Moving beyond the lies built into hiring
A recent article from the Economist.
Our guest writer, John Carlson, shared a recent article published in “The Economist.” He felt the content of “Moving beyond the lies built into hiring” would be of value to readers here at Learning Without Scars.
In “How to get the lying out of hiring,” The Economist makes a strong statement about lying on both sides of the hiring process: “You might imagine this is a simple fight between truth-seeking firms and self-promoting candidates, and to a certain extent it is. But companies themselves are prone to bend reality out of shape in ways that are self-defeating.”
I can’t help but think about the more fundamental issue at the heart of hiring: does the employer just want to fill the position or to obtain someone who best fits the role and who has the greatest potential to perform well and stay? Our team at Reflective Performance, Inc. have been working to offer this better way based on the latest in cognitive science applied to the workforce.
Lies are only possible in a subjective world. Instead, employers and employees can benefit through objective measurement of how people process information, make informed decisions, and deal with fast-changing environments. We do this by determining the fit for a position and organization based on direct measurement of Executive Function skills and Cognitive Reflection abilities to determine human potential in all kinds of corporate environments.
These performance factors are nothing you can lie about or fudge when you are engaged by a software app that puts you through questions and situations that determine the accuracy and speed of response, simulating how your brain responds. Are you impulsive and don’t take valuable time to reflect? Certainly, our social media onslaught can be encouraging of such a response. Wouldn’t it be beneficial for employers to know how human performance factors are addressed based on real data, not subjective evaluations and impressions and past positions?
Able to customize our insights around an organization’s goals, Reflective Performance develops datasets for the performance of current successful employees, plus norms for functional areas to identify Fit Markers and KPI correlations related to the work that a potential hire will be doing.
It’s time to move past subjective and untruthful information in the hiring process and to take the analysis of human factors out of research labs to apply in workforce optimization, ultimately able to eliminate so much embedded waste in terms of costs and lost productivity. Too much money remains on the line for organizations making bad and marginal hires as well as in so much employee turnover. Advanced brain science applied through data-driven systems analysis is where progressive employers are focusing, not in fooling applicants to join their organizations.
