraction of second and, for the most part, we go on believing that this impression was accurate.  While this has little consequence when you’re gauging how pleasant the barista at your local coffee shop seems, it can have long-term negative effects when you bring these judgements into the process of hiring your next employee.

While it may be tempting to “trust your gut” when selecting people for your team, research has shown over and over again just how unreliable this gut really is.  Yet many churches and workplaces continue to rely on their intuition and make unstructured, conversation-style, interviews the cornerstone of their hiring processes.

 

Do Interviews Work?

We got a unique opportunity to study the effectiveness of interviews in 1979 when the University of Texas Medical School was screening their top 800 applicants.

They interviewed each one and scored them on a seven-point scale.  After determining who would be in the top 350 to be admitted, an unexpected change in legislature required the school to accept another 50 students. Only now, most of the other applicants had gone off and been accepted at other schools.  This left them with only 50 students who had initially scored in the bottom 700-800 category.  These bottom-dwellers, alongside their 350 rockstar peers, created the perfect opportunity to measure the connection between the interviewer’s judgments and future performance.

What was the difference between these two groups?  Absolutely nothing.

Not only did each go on to graduate and receive honours at the same rate, but they also performed equally well on the job in their first year of residency. In other words, the judgements of the interviewers added no predictive value whatsoever to the process of determining which students were most likely to succeed.

This is a hard story to hear because we all want to believe that we’re relatively good interviewers.  We want to believe that once we’ve sat across the table from someone, we can have them pretty much sorted out.

More recent research continues to confirm the surprisingly low correlation between interviews and future performance.  Our overconfidence in our judgements is so prevalent and so difficult to overcome, several psychologists say it might be better if we didn’t interview candidates at all

 

Why Don’t They Work?

The main problem with these interviews is us.  People. We’re biased and jump to conclusions with entirely inadequate amounts of information.

Many of these problems can be exacerbated when hiring church staff because we can tend to “baptize” our impressions and hunches and claim them as the Spirit’s leading.  Is it?  Well, maybe.  Maybe not.  As believers, it is not a lack of faith to question our intuition, it’s humility.  We’re just as susceptible to biased opinions as anyone else. We need to be aware of that and build into our hiring processes various ways to counteract these tendencies.

What are these tendencies and how do they affect how we’re hiring church staff?

I want to highlight just three of the ways our brains might be sabotaging these efforts:

 

1. Halo Effect

That first impression you make within seconds of meeting someone will go on to colour everything else you see or hear from them.  If this impression is positive, you will tend to minimize any weaknesses or warning signs you see in the interview.  At the same time, their strengths will be overemphasized in your mind and deemed to be more important for the role than they really are.  If your impression is negative, however, the opposite is true and the candidate really doesn’t stand much of a chance.  This is a form of confirmation bias and its effects are powerful enough that the typical hiring manager has decided in only 6 minutes whether or not the candidate is right for the job.

Some ways to counteract this tendency include:

 

Add structure to the interview.

Determine the 6-8 absolutely essential qualities that you need for the role and ask questions that directly link to these qualities.  Cut out the riff-raff and quit asking them about their pet peeves and favourite movies. Ask every candidate the same questions and rate their answers on a scale from 1-5 so that you have a quantitative guide as well as qualitative. Consider a “Topgrading” approach.

Multiple interviews with multiple teams.

Don’t have the same people reviewing every part of the hiring process.  By mixing it up and involving different people you are essentially giving applicants multiple chances at first impressions.  This reduces the impact that any one person’s bias may have.

Gather independent judgments.

Before a team discusses and debriefs after an interview, have them submit their notes and final scores.  Research shows that group discussion tends to alter people’s opinions and brings everyone’s perspectives closer together.  While this is helpful in some settings, here it only serves to reduce the diversity of input that you’ll receive on a candidate.

 

2. Availability Heuristic

A “heuristic” refers to a simple yet imperfect method for solving problems. The availability heuristic refers to our tendency to use the information that is most readily available to our minds to make decisions.  Daniel Kahneman coined a term to describe this:

WYSIATI – What You See Is All There Is.

