Why You Can’t Accurately Predict a Candidate’s Future On-the-Job Success

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

Sherlock Holmes, The Boscombe Valley Mystery, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

It’s nearly impossible to accurately predict a candidate’s future success on the job because of something called irreducible unpredictability. Any predictions would be based on incomplete historical/factual data supplied on the candidate résumé — some of which may not be totally reliable and honest — fail far short of providing reliable probabilities.

A 2008 study published in the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Journal found that the variance in executive success accounted for by technical competence and psychological factors was 20% and 10%, respectively. However 70% of the variance was attributed irreducible unpredictability.

In a separate study, researchers found that managers placed more emphasis on competencies assessed by unstructured interviews (subjective, intuitive) than on competencies measured by different assessments (objective, defined).

The process of candidate assessment and selection involves considerable interplay of many psychological factors; yet many believe that as long as the candidate is the “right person for the job” and has been accurately assessed, success is certain. This belief fails to recognize that many elements of performance are unknown at the time of hire. The idea that it’s still possible to predict employee success ignores the fact that there is no such thing as perfect prediction in the hiring process.

A résumé with quantified accomplishments and achievements can lead one to believe that past history is an indicator of future performance. Such a candidate résumé will likely get on the short list for an interview—if there weren’t any social media red flags that would call into question that candidate’s viability as a quality hire.

When you’ve exhausted all legal/ethical avenues for evaluating a potential candidate, you’re still left with irreducible unpredictability. When you’ve gone as far as you can, you go with what you know and then intuition or “gut instinct” often takes you over that gap to help with making the hiring decision.

Experience Breeds Overconfidence with Prediction Accuracy

But there’s a problem there as well. The mistaken belief by many decision makers, hiring managers, and HR people is that the prediction accuracy of future performance improves through experience. This results in an overweighted trust in intuition and growing overconfidence. Overconfident people place too much trust in their own ability, easily dismiss factors or influences that may undermine their own perceived accuracy, and they underestimate others. As we gain experience, one would think that it would have a dampening effect on overconfidence, but quite the opposite happens: it increases.

Overconfidence can lead to complacency by not engaging the due diligence of critical thinking. Instead, we opt for a path of least logical resistance, bypassing other possibilities and rushing to judgment.

Neural Processing Shortcuts Can Introduce Noise and Bias

Our brains rely on mental shortcuts (called “System 1 processing”) to simplify making critical and non-critical decisions from all the sensory input we encounter every day. There are many neural processing  short cuts, called “heuristics,” and each occurs in different contexts. The caution here is that because they are detours to longer duration neural processing (called “System 2 processing”), they can introduce errors and bias.

Unconscious bias refers to a prejudice of which we are unaware and which happens outside of our conscious control. (So-called “Overcoming Unconscious Bias” programs are really more about ensuring you can call up System 2 as a check on the effects of bias associated with System 1, though the efficacy of such programs remains questionable, according to many studies.) Unconscious bias occurs automatically and is triggered by our brain’s preference for neural processing shortcuts, resulting in quick judgments and assessments of people and situations (referred to as “thin slicing”). All of this is influenced by our background, cultural environment, and personal experiences.

But because System 2 takes more neural effort, it is easily distracted by competing demands. Stress, anxiety, fatigue, burnout all make it more difficult to access System 2.

Not all bias is unconscious. Not all bias is bias; it could be noise. As psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman writes in Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment:

Noise causes error, as does bias, but the two kinds of error are separate and independent. A company’s hiring decisions could be unbiased overall if some of its recruiters favor men and others favor women. However, its hiring decisions would be noisy, and the company would make many bad choices. 

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Donn LeVie Jr. has 30 years’ experience leading people and projects for such Fortune 100 companies as Phillips Petroleum, Motorola, Intel Corporation; government agencies (NOAA), and academia (Department of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Houston Downtown College). Donn specializes at the intersection of leadership, communication, and performance, which means he works with organization leaders and executives through the doorway of coaching and consulting so that they get higher performance, higher employee retention, and richer financial results though programs in intelligent leadership influence.

Contact him at donn@donnleviejrstrategies.com.

Should You Screen Job Candidates’ Social Media Activity? YES…but

More than ever, the employee hiring process has been a hot topic of conversation and controversy lately. Not only are there legal or ethical restrictions on what information hiring managers and decision makers can or can’t use to access candidates, the hiring process itself is fraught with bias and noise.

An article in the September-October 2021 issue of the Harvard Business Review “IdeaWatch” section admonishes decision makers to “stop screening job candidates’ social media” (the article’s title). The article, which is a synopsis of an academic paper, promotes the idea of embracing “evidence-based recruiting.”

Is Off-the-Clock Behavior Fair Play or Out of Bounds?

One of the original study’s researchers, a professor at the University of Iowa, believes that candidate screening should have a “clear distinction between what people do during work and what they do outside of work.”

In one of the studies, 266 Facebook profiles of job seekers were reviewed to see what they revealed about the candidates. Fifty-one percent contained profanity; 11% indicated gambling problems; 26% showed or referenced alcohol consumption; and 7% referenced drug use.

Would this information be diagnostic of a candidate’s future on-the-job performance? Only time will tell whether or not it has a dilution effect on the impact of quality information. However, the cascading effects of off-the-clock drug and alcohol use rarely remain outside the company entrance for long.

Atta Tarki, CEO of ECA Partners, a recruiting firm, warns hiring managers about digital sleuthing of candidate social media accounts: “If you let hiring managers screen social media profiles, it will result in bias,” he claims in the HBR article. ECA Partners use social media screeners—and not hiring managers—to look for unequivocal red flags in social media profiles. Those red flags are then reported to hiring managers, but the screening is done after candidate selection, not before.

A recent HBR article cited a study that researched questionable off-the-clock activities of many CEOs—from gains from possible insider trading and domestic violence to extravagant lifestyles and multiple DUI arrests. Wouldn’t it be prudent for board members to have access to such information prior to hiring a CEO?

Does such information call up bias? Of course it does, but often such bias serves as an “early warning system” to suggest a potential problem that remains hidden on a résumé. But more companies seem to prefer to emphasize avoiding hiring bias than they do ensuring a high-quality hire without hidden baggage that could be costly down the road.    

For those responsible for making high-quality, cost-effective hiring decisions, shouldn’t a potential candidate’s actions and behaviors as seen on social media platforms fit the criteria as “evidence-based recruiting” for evaluating quality of hire?

According to a 2018 CareerBuilder survey, 70% of employers check out applicant profiles as part of their screening process, and 57% have rejected applicants because of what they found; 48% monitor employees on social media; and 34% disciplined or fired employees for social media content. According to the first referenced HBR article, the assumption was that this information was being used to predict whether a person will succeed on the job.

But the truth is: You can’t accurately predict a candidate’s future on-the-job success but take notice of the signs along the way.

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Donn LeVie Jr. has 30 years’ experience leading people and projects for such Fortune 100 companies as Phillips Petroleum, Motorola, Intel Corporation; government agencies (NOAA), and academia (Department of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Houston Downtown College). He specializes at the intersection of leadership, communication, and performance, which means he works with organization leaders and executives through the doorway of coaching and consulting so that they get higher performance, higher employee retention, and richer financial results though intelligent leadership influence.