Just recently, I was discussing with a good acquaintance a rather clueless HR person who was looking for a full-time trainer for a pharmaceutical company. The initiative and the task itself are not subject to criticism, except for doubts about the young lady’s ability to handle it adequately. evaluate a specialist in a field in which she is not a professional herself, as well as the client of the service (the trainer’s boss). The absurdity of the situation was that last year the “short-list” for interviews consisted of 200 people. This year, they continue to search for a candidate, having already changed several recruiters who consistently supply them with candidates in batches.
Indeed, a good rat catcher will never catch all the rats, leaving a couple behind to breed. Apparently, the lady thinks her job is an endless search. But I’m talking about something else.
How, really, do you make a choice? There are no perfect candidates, to begin with. If someone suddenly seems perfect, there will always be someone who says, “There’s got to be something off about them” and starts digging for flaws, and of course, they’ll find something. It turns out that the optimal solution to this problem exists, and it lies not in the realm of human resource management, but in the field of… mathematics . Here you go, for example a presentation of the issue in a popular form.
The essence of solving the problem is that you need to:
- Determine the total number of candidates that are available (or that you are willing to consider until you get tired). An infinite number, as described in the example at the beginning of the post, will not work, as it requires infinite resources, which are not available.
- Evaluate the first ~37% of them and discard. (exactly — 1/e)
- To judge others until a better one appears among those already seen.
In other words, if you have, say, 5 candidates, you should choose the third one if he is better than the first two, without even considering the fourth. If the third is worse than either of the first two, then you should look at the fourth. Once you exceed the threshold of 37% of the interviewed candidates, the chances of finding someone better than the best one you’ve seen drop significantly below 50%.
Unfortunately, our HR specialists often do not intuitively apply such an approach and “search for a prince on a white horse” until they get tired or the vacancy starts begging to be filled. Then they simply recall who they liked the most from the recent candidates and invite them for a second, refreshing interview, which, in essence, is also fruitless.
Now let’s look at the question from a different perspective. From the candidate’s side.
If you haven’t been invited for a second interview within 2-3 days after the first one, or at least haven’t been given a date for the second interview or any feedback at all, then you shouldn’t worry about the job opportunity anymore.
You are either among the top 37%, or you are worse than someone who has already gone through the interview, or something is wrong in the “Danish kingdom,” and you should consider whether you want to work for an employer that hasn’t even properly organized their HR department.