Don’t hire staff just because they’re similar and likeable

Don’t hire staff just because they’re similar and likeable

October 16, 2024

“You are not one of us and I don’t like you”. The confronting inner dialogue many of us can be saying to ourselves about a candidate we have just interviewed.

The research shows that we are more likely to say yes to hiring someone we like and someone who is similar to us.  This can lead us to ignore other objective, more performance predictive data.

And what if the objective, predictive data says this similar, likeable person is not going to perform?

As quoted in Forbes magazine in January this year, in the “recent McKinsey Diversity Matters report, companies committed to diversity show a 39 percent increased likelihood of outperformance for those in the top quartile of ethnic representation versus the bottom quartile”.  These are companies who understand the value in finding people who are dissimilar in many ways to the current cohort, because they can offer different perspectives that enhance the quality of decision making.  

Similarity and likeability don’t improve performance. Diversity does.

Unfortunately, interviews often unconsciously steer us toward making decisions on criteria that are irrelevant to performance, such as similarity and likeability.

And in our hiring process we often don’t use the tools that can help us explore diversity and give us the data that does predict performance.

I’m not saying don’t interview.

But we need to fix the way we interview to ensure we are not getting pulled away from the job success criteria because we are seduced by a candidate’s likeability and similarity to us.

And we need to add other tools to the process, in addition interview and reference check, that allow us to better assess diversity of working styles and give us more accurate and reliable data that does predict performance – tools such as personality assessment, thinking ability and style assessments, and skills assessments.

We are inherently programmed to gravitate toward people who are similar and likeable. But if we do that in a recruitment context we are more likely going to suffer poorer performance results. Identifying the right people for our team to achieve high performance means consciously going against what we’ve been accustomed to doing – hiring people on the basis of their likeability and similarity to us assessed through interview. It’s time to consciously choose a broader set of tools that help us explore diversity and allow us to obtain data that is truly predictive of high performance.
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