How to Shape Human Behavior

17 important takeaways from this video:

00:00:25 Which parameters, tests and selection methods best enable you to predict future performance? When more than one person applies for employment with your company, you inevitably have to make a choice. Why and how you conduct the interview process…

00:04:10 Future-actual performance versus current future-perceived performance. If you think the person will perform very well, you’ll hire the person. You hire the one where you think performance will be the best. One year later after hire you’ll know whether or not the person has performed well or not. Four decisions, half of them yield negative outcomes:

• Right Negative: Based on what I have learned about you, I believe that if I hire you, future performance will be low; so I don’t hire you.
• Right Positive: Based on what I have learned about you, I believe that if I hire you your performance will be very high; so I hire you.
• False-Negative: Based on what I have learned about you, I have predicted that your performance will be low; so I don’t hire you. But if I would have hired you, your performance would have been high.
• False-Positive: Based on what I have learned about you, I predict that you will be a star and will really out-perform, but later on you become another ‘warm body’ in the office. In some countries, ‘getting rid’ of employees is costly and time consuming, further compounding the damage done by choosing to hire this person.

At the base, candidate selection is about increasing the right decision and decreasing the wrong decision.

00:08:54 There is a difference between a ‘position’ and a ‘job.’ A job is merely defined as your set of responsibilities. Many people, from superiors to subordinates, may have the same job, but they don’t have the same position. A ‘position’ is simply a box allocated somewhere within your corporate tree structure.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The Rules of Work 2nd Edition by Richard Templar is a great book that provides 108 effective rules to increase your ‘position’ as effectively and efficiently as possible.]

00:10:38 The obvious first question in a recruiting process is: ‘What are we looking for?’ This is usually defined through a job analysis – an attempt to understand the scope and nature of the job by identifying:

1.  The critical requirements related to a job, and
2. Attractive aspects of the job

In times of talent shortage, it’s sometimes obligatory to ‘sell’ a job to people.

00:12:40 Look at current job ads and you’ll find that the largest part of them are about job requirements, whereby the company gives you permission to apply if, and only if, you meet the requirements set forth by the job announcement.

But many jobs change over time and responsibilities may become outdated after a few years. A software developer must develop software, but the requirements and the environment is constantly changing. To understand the critical requirements of a job position, you must look at the critical incidents: the extreme problems and challenges a person in that job position must regularly face.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Armin Trost talks more about the essential elements of a job advertisement in his lecture on how brands attract & select the best clients.]

00:13:10 The more important element to begin with in a job announcement is the attractive aspects of this job: ‘Why is this job a great job?’ Every job has good and bad sides. ‘Magic moments’ are the defining moments that make you say ‘That is why I love this job. That’s why I get up in the morning and go to work.’

00:19:44 ‘De-jobbing’ is a modern approach where more and more people are creating their own job. You and your colleagues may have the same ‘job,’ but each person is defined by his or her talent, preferences, approaches, motivations, work style and skill set, and may therefore do and be responsible for something completely different.

00:21:00 If you have a company where people always refer to their job description, a ‘it’s not my job’ mentality sets in and your company is in a bad situation. Providing the service the client is requesting isn’t in my job description so I won’t do it. Organizing the christmas party isn’t something I’m being paid for, so I won’t do it. When you have people like this, your company is in deep trouble because success means attracting and hiring people willing to walk the extra mile.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Seth Godin illustrates the ‘not my job’ problem in his talk This is Broken]

00:21:53 Relevant Candidate Dimensions. When humans try to make a judgment about other human beings, we unconsciously try to create a wholistic picture – the person as a whole rather than isolated attributes of the person.

00:30:00 When you make a judgment about another human being, certain biases influence your decisions and can lead you to make wrong or incorrect judgments. This can lead you to rejecting the right candidate or hiring the wrong one.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Frank Bernieri and psychologist Alexander Todorov have conducted studies into first impressions – the primacy effect – and have found that the judgements made about you within the first few seconds heavily influence that person’s final judgment about you.]

00:39:00 There are some systematic changes that happen from the beginning to the end of the recruitment process:

1. A rule of thumb is that a company receives as many applications in a year as they have employees employeed. (10,000 employees? Expect to receive roughly 10,000 job applications = nearly 30 CV’s every day.)
2. On average, research has shown that experienced recruiters may spend about 11 seconds on each CV/resume. Because you cannot effectively evaluate the candidate within this timeframe, the recruiter focuses on certain critical cues. At the beginning, this is an efficient and cost-effective way of evaluating the candidate pool.
3. The closer you get to offering the position to the final pool of candidates, the quality and cost of the selection method increases.

00:46:32 The biographical questionnaire is based on the idea that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior; the belief that people don’t change very much.

00:54:50 Personality is has to do with individual differences among people in behavior patterns, cognition and emotion depending on the situation in which they find themself.

00:57:57 The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is among the most commonly used tests.

01:01:20 The problem with personality tests is that the candidate will base his or her answers on what they believe the recruiter considers to be the ideal profile for the position. Therefore, good personality tests include questions that also measure your tendency to draw a positive picture of yourself.

01:04:10 Personality is as it is, but with skills, competence, ability and aptitude there is a strong-end and a weak-end.

01:09:30 Intelligence is being able to explain something, even if you don’t believe it.