Ever wondered why the Spartans had only an army of 300 in the battle of Thermopylae?
Because they believed “Good people are always hard to find!” 🤣
It seems that the world of work and recruitment is as old as civilisation itself. Early evidence of recruitment can be seen throughout the history of imperial China. Imperial exams were a way of recruiting civil service candidates during the Han dynasty era, around 1500 BC. These were considered one of the toughest assessments for centuries and were often referred to as “exams from hell”¹.
Equally intriguing, is that the first instance of modern day resumes can be found on rock and wooden tablets dating back to ancient Rome. These tablets contained a listed engraving of what a person had worked on in a professional capacity. These tablets offer us the very first formal listing of an individual’s professional details and achievements².
Two Bloomberg Tablets found at the site of the Bloomberg building in the financial district of London
The birth of the modern recruiting industry, however, did not take place until the 1940s, as a result of WWII. Employment agencies began to advertise for workers who were not obligated to partake in military service in an organised effort to fill the void in the workplace left by those who were called to duty.
The end of the war led to an influx of workers returning from the army, many with new skills that could be applied to the new and blossoming technology industry. Headhunting companies became popular as a response to the growing workforce³.
Despite the passage of time, the ever-evolving world of work, and the constantly changing employee landscape, it seems as though modern businesses have not yet been able to perfect a formula for employee hiring. Harvard Business Review states, “unsuccessful hiring is the single biggest problem in business today,” and that 80% of employee turnover is due to bad recruitment practices⁴. Similarly, Macquarie University states that a poor fit between job applicants and job requirements is a significant issue in the labour market today⁵.
Talk to any business owner or executive and one will quickly see that it is all the same — hiring the right people is difficult and it is only getting harder. Recruitment is a high-stakes and a high-risk business that creates a lot of stress and anxiety for the people tasked with hiring. This is because more businesses recognise that a competitive advantage stems from their human resources⁶.
As such, the cost of hiring the wrong employees can be catastrophic; bad hires can cost a company a significant amount of money as well as damage to its reputation, culture, and workplace morale⁷.
For the most part, it seems that we consider recruitment a dark art rather than a calculated scientific approach — a gamble of sorts that if you happen to get right, more likely than not, some luck can be attributed to the results.
Why is this so, and does it have to be like this? Surely not!
Well, there are many reasons why we struggle to hire right and some of these reasons I have already unpacked in an earlier blog article Winning the War on Talent, but one main reason has to do with neuroscience and the design of our brain.
Let me take you on a journey of the brain…
The most complex manifestation of intelligence that we know of resides between our ears. The human brain is a marvellous organ; its storage capacity is considered virtually unlimited and it doesn’t get “used up” like RAM in your computer⁸.
Equally incredible, is the latest neuroscience research showing that the brain’s memory capacity is a quadrillion, or 10¹⁵ bytes. Astoundingly, this is about the same amount needed to store the entire internet!⁹.
There is plenty of evidence that show just how incredible our brains are, but the brain can also work in ways that are illogical, fallible, and counterproductive. The brain often has a tendency to trip us up when it’s just trying to help.
Your brain has 2 systems — one rational and the other emotional — that drive decision-making and behaviour¹⁰. The rational, or thinking brain, is what sets us apart from other animals. You are using your thinking brain when you are deliberately paying attention to something, or actively thinking. It is a conscious way of thinking and it deals in details, calculations, and rationality.
Its other strengths include:
However, its evolutionary weakness is that we can’t afford to run the thinking brain all the time because it uses up a great deal of energy, works really hard, and is quite slow in processing information (making you unable to quickly respond to threats).
The emotional brain, however, serves as the seat of emotion, motivation, mood, and lots of other mental and emotional processes. The emotional brain is an automatic, fast and unconscious way of thinking. It makes judgements based on personal opinions, experiences, and generalisations without you even realising it.
When you use it, it doesn’t feel like you’re actually thinking¹¹. The emotional brain accomplishes this by applying simple rules that psychologists call ‘heuristics,’ or mental shortcuts¹².
But quick assessments and general rules can often get things wrong. With that said, the emotional brain can let you down and is prone to systematic errors.
The emotional brain is responsible for personal biases, stereotypes, superstition, gullibility, naiveté, and prejudice¹³. It is also to blame when you over react to life’s small inconveniences. It could also be considered the culprit for fostering addictive relapses.
Neuroscientists report that humans run on the emotional brain’s autopilot mode 95% of the time and for the most part, we aren’t even aware it’s happening. If one were to poll people about “unexplainable” behaviours, there would be tons of stories.
How many times have you done something that you said you would not do, eaten something that you said you would not eat, and said something that you said you would not say?
We all know that it would be a very extensive list and it happens every day. The thinking brain provides 5% or less of our cognitive (conscious thinking) activity throughout the day — and researchers say that 5% is for the more aware people and that many people operate at just 1% consciousness¹⁴.
