Intuition or Inclusion? The Role of Gut Instinct in Inclusive Hiring

Recruitment professionals and hiring managers talk a great deal about the power and the value of gut instinct, particularly in niche industries or when they have been recruiting for a number of years. But from what we have explored so far in this series, is there a place for gut instinct in an inclusive hiring process? If so, how can it be used and managed?
The short answer is yes! After all, an instinct is telling you something. Inclusive hiring teaches you to say, “great, now give me the evidence for this instinct.”

Trusting the process

Imagine a candidate who’s perfect on paper. It feels like you’re onto a winner looking at their CV and you almost don’t feel the need to go through with the proper hiring process. This is especially tempting in a niche sector or a high skills role, where the perfect candidate can be rarer than hen’s teeth. Here, gut instinct is saying “I’ve got to secure this candidate” rather than, “I need to assess the capability of this candidate to do the job.”

The inclusive hiring process therefore allows you to use your gut instinct as a tool in your hiring toolbox. Feel it, trust it, but gather the proper evidence to justify it. What is your gut instinct picking up that the hiring process doesn’t quite capture? For example, is it a skill or competence that you can see in the candidate but isn’t amongst those measured by the interview question? That is an important indicator of how the structure of the recruitment process could be changed to gather more relevant evidence.

Crucially, interrogating your gut instinct mitigates the risk of relying on bias that we have explored previously, giving you more certainty in your choices. Gut instinct is often based on a candidate’s choice of clothes, the strength of their handshake. It could also be based on other unassessed biases such as ‘like me’ – when you warm to a candidate who has similarities with you – or ‘enthusiasm for competence’ – when a candidate’s display of enthusiasm or gravitas is taken as proof of their competence to do the job.

Hiring the wrong candidate for the job could potentially be setting them up to fail, making this a lose-lose situation for all parties. And for experienced recruiters making senior hires, such as at C-suite level, trusting gut instincts could land you in seriously hot (and expensive!) water if they weren’t to work out. Besides, “gut instinct” doesn’t leave an audit trail, making it impossible to justify a hire.

Moral of the story: inclusive hiring is not about ignoring or trying to silence gut instinct, but rather about testing it and giving it more to go on.

Mitigating risk

For recruiters and hiring managers who might be feeling resistant to our suggestion to switch up how you’re hiring, consider how this might change if we introduce the concept of mitigating risk. If you wouldn’t want to make a risky decision in another area of the business and you wouldn’t buy something without testing it or looking for the evidence that it did what you wanted it to do, why should hiring be any different?  

Raising the bar

If your assessment process is based purely on evidence of the ability to do the job and nothing else, then it's raising the bar. The only way you can get that job is if you have got that ability, not because of somebody’s bias, prejudice, connections or subjective thoughts. 

Feedback worth giving

An all too rare part of many recruitment experiences is good quality feedback. How many of us have received the generic responses of “someone else was a better fit”, “we’re going with someone more experienced” or “you weren’t quite what we were looking for”?

Inclusive hiring is perfectly structured to give your candidates precise and valuable feedback related to very specific criteria. Whether they’ve been successful or not, clear cut evidence against the criteria is much easier for the candidate to take forward, perhaps to develop their skillset or gain more experience.

We shouldn’t overlook the significance of an interview as a life event with lots of time and energy invested into researching, applying and preparing. The very least you can do as a recruiter or hiring manager to be respectful of that, is implement an evidence-based approach respectfully and make sure that it’s a positive experience for the candidates. From a reputational standpoint, this also increases the chance of candidates spreading the word of their positive candidate experience though Indeed, Glasdoor or LinkedIn, amplifying and organically diversifying your talent pool

Inspired to see how Inclusive Hiring could transform your organisation? Contact us or learn more about our inclusive hiring programmes and workshops.

Written by Maria Baggio, Managing Consultant