Like dating, a human endeavor frought with uncertainty, reward, and high turnover, hiring has a habit of taking all the theories and recommendations you have about a candidate (or, from the other side, the company) and emptying them unceremoniously into the nearest garbage can. At a fundamental level, when two people sit down to an interview, it’s two humans trying to figure out if they like each other.
And, according to Northwestern researcher Lauren Rivera, what most people are looking for is “me.” In the companies she studied, interviewers who lacked systematic measures of what their company was looking for tended to fall back on themselves and defining merit in “their own image,” meaning that the most qualified interviewees were those who best resembled their interviewers.
Because of this pattern, the consultancies, banks, and law firms that Rivera studied tended to “replicate themselves,” hiring only people who had the same hobbies, styles of self-presentation, and educational and geographic backgrounds. Even if there was nontrivial demographic diversity across race or gender, there remained a more fundamental homogeniety of culture or personality.
Which is a bad thing for innovation. Research shows that if you want to create new ideas, you need to include the outgroup.
What Rivera’s studies evidence is that the murkier aspects of hiring–like personality fit–have been left to hunches, heuristics, and their inevitable human biases, a multi-faceted blindspot that a crop of companies seek to cure.
Person to person: eHarmony
You may have heard of eHarmony. Launched back in 2000, the Santa Monica company known for making long-lasting couples–to the tune of 100,000 marriages a year–is now taking first steps into the recruitment racket. VP of customer experience Grant Langston tells Fast Company that they’ll probably bring a product to market next year, though at present the effort is being developed by four full-time employees and a gaggle of consultants.
Langston says the company will try to slow down the rate of job-hopping, similar to what they did with divorce. He chalks the turnover rate up to superficial assessments of job fitness for both employee and employer, leading to fundamental disconnects and leaving employees feeling underappreciated.