The emotional brain operates at 40 million bits of data per second, whereas the thinking brain processes at only 40 bits per second¹⁵. The emotional brain is much more powerful than the rational, thinking brain and it is predominately responsible for shaping how we live our lives.
It helps us to quickly make sense of the world by constructing the outside world inside of our heads, which means we experience the world not how it is, but how our brain interprets and rebuilds it.
“The eyes see only what the mind is prepared to comprehend” — Henri-Louis Bergson.
A world that is useful albeit imperfect!
Humans have a limited supply of resources and energy to expend — think along the lines of a rechargeable battery — and we are designed to be as energy efficient as possible. However, our brain can be extremely resource intensive. While its weight only accounts for approximately 2% of our body weight, the brain can use up to 20% of our body’s oxygen supply and 25% of our body’s energy¹⁶ ¹⁷.
Think about it; there are over one hundred billion cells in our brain and each of them makes over ten thousand connections with other brain cells. While the large number of possible combinations of cell connections allows for higher-order or conscious thinking, this is quite a large evolutionary problem, in terms of energy cost.
The more you actively use your thinking brain, the more energy your brain consumes. This in turn, leaves less energy available for other additional activities. Therefore, the brain has to process information and encode things efficiently to save energy¹⁹.
As humans we use all five of our senses to observe and interpret the world around us and create a picture of reality. At any moment, your brain processes approximately 35,000 bits of information coming directly from your senses.
Everything you see, hear, feel, taste, and smell is processed by your brain, but it only allows you to consciously think about a handful of this information. In fact, of the thousands of sensory information bits collected by your senses, you can only consciously pay attention to approximately 7 bits before the information load becomes too much and the thinking brain (prefrontal cortex) shuts down²⁰ ²¹.
It seems that as people reach information overload “they start making stupid mistakes and bad choices because the brain region responsible for smart decision making has essentially left the premises.” — Angelika Dimoka (Director at Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University). In addition to this, your thinking brain can only temporarily hold information in your working memory for up to 20 seconds before it fades away.
This means that the brain is designed to forget, in order to conserve energy²² ²³. This is, of course, extremely problematic when having to make important decisions that require you to compare and contrast multiple pieces of information at the same time. Scientists believe that this level of thinking can actually hurt by inflicting psychological pain!²⁴.
As we saw, most of our decisions are shaped by our unconscious mind and its subjective view of the world. We are not the rational decision makers we think we are and how we evaluate a job-candidate’s fit is often driven by personal biases and opinions, as opposed to considering individual facts on their own merits, unaffected by our own particular likes and dislikes.
Without us knowing it, there is a good chance we may be shutting out the very candidates we need in our business because we are not aware and/or testing the parameters of our own thought processes. When our personal biases get the better of us, the following hiring mistakes are almost inevitable²⁵ ²⁶:
The reality is that bias is practiced in recruitment and selection, and it often occurs not due to any ill will, but rather because of the human’s inherent nature.
Imagine you are recruiting for a role and you’ve received 30 or 40 resumes. That’s a lot of resumes sitting in front of you to sort through and rank order!
What makes matters worse is that each and every resume looks, feels, smells, and tastes differently — the layout is different, font is different, sentence construction and linguistic proficiency are different... and we haven’t even yet started to compare and contrast the resume content to the Key Selection Criteria and requirements of the role!
Not even on your best day, jacked up on countless cups of coffee, would you be able to objectively compare and contrast each and every resume with each other. There is just too much information to consider and think about simultaneously.
Shorting through resumes
So, let’s simplify it! Now, imagine you only have 3 or 4 resumes lying in front of you. This seems a lot more manageable, right? As you begin to review each candidate, you’ll notice all the different skills and competencies developed over the years of employment.
You’ll also take in all the years of experience, proficiency levels, and qualifications to make judgments about the quality of the different schools each candidate studied at (with a natural preference for the one you went to, of course).
You’ll then subjectively rate the different companies each candidate worked for and how closely they matched to your own business. Then, you’ll start to review the extra curricular activities / organisational citizenship behaviours when you begin to wonder why one of the candidates had a gap year in Europe.
While doing this, you’ll also flick through each of the candidate’s cover letters and begin to question the purpose of a cover letter, especially considering two of your candidates didn’t even include one with their application submission.
While considering all of this information at the same time, you decide it’s time for a coffee because you are struggling to stay focused.
In reality, your brain has gone into a complete meltdown, only allowing you to cling to bits and pieces of information from each resume rather than maintaining the holistic picture relative to the job you are hiring for.
To make matters worse, the Key Selection Criteria that you are using to evaluate candidates on, are also not equally weighted, so you will need to consider this in your overall screening and ranking of candidates as well.
The fact is, it is not possible for your brain to consciously process all of this information and objectively compare and contrast candidates. The process is fraught with subjectivity and your brain is tricking you into believing that you are doing a good job.
Most hiring decisions are still underpinned by what candidates present on their resumes; tapping into the thinking brain of candidates while largely ignoring their emotional brain and the significant role it plays in decision-making and behaviour.
