Two Seconds To Hire

A study I read a few years back has always stuck in my mind. It was conducted by a US University (apologies for not remembering which), and the purpose of the study was to evaluate the ability of lecturers to engage students and better understand how they engaged their students.

To gather data, a range of lecturers were filmed during their classes and the video was shown to a control group of students, who were not from these classes. The control group were asked to rank each of the lecturers on their ability to engage and present.  However, because some of the footage showed the reactions of the students who were present at the lecture, it was thought this may prejudice the views of the control group. Instead of filming again, the footage was edited to remove the classroom students. This meant that instead of ten to 15 minutes of footage, there was less than five minutes.

Interestingly, when the footage was shown to a control group again, the reduced content didn’t impact the outcome, with all lecturers receiving very similar scores across the groups. Intrigued by this finding, someone had an idea to test how much footage was actually required to gain consistent results. The footage was cut from five minutes to two minutes: results same. It was then cut to one minute; the same. In the end it was found that just a few seconds of footage would gain consistent reactions. The control group of students had made their judgement on the ability of the lecturer within just a few seconds.

What fascinated me most about these findings was their extrapolation to the wider context and how adept we, as a human race, are at making snap judgements. From an evolutionary stand point, ‘trusting your gut’ has proved its value, but how many times have you been guilty of making assumptions about someone and, once you’ve got to know them better, realised they weren’t at all like what you had assumed? I know I’ve certainly been guilty of judging a book by its cover, on occasion.

Which brings me to candidate interviews… On paper, your time to hire may be six weeks, but how many of us are guilty of hiring (or not) within the first two seconds? Gut feel plays a part in all human interactions but, in my experience, too many interview processes come down to ‘beauty contests’.

How would you rate your performance in evaluating people? Are you able to maintain objectivity and evaluate interview answers on their merit? What tools and processes to do you have in place to assure this?

Dale Whitton
Senior Consultant