The Gifts & Servants of Talent Acquisition
Albert Einstein, famous for his rational mind, once suggested that “intuition is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant, though we have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” He may have known as much about the powers, and weaknesses, of human sensemaking as he did physics.
Today, the servant has been further promoted and the sacred gift pushed further towards the end of a mysterious perceptual duality, one that may appear as such because we don’t understand how to properly define the mental processes we commonly attribute to it. Our intuition, in reproducible situations, can be highly accurate. It is less so, when we incorrectly perceive that a new situation is similar enough to one we already know. Likewise, logic and rationality are not impervious to imprecision. We are often far less logical than we think because a deliberate thought process is either absent or poorly utilized, or due to the biases that inhabit our ‘consciousness.’
This is precisely why I have become more and more involved in the decision-making process around talent acquisition. Many times, those who interview others are not well-studied in psychology, sociology, or human perception and sometimes being promoted is the only qualification needed to select others who will be able to achieve the same levels of success. People I talk to either falsely trust their perceptual powers too much, or not enough, with the latter case sometimes resulting in a subcontracting of the selection process per psychometric assessments. It is an understandable decision, but also a promotion of Einstein’s servant.
The inherent danger is that we become project managers instead of perceptual masters. In the bid to fill the perceptual gap, psychometric assessments have evolved to an amazing level of sophistication with instruments that can predict performance. Such assessments are well-intended, and clever, because they must not only be scientifically valid in how they assess personality, but also in how they assess performance predictability. They represent fascinating work, created by amazing people, but if not used carefully can too narrowly define what ‘performance’ looks like.
Instead of seeking silver arrows, we should adopt a more adaptable selection methodology. When we too narrowly define performance there is a tendency to homogenize the workplace, which then counters diversity and inclusion initiatives. Before long, we hear the infamous, “You know, we need to think more outside the box.”
To be clear, psychometric assessments are in incredibly useful tool for human development. They are even incredibly useful for selection if performance indicators can be customized to a variety of different environments. But even then, a selection bias is a relatively immovable object, even when performance is more broadly defined, due to assumptions we have regarding organizational performance.
We need more effective methods to make decisions about those we hire, methods that consider human ability more fully, methods that enable much richer information and contexts about those we are interviewing and that enable those who interview to learn more about their own perceptual processes. We need solutions that can result in a spending reduction of leadership development. These solutions should bring intuition and logic so close together that they are almost indistinguishable from one another and by doing so redefine how we think about them.
Perhaps it is time to reevaluate the servant and remember our gifts when making choices about human beings.
