Minimizing False Negatives

Our guidance and training is aimed at helping you maximize your hiring accuracy. (And creating a great candidate experience so that those people who do receive an offer from you are excited to say yes.)

One way you do this is—the main way—is by minimizing false positives. Think of the salesy candidate who performs well in the interview but then underperforms when the real work begins. We want to avoid that hire.

But there’s a less commonly analyzed problem: how do we avoid false negatives? Think of the very talented, capable person who underperforms in a typical interview setting or who you never even get a chance to interview. The great hire we never knew we missed. How do we minimize that problem?

Unwise External Messaging

It’s fine for your role description to turn off mediocre performers and those who would be a clearly poor culture fit. But you obviously do not want to dissuade those who could be quite successful and happy. Companies typically make this mistake in their role descriptions in one of two ways:

1. Too many (unnecessary) qualifications, which has been repeatedly proven to create bias, particularly gender bias.

2. Using language that appeals to a certain imagined prototype or “profile” candidate, at the expense of others.

In both cases you are causing some potential high performers to self-select out of your process before you even get a chance to meet them.

It’s fine—even good—to use language that indicates you are only looking for hard-working high performers (if, in fact, that accurately describes your needs) but you want to be careful to avoid other type of opt-out energy.

Ignoring Passive Candidates

“Passive” in this context simply means that the candidate is not actively looking for a job. This describes the vast majority of high-potential candidates, but is a pool that is entirely invisible if you are not actively courting it.

If you are serious about finding the top percentiles of talent for your company, you need a process for accessing and cultivating relationships with these passive candidates. It also implies that you need to treat this as a months-long process, rather than a weeks-long sprint. (The recruiting portion, not the interview process.) Relying on job postings, as many companies do, would be the exact opposite strategy of what we recommend, as these are generally only read by active job seekers.

Over-indexing on Experience

Many employers find the concept of interviewing and hiring to be difficult (deservedly so). As a result, they “outsource” (consciously or not) the hiring decision to someone else. What this looks like is the following line of thought: “We want someone who worked at ABC company doing XYZ role.” There is some room for this type of thinking when formulating sourcing strategies (i.e. top-of-funnel prospects) but it gets taken too far when it comes to assessing candidates.

What often happens is interviewers are too impressed by run-of-the-mill performance by candidates who have very similar experience to what will be required on the job. And conversely, they don’t make the effort to uncover exceptional performance from non-traditional candidates who have closely relevant experience.

We’re not saying experience does not matter at all—obviously you don’t have an infinite amount of time for a new hire to learn things—but as a general rule, companies hire experienced “B players” (who are often making a lateral move) rather than “A players” who are bringing their skills to a new business context.

Desperation

Wait a second—doesn’t desperation lead us to false positives—saying yes to the marginal candidate due to time pressure? Yes. But it can also lead to false negatives. Here’s how…

When you are under time pressure to fill a seat, you will tend to prioritize candidates who are fully trained and “plug-and-play,” even at the expense of their true potential for long-term performance. You over-value performance on day 1, under-value performance on day 100, and completely ignore performance on day 1000. (It compounds.)

Superficial Rejection Rationales

This one is broad, and a bit fuzzy. Here’s the gist: many bad/lazy interviewers will reject candidates based on a weak rationale. Subconsciously, the reason is often that they either “didn’t like” the candidate (you need to be more specific than that), or that the candidate was “not like me” (obviously a terrible reason). But even when it comes to supposedly data-driven decisions for rejecting a candidate, there are still plenty of questionable reasons:

1. The candidate used a forbidden word (“I’d like to become a ‘manager’ at some point.”)

2. The candidate was nervous or stumbled with some responses

3. (CRITICAL) The candidate was introverted or otherwise doesn’t express themselves the same way I do

The average (untrained) interviewer is far too concerned with how a candidate’s interview performance appears, and places too much stock on a candidate’s initial response to a question. A skilled (trained) interviewer cares far more about the substantive relevance and impressiveness of past, verifiable instances of the candidate accomplishing something meaningful.

Weaving It All Together

There’s no way a single blog post can make great hiring decisions for you—it’s too complex and the business needs/logic are too unique to your situation—but there are some general maxims to follow:

1. Don’t inadvertently turn away high performers with your language and positioning

2. Don’t settle for passive applicant channels

3. Don’t overweight experience

4. Don’t get desperate

5. Don’t settle

6. Don’t overlook high-performers in “unrelated” (but analogous, from first-principles thinking) fields

7. Don’t rely on superficial reactions from untrained interviewers

If any of these strike your interest, let us know and we’d be happy to expand on them further.