The purpose of the resume is to provide a summary of technical skills, qualifications, and experience — all of these attributes exist in a person’s thinking brain and are used to solve technical problems such as calculating a complex math problem or performing a demanding physical task.
Only recruiting for technical abilities can be problematic, as the emotional brain mostly drives behaviour.
There is no doubt that technical skills and qualifications are important for gauging a candidate’s technical aptitude, but it does not give insight into what motivates a candidate on the job, nor is it a reliable indicator of job performance or how a candidate is likely to fit into a specific role, team, and an organisation’s culture.
Specifically, a recent study showed almost no correlation between a candidate’s resume and successful in-role performance²⁷.
Let’s consider the following scenario — you have two employees with roughly the same skills, qualifications, and experience, but one employee consistently outperforms the other. Why do you think this is? Well, the reason has less to do with the thinking brain and more to do with the emotional brain and the individual motivators of both employees.
I am not recommending to simply throw out everything that’s been used in traditional recruitment, but we need better hiring processes that consider a candidate’s full potential — we need to tap into the thinking as well as the emotional brains of candidates.
The inclusion of psychometric assessments in recruitment has started to explore this balancing act. However, we have only scratched the surface of what is possible.
For one, psychometric assessments are usually the last step in the hiring process, as opposed to the first. We typically screen, rank, and shortlist candidates based on their technical skills and qualifications first, and only further down the recruitment process, when we already have a shortlist of 2 or 3 candidates, do we administer psychometric assessments to evaluate the non-technical fit.
This approach is somewhat counter intuitive — wouldn’t it make more sense to first see if a candidate has suitable company fit and personal characteristics before evaluating them on technical fit?
I mean, you can train someone to have the right technical skills, but you cannot train a person to have the right attitude and job motivation.
That being said, the ideal scenario would be to evaluate a candidate’s technical and non-technical fit at the same time.
Why don’t we do this already?
A key reason is that psychometric assessments are costly and it would be a huge financial burden on an organisation to put each and every candidate through a suite of assessments.
Another reason is confusion — unless you are an organisational psychologist, most people do not know how to successfully interpret psychometric data and compare candidate results to the job and company requirements.
Similarly, not all Key Selection Criteria are equally important for predicting in-role success — we need a way to systematically weigh selection criteria against each other and objectively compare and contrast candidates’ technical fit as well as non-technical fit relative to the weighted Key Selection Criteria.
Humans are good at some things and computers are good at other things. Chances are, tasks that are easy for you, are hard for a computer. In addition, chances are good that the reverse is also true.
In many ways, humans are still superior to computers. Humans possess traits like creativity, imagination, and inspiration. A person can write a poem, compose and play music, sing a song, create a painting, or dream up a new invention.
Computers can be programmed to replicate some of those tasks, but they don’t possess the innate ability to create the way humans do. Computers can’t experience life the way we do, either.
On the other hand, computers can take in and process certain kinds of information much faster than we can. They can swirl that data around in their “brains,” made of processors, and perform calculations to conjure up multiple scenarios at superhuman speeds.
For example, the best chess-trained computers can, at this point, strategise many moves ahead, effectively problem-solving far more deftly than even the best chess-playing humans can.
Computers learn much more quickly, too, narrowing complex choices to the most optimal ones. Yes, humans also learn from mistakes, but when it comes to tackling the kinds of puzzles computers excel at, we’re far more fallible.
Computers enjoy other advantages over people, as well. They have better memories, so they can be fed a large amount of information, and can tap into all of it almost instantaneously. Computers don’t require sleep the way humans do, so they can calculate, analyse, and perform tasks tirelessly and ‘round the clock.
Computers are simply more accurate at pulling off a broadening range of high-value functions than we are.
They’re not affected or influenced by emotions, feelings, wants, needs, and other factors that often cloud our judgement and intelligence.
Humanity and technology combined
When it comes to hiring, computers can enhance the productivity of human recruiters by managing tasks such as candidate screening and ranking, and matching to jobs and company cultures.
We can use computers to take weighted Key Selection Criteria and apply algorithms to objectively compare and contrast candidates that evaluate their fit based on both technical and non-technical requirements.
By eliminating the “grunt work,” as it were, recruiters can focus on executing tasks that require a human touch, such as engaging with candidates and clients, building trust, and creating rapport.
Compono Hire is an automated job-candidate screening, ranking, and matching tool for businesses. The platform combines organisational psychology principles and neuroscience theory with technology to help businesses hire smarter and faster.
The platform uses algorithms to match candidates to role requirements and organisational cultures, and helps recruiters to select candidates based on their full potential.
We wanted to build a platform that removes bias from the recruitment processes and pain incurred when manually sifting through CVs trying to objectively compare and contrast candidate information.
Essentially, Compono enables you to identify and hire people that best fit your job roles and company requirements.
It does what it says on the “box” — it helps you create a shortlist of the best-fit candidates, but doesn’t make the final hiring decision. We believe that right is still reserved for humans.