It’s a mouthful, I know. In other words, we believe that what we learn about a candidate through our hiring processes is enough to make a wise decision about them.  Our default mode is to not gather enough information and to trust what we’ve already discovered (e.g. deciding to hire someone in 6 minutes). Our “gut” is wildly insensitive to both the quality and quantity of evidence that is before us.

To put it a different way, you don’t know what you don’t know and you don’t care that you don’t know it.

To counteract this tendency in hiring, consider the following:

 

Introduce variety into your hiring process.

Include multiple components that each test for different elements (start with the “Four C’s” – Character, Competence, Chemistry, and Culture).   Examples include the obvious like resumes and references, but you should also consider:

Personality/strengths assessments

Aptitude tests

Spiritual gifts tests

Peer interviews

Role-related tasks to complete

Scenario-based testing

Informal “meet the team” interviews

Or more!  There are many other options that you might feel are necessary for your role.  Life.Church, for instance, always adds an opportunity to get to know the candidate’s spouse.

Don’t be afraid to make your process quite a bit more robust than you think is necessary.  In fact, a good sign that you’re moving in the right direction is when people start telling you that you’re going overboard.

Consider the quality of the information.

Not everything in your process should be weighted equally.  The reference of a former employer is more relevant than an applicant’s Facebook account (to avoid further biases or even legal issues, you may not want to look at their social media at all). A personality or strengths assessment is also consistently shown to be a better predictor of future performance than an interview so don’t treat those simply as novelty items in the process.  Consider contacting unlisted references as well, though you need to be careful that you go about this in a legal and ethical manner.

 

3. Anchoring or Primacy Effect

This refers to the tendency of allowing the first piece of information we receive to act as the starting point for all future thoughts or discussions about that subject.  For instance, this is why negotiators are motivated to put the first offer on the table or why you set an asking price for your house before you put it on the market.  The initial number acts as an anchor and people tend not to stray too wildly from this point.

In the hiring process, this shows up in at least two ways.

One, the first application you read or the first interview you conduct will set the bar for all future applicants.  The danger here is that you may hire the wrong person simply because they were better comparatively than the first applicant, rather than actually being the right person for the job.

Two, the information you receive earlier in the process about the applicant may be given too much weight in comparison to the information you receive later.  This is why reference calls made at the end of a hiring process tend to be treated as a formality rather than the important piece they really are.

Here are a couple of suggestions to counteract these biases:

 

Create your own anchor.

Be crystal clear about what a certain position requires and use these criteria as the benchmark against which all applicants will be measured.  Without this clarity, you may hire a very talented person who is still ultimately the wrong fit for the position.

Beyond simply the requirements of the position, there are multiple tools out there that can help you identify the skill-set or personality profile needed for the role.  In our church, we use the “Leading From Your Strengths Position Insights Profile”  for this purpose.  We have also been impressed by the tools coming out of the McQuiag Institute, though these come with a higher price tag.

Front-load your process with deal-breakers.

The elements of your process that are likely to give you the most reliable information and reveal red flags more readily need to be placed higher up in your order.  For us, this meant placing both the strengths assessment test and the reference calls before the formal interview.

 

What Do You See?

How have you seen these three biases play out in your organization or church? What others have you noticed?

If this is your first time reading about some of these, it can be a bit discouraging.  I’m sorry. It’s hard to realize that you are neither as wise as you thought you were nor as in control of your decisions as you had hoped.  This is not a bad thing and should give us an attitude of humility when approaching decisions (and when judging the seemingly poor decisions of others).

If you’re in the process of hiring church staff, I hope the suggestions in this post help you move forward and find the right people to move the mission of your church forward. Selecting and developing leaders may be the most important responsibility that we’ve been given as pastors and church leaders.

Stay tuned for a future post in which I highlight, in detail, the process that we are using in our church right now.  Sign up for the email newsletter to make sure you don’t miss it! (*Update: You can find that post here)

-Dan

 

PS – Not in a hiring process right now but have a staff member who needs to kick it up a notch as a team player? Send them over the 3-part series on the 3 relationships of leadership in any organization