You know them well; those who believe they are God’s gift to selecting successful job applicants. They scoff at psychological tests and believe that good hiring is a matter of experience and intuition. Despite considerable evidence that informal interviews are notoriously unreliable as predictors of job success, these hiring managers stubbornly cling to the belief that their judgement of people is infallible. Why do they persist in this mistaken belief?
One might argue that this attitude merely reflects a lack of knowledge about effective practices, but there is ample evidence that employers do not believe that the research is relevant to their own situation.
In the September 2008 issue of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Scott Highhouse examines two reasons why many hiring managers and HR professionals persist on using their own intuition and judgment like informal interviews to supplement (or replace) tests.
First is the belief that we should be able to achieve 100% accuracy in the prediction of employee success. The fact is that predicting behaviour is an inexact science. At best, psychological tests give us 25% accuracy (more likely 10%), but the interview gives us much less. Most of the variance in executive success is simply not predictable prior to employment. Tests and other selection tools merely reduce the error of choosing the wrong person, not perfectly predicting the right person. Disappointment is inevitable when we fail to see selection in probabilistic terms.
The second common reason for objecting to selection systems is the belief in the myth of expertise. “The considerable research on predicting human behaviour shows that experience does not improve predictions made by clinicians, social workers, parole boards, judges, auditors, marketers and business planners”, says Highhouse.
However, expertise is more socially acceptable than relying on test scores or formulas. Professionals who make computer-based decisions are perceived as less competent and less thorough than professionals who make decisions without any aids. So it is not surprising that HR practitioners would be reluctant to undermine their status by administering a psychological test, structuring an interview, or plugging ratings into a mechanical formula.
The article is informative, interesting and provocative. It is worth a read.
Reference
Highhouse, S. (2008). Stubborn Reliance on Intuition and Subjectivity in Employee Selection. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 1, 333-342.
