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Small Business Tips to Hire Great Employees – Listen To Your Gut

Written by: Ingrid Cliff

Article Overview: Have you ever had a hunch? How about gut feel? All of these are euphemisms for intuition. Intuition is one of the most underrated business tools that exists for managers, with all successful leaders using it automatically in their day to day decision making. For 20 years I taught logical and rational decision making processes around people management to executives, but found that something was missing. Even the most rational and logical processes could go totally wrong unless intuition was allowed air time.

Small Business Tips to Hire Great Employees – Listen To Your Gut

Have you ever had a hunch? How about gut feel? All of these are euphemisms for intuition. Intuition is one of the most underrated business tools that exists for managers, with all successful leaders using it automatically in their day to day decision making.

For 20 years I taught logical and rational decision making processes around people management to executives, but found that something was missing. Even the most rational and logical processes could go totally wrong unless intuition was allowed air time.

Nowhere was this more pronounced than in recruitment and selection processes. Best practice recruitment and selection since the 1980’s has been guided by written position descriptions, standardized selection criteria, competencies and structured interview processes. These processes were designed to take out the arbitrary nature of recruitment and to remove hidden discriminatory processes. The problem was that it also attempted to remove intuition from the process.

I have seen many recruitment processes where on paper one applicant came up on top, but panel member’s gut feel told them to be cautious. Generally when they didn’t listen to their gut, they lived to regret their decision (I certainly did in one case, I had a funny feeling about one candidate but allowed this feeling to be ignored and ended up hiring a stalker who created havoc for my staff).

So how do you hire someone successfully? Try to have more than one person on the interview panel as you can compare notes.

Listen to both the rational and intuitive sides of the panel members. Certainly follow the logical processes – they are proven to help create a level playing field for candidates, but at the end of the process, ask each panel member to jot down silently what they “feel/think” about the candidates and whether or not they “would they like working with them”.

The panel should then share their feelings/thoughts – if there is even one concern, then trust this hunch and use additional logical processes to check this hunch out. These processes can include asking for additional referees, re-interviewing the top few candidates with new questions or supplementing the applicant pool with additional candidates for comparison.

Life is too short for a bad hiring decision – they are highly costly mistakes in terms of impact on a team and wasted training. Allow intuition to also come to the table and these mistakes will be minimized.

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Article Tags: air time, arbitrary nature, business tools, funny feeling, hunch, interview panel, interview processes, intuition, jot, logi, logical processes, panel member, panel members, position descriptions, rational decision, recruitment and selection, recruitment processes, selection criteria, selection processes, structured interview



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