feature | GAMIFICATION
PUFFED
QUINOA AND CHIA SEEDS… OR HOTDOG?
Start of 2019, the team - just back from Christmas excesses - voted for a healthy start, and an array of high protein, low salt, sugar and fat options were duly purchased. My desk is in line-of-sight of the
snack cupboard and numerous packets of lentil crisps and dried fava beans, sat largely undisturbed and not discernibly depleted in number. The chocolate-coated seed mixes though, disappeared in pretty short order.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his TED talk about how Howard Moskowitz’s data-driven approach transformed the spaghetti sauce industry, memorably points out that; “if you ask people what they want in a coffee, they always say the same thing; ‘a ‘rich, dark, hearty roast”. Whereas when you look at the sales figures, the overwhelmingly more accurate answer is what people really want is; “weak, milky coffee”, but nobody will ever say that. Steve Jobs famously made the same point when he advised: “People don’t know what they want; you have to show it to them.” Clearly, the office snack order was not an isolated event in human history. So, what does this mean for the world of HR? Well, this tendency for human beings not to recognise what they’re looking for is not limited to food, drink and iPhones - it is arguably a more serious issue in the world of employment. Alarmingly, there’s a good amount of evidence that we don’t know what we really want when it comes to HR decisions. As Fast Company reports; “employers often struggle to gather objective data on past job performance in a given role, to define the key attributes that make someone successful in it.”
Of course, whatever employers say they want, is what the talent market will claim to provide. Read any self-respecting employability advice website and it will tell you to tailor your application for the role. The process for a candidate is simple; first you look up what the employer says they’re looking for, then you manipulate your CV to claim that’s exactly what you’re like. If you’re filling out a traditional personality test questionnaire, you do something similar - you carry out some practice tests and learn to choose the answers that correlate with the personality you know the employer is looking for - it’s a pretty simple formula. In the absence of this knowledge, recruiters - swayed by subconscious and deep- rooted cognitive biases such as the availability heuristic - tend to over-index on those characteristics which they have seen as present in those that are successful in the role. According to the F
ast Company report cited ARTICLE BY TOM VIGGERS, GLOBAL ACCOUNT DIRECTOR - PYMETRICS
earlier, these characteristics include; ‘confidence, credentials, conscientiousness and conformity’. And, according to just about any diversity report ever, they unfortunately also include; gender, ethnicity, sexual-orientation, physical ability, socio-economic group… oh, and height! Whilst the danger of some of
24 | thehrdirector | MAY 2019
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