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« December 2005 issue of Personnel Psychology | Main | Germans demand that workers be happy, invade Poland »
The link between blinking, speed dating, and speed hiring
On November 17, 2005 by Jamie Madigan
I talked a while back about the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell, mainly how the author's concept of "thin slicing" is essentially the old, well researched concept of decision-making under uncertainty. That was on the basis of just reading a book review of Blink, though, and I finally got around to reading the whole thing myself. It's great and got all kinds of ideas kicking around in my head.
For example, in one section Gladwell talks about speed dating, which is an organized dating event where singles meet in a large group and then meet with a prospective partner for just a few minutes --typically eight minutes or less. After that, a bell rings and the men scoot down the line and repeat the meeting with the next person. Participants each have a rating sheet where they indicate how much they like each person they met with. If any given pair of people make favorable ratings about each other, they are given each other's contact information so they can arrange a more traditional date.
This is interesting to me, not because I want to participate in speed dating (I doubt my wife or daughter would approve), but because people say that it works. Gladwell reports how people can usually tell within a few minutes if not seconds whether or not they like a person. Speed dating just takes the inefficiencies out of traditional dating. You don't need to spend days or weeks or months getting to know a person to judge whether or not she'll fit in with your life. You just need 30 to 60 seconds of casual conversation. And maybe a criminal background check.
The natural association that came to me while reading this section of the book, of course, was doing the same thing with prospective employees. Well, not deciding whether or not to date them, but deciding whether or not to hire them. I think most of us have met a prospective co-worker and within a very short period of time if we would really like working with this person or if we wouldn't be able to stand him. Or maybe it gets even more sophisticated than that and we get a whiff of whether or not the person has similar values, goals, and attitudes as we do or whether or not the person will "fit in" with our company's culture. How is that different than speed dating? It's not, and I'm even willing to say that our this thin slicing, to use Gladwell's term, is usually right about those things.
So why aren't staffing gurus (you know who you are) recommending speed hiring sessions where we rotate a bunch of candidates in front of us and talk to them for five minutes each? Because hiring someone isn't the same as dating someone. For one, hiring is a more permanent decision that's harder to break off than a date for Friday night. If we were talking about "speed marriage" it might be closer to parity. But more importantly, picking the right person for a job requires not just choosing someone who fits with the culture of your department or the company overall, it involves someone who can do the dang job. We've all probably known the "pleasant idiot" who people like, but who also always screws things up or never gets anything done. You've got to assess the requirements of the job and the degree to which the candidate can fulfill those requirements. Then you start thinking about other things.
Not only that, but I developed other concerns about the whole speed dating system once I thought about it. It seems to me that it's susceptible to the same kinds of decision-making quirks that we have to watch out for in employment selection. Sure, dating has different rules and it's completely acceptable to have biases that would be unacceptable in the employment field. "I'm only interested in people that share my religion" or "He's too old for me" seem pretty acceptable in dating, but are generally disastrous in employment. Still, I can see biases like the self-fulfilling prophecy taking hold of any given speed dating session. If the man who sits down across from you for some reason gives the initial impression of having no sense of humor, that may affect how you treat him and how the conversation goes. You may not joke with him or you may not consider his jokes to be as funny as you would otherwise. Same with the contrast effect --some average gal may seem like a knockout if you meet her right after talking with a mean-spirited hag with poor hygiene.
And indeed, Gladwell admits some of these issues in a roundabout way. He often touches on "the dark side of thin slicing" where he discusses how this cognitive gift can also be a curse when it leads us astray. So listen to your gut on some things like deciding what brand of jelly to buy at the store or even deciding whether or not to ask someone out on a date. But do better when it comes to the more important stuff.
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