How often do we do things that just feel right? We don’t know why we do them, we probably can’t explain why, but we just know it’s been the same in recruitment for years. Recruitment consultants will tell you they get a gut feel when meeting a candidate - that they somehow know when they find someone who is right for their client. But how reliable is ‘gut feel’?

Now I have been doing this a while and reckon spot on. I’ve been around enough to know a good one when I see one!

The question is, would I gamble £80,000 of my own money on my ‘gut feel’? Would you? Should you?

The truth is most of us wouldn’t and definitely shouldn’t, but it’s the decision our clients face every day. So where does ‘gut feel’ go wrong? The hard truth is we are all prejudiced; we have pre-conditioned views on people - fat, blonde, thin; they have the same name as the boy who bullied you at school… all sorts of prejudice. The psychologists call this ‘implicit association’. You can check out your own prejudices at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/uk/takeatest.html

Implicit association is the downfall of your intuition when it comes to people and therefore an Achilles heel when hiring. So what to do?

The most accurate form of hiring, up to 300% more accurate than ‘gut feel’, is to objectively measure aspects of individuals’ intellect, values, motivations and behaviours, and understand whether this fits with the role and, just as importantly, the company. The appropriate use of psychometric and behavioural profiling can shed a whole new light on a candidate’s application. You can now accurately assess such things as work ethic, ability to cope with change, task focus, resilience and, most importantly, overall emotional intelligence.

Nowadays, in the time it would take you to do a traditional experience-based interview, you can gather enough information to describe how the
individual would behave in your client organisation to an unerring level of accuracy; you can predict success! Now that’s seriously cool and with the cost of mis-hiring calculated at 14.6x the individual’s basic salary, your clients will pay proper fees for that kind of cool!

So is ‘gut feel’ entirely useless? Hell, no! Let your intuition guide you to spend time with the right candidates, but assess them objectively and
comprehensively and you will make the more accurate decision. However, be aware of those prejudices. I, for example, according to the Harvard Implicit Association Test, need to make sure the skinny people get a chance!

• Roger Philby is the founder of Chemistry Recruitment.

(Want to understand more about how you can objectively assess a candidate’s application? Or how such assessments can be used to add value to your clients’ recruiting and maintain your fee levels? Email [email protected] for a brief guide. )

Next issue: In-House Hannah returnsHow much should you rely on your intuition?