A Tiebreaker for Interview Candidate Hiring
A Tiebreaker for Interview Candidate Hiring
A quick-and-dirty heuristic (mental shortcut) when you're caught in a hiring dilemma
In Leadership Land, some hiring decisions are shrouded in a Fog of Uncertainty so dense that it feels like a solid wall. To avoid “analysis paralysis,” we often resort to taking mental shortcuts, like ruling out candidates who:
show up late to an interview
use Comic Sans to write a résumé
dress sloppily during the interview
Many hiring managers use these violations of decorum as dealbreakers. Sure, it’s an efficient method for draining a large candidate pool when you only have a single vacancy to fill. But what would you do if you had to pick between two excellent candidates who seem to be evenly matched?
The Tiebreaker
If you’re in a hiring dilemma between two evenly-matched candidates with excellent track records, select the one who doesn’t look the part.
The reasoning behind this is simple, but counterintuitive: if someone doesn’t look the part, but still managed to build a successful, multi-decade career on par with someone who does look the part, then the first person has some kind of “secret sauce” that allowed them to keep pace with better-looking peers. The first candidate had to overcome the deficit in appearance by overcompensating elsewhere.
We first presented this tiebreaker as a sideshow in an earlier post. However, the heuristic is important enough to be a standalone idea, so we wanted to highlight it here.
Surgeons Should Not Look Like Surgeons
This hiring heuristic was inspired by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. In Chapter 9, Taleb floated the idea of two surgeons of similar rank in the same department of a hypothetical hospital. One is a silver-haired, bespectacled man with a refined appearance and an Ivy League pedigree. The other surgeon looks like an overweight butcher. Taleb presented the case that, conditional on the two surgeons having both enjoyed similarly successful careers so far, the butcher is more likely to be good at his job. The butcher-like surgeon had to overcompensate in order to overcome the negative impression he made on patients, peers, and hospital administrators.
This “butcher heuristic” is far from foolproof, but still gets you better results than a 50/50 coin flip. In the realm of candidate selection and recruitment, the butcher heuristic is better than “going with your gut” because it protects you from being fooled by a candidate who offers more style than substance:
Being too good at interviewing is a red flag. Someone who gives a stellar interview performance has spent a lot of time perfecting an illusion. When a magician performs magic tricks, we expect entertainment without believing there’s actual magic being done. But when you hire a candidate who performed well on an interview, are you expecting them to perform real magic on the job?
Dangerous candidates ooze with superficial charm. Interviewees who score high on the Dark Triad elements of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism are very good at telling you exactly what you want to hear.
Credentials as ornamentation: We tend to equate “fancy degrees and certifications” with “more qualified.” However, if a richly-ornamented candidate were superior, you’d also expect them to have a superior set of knowledge, skills, and abilities, and accomplishments (KSAA). Given a choice between a candidate with an alphabet soup of letters after their name, and an undecorated competitor with a comparable set of KSAA, we’d go with the latter1.
Our Own Skin in the Game
This isn’t armchair theorizing. One of our authors works for an organization which, years ago, hired someone who really, really doesn’t look the part. To this day, his hair looks like a half-built bird’s nest and his shirt looks like it’s never been acquainted with an iron. Despite this unkempt appearance, this fellow wields an incredible memory, recalling minor details from informal conversations years ago. Every time he opens his mouth, something insightful comes out.
He is the person who inspired the description of Candidate #2 in the original post. Although…we dialed it up to eleven by giving Candidate #2 a tattoo and the appearance of an ex-convict. These artistic liberties were taken to protect the innocent.
We hope this post helped to push back the Fog of Uncertainty, at least by a little bit. In our very first Adventures in Leadership Land post, we cautioned new leaders to beware the unseen, unheard, and unknown. When evaluating a job candidate, it always pays to ask yourself: what are they not telling you?
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Even if the two candidates bring the exact same KSAA to the team, the one with the certificates and diplomas is more likely to be pompous. Why rely on wits and persuasion when you can shut down arguments with the authority of your credentials? Ornamentation ∝ Insufferability.