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Whole Brain Interviewing

By Lou Adler, August 20, 2008

Beauty is in the Eyes of the Beholder – Lie Zi

I was in Moscow the day the invasion of Georgia began. Our Russian guides, who up to that date were pro-American, saw the same conflict as a liberation clearly provoked by Georgia. Some of the more vocal on our tour, as well as the Russian guides, saw Barak Obama as the new American ideal, with John McCain being quite troublesome. Others saw Obama as a neophyte, ill-equipped to go belly-to-belly with Putin the Terrible. A former CBS Moscow bureau chief on the tour suggested diplomacy was called for, while the hawkish Americans in the group wanted a strong U.S. counter-attack. It seemed most Russians wanted an escalation of the conflict to demonstrate that they were no longer going to be pushed around by the West. I could go on, but by now you're probably wondering what any of this has to do with recruiting.

Read more articles by this author.

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If you've ever had a top candidate get dropped because someone on the interviewing team made a bum assessment, you'll see the glimmer of a connection. And if you, or one of your clients, ever made an instant judgment about a candidate, and then used the balance of the interview to justify it, the connection will be much more obvious. The rather circuitous point I'm trying to make here is that we all see the same things differently based on our viewpoint, biases, upbringing, academic background, culture, race, religion, age, health, need, and even time of day or night, plus a host of other important and not-so-important issues.

Understanding these issues and the impact on decision-making is part of the new field of behavioral economics and brain mapping. In his book, The Mind of the Market, author Michael Shermer describes how the use of functional MRI has enabled researchers to study brain activity under different decision-making conditions. Shermer makes the case that most decisions, whether they are political, business-related, or personal, are usually based on some biased precondition. The decision ultimately made is justified using "cherry-picked" information with contrary information discarded, minimized, or ignored. Furthermore, even if the decision is ultimately proven wrong, people are able to self-justify their original decision with contortions and spin.

This basically means that first impressions count, even if they don't.

In the case of making better hiring decisions, much of this evolutionary pre-wiring can be overcome by the use of a concept I call "Whole Brain Interviewing." What follows is a rather superficial and biologically incorrect explanation of this approach. Yet, as a real brain surgeon once told me, while the concept may not be quite correct regarding how the brain truly operates, the conclusions drawn are nonetheless quite valid. With this caveat in mind, let me offer "Whole Brain Interviewing" as a means to overcome the problems associated with making better hiring decisions and eliminating bias.

Whole Brain Interviewing

The brain consists of four core parts. The left hemisphere is the center of analytical skills and fact-finding. The right hemisphere is the center of creative thinking and intuition. The limbic system at the base of the brain acts as our emotional control valve and is the center of the friend vs. foe response. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is the decision-making center of the brain processing data from the other three primary regions. Unfortunately, the prefrontal cortex can be overridden by the limbic system's friend vs. foe response if a threat appears. It is this override capability that is at the root cause of most interviewing mistakes, and compensating for it requires some serious manual intervention.

Before getting into this, it's important to understand how our brains are wired to make incorrect assessments. Techies tend to be conservative, over-relying on their left brain, looking for heavy experience and an exceptional level of skills. Most managers and executives emphasize their right brain, trusting their intuition, basing hiring decisions on a narrow set of traits, usually strong communication skills, presence, and raw intelligence. In this way they globalize competency, or the lack of it, based on a few narrow traits. Sales people instinctively go with their gut reaction, in this case their limbic system's friend vs. foe response overvaluing personality and interpersonal skills. In actual practice everyone uses a bit of each brain region, sending biased information to their PFC for the final yes/no decision.

Some examples will help clarify this and highlight some common hiring problems. Most interviewers when meeting a candidate make some type of snap decision. If the interviewer "likes" the candidate, the interviewer relaxes, is more open minded, and is predisposed to ask easier questions using either a left or right brain bias. In this way left-brain techies tend to hire highly experienced people, but few superstars, since they're unwilling to sacrifice skills for potential. Right brain intuitives hire more high potential people good at strategy and planning, but are less successful hiring people who are strong on the execution side. Sales people tend to have random results. If they like someone, they'll quickly attempt to sell them into the job without thorough vetting. People who make weak first impressions, regardless of their overall competency, tend to be eliminated for superficial reasons before they're even subjected to the biased interviewing process described here.

Making matters worse is the dominant boss who uses a 15-minute interview to determine "fit." The idea here is that this person is blessed with supposed wisdom and judgment and is given the authority to use his or her super ego (a limbic system on steroids) to override the collective wisdom of the minions. Of course, as a sign of respect, or perhaps cowardice, the team quickly acquiesces to this person's superior judgment seeing the error in their ways.

Whole Brain Interviewing involves the process of overriding the limbic system's first impression response and the dominant boss syndrome, using the right and left brain in balance to collect meaningful and appropriate evidence. This evidence is then sent to the PFC for an unbiased evaluation and proper disposition. Here are some ideas on how to implement this in practice:

1. Get everyone on the hiring team to agree to real job needs before the interview. When everyone on the team knows the job, they tend to use this as the hiring benchmark, rather than their own perceptions of the job. Here are some ideas on how to prepare these types of performance-based job descriptions.
2. Use phone interviews and panel interviews liberally to minimize the impact of first impressions.
3. When meeting the candidate in person, wait 30 minutes or longer before making any type of yes/no/maybe judgment. Using a structured interview allows the interviewer to collect unbiased information during the first 30 minutes of the interview.
4. Measure the impact of the first impression at the end of the interview when you're no longer affected by it. Then objectively determine if your first impression of the candidate will help or hinder on-the-job performance.
5. Don't give anyone a full yes/no vote, including the boss. Instead, assign each interviewer a narrow subset of skills, factors, behaviors, and competencies to assess. The final hiring decision is then given to the team with the hiring manager getting a few more votes.
6. Have each member of the hiring team share the evidence gathered during their interviews in a formal group deliberation process. Here's a form we use to gather this data and guide the assessment.
7. Force techies to evaluate non-technical factors like organization, planning and project management skills, and working with non-technical departments.
8. Force intuitives to assess the candidate's ability to consistently deliver results comparable to what needs to be done on the job and the ability to develop and build teams.
9. Force sales people to evaluate candidates based on their track record of making quota selling comparable products and services to similar buyers.

While overcoming the impact of first impressions and biased decision-making is no easy matter, it's an important aspect of any business decision-making process. Collectively I call the process described above Performance-based Hiring. Managers and companies who have used these techniques have seen a marked improvement in assessment accuracy and on-the-job performance. All it takes is a little rewiring and reprogramming to overcome the natural tendency of our brains to make emotional rather than objective decisions.