How to use your intuition to hire the right people

Recruiting great talent is tough, yet it’s critical for any leader’s success and succession. Despite tons of new digital tools, expensive and long recruitment processes frequently lead to poor hires. That shows up in the numbers that suggest an astonishing 20% of people fail probation within the first 45 days, while between 30% and 40%, depending on who you ask, only last six months. It’s even worse at the senior level, where about 60% of leaders are thought to fail or derail.

Why is finding talent so hard? First, the landscape has changed: people, especially millennials, want to work flexibly, and their personal goals and aspirations have evolved. Second, particularly for complex roles with shifting priorities and multiple stakeholders, it’s often not clear exactly what skills a job requires. How will you find that great hire if you can’t articulate what you’re looking for? Third, to rightly address unconscious bias and discrimination, often there’s too much faith placed in algorithms and technology.

When you’re hiring, of course, your first task is to ensure equality of opportunity and diversity of thinking. Bias has no place in a recruiting process, but intuition should be there. If you’re worried about mixing them up, the former is largely about social stereotypes, while the latter is simply your feeling of knowing. It’s bias if you keep hiring candidates who look like you; on the other hand, if you challenge an unconscious bias with logic, it usually falls away. But an intuition around a potential hire will persist, even when you dismiss it. If you’ve ever ignored your gut feeling and hired the wrong person, you’ll know exactly what I mean: you’ll have had that inkling not to go ahead more than once.

The fact is that intuition is ideally suited to situations where there’s great uncertainty, time pressure, insufficient data, and many possible solutions, all of which are key attributes of recruitment. And it matters when you’re hiring for two reasons. Recent research shows that if you have experience as an interviewer and use your intuition, you’ll recruit better quality people, particularly if the job is complex. In that instance it’s hard to nail down both objective interview measures and success criteria: all you’re left with is intuition.

Moreover, while obviously you need to assess someone’s capability, you really need to know where their interests lie, how enthusiastic they are, how they learn, what flexibility means to them, what their grasp of detail is, how they like to work with others, how they prefer to be managed, and how all of this meshes with you and your needs. Gauging character, attitudes, and motivation is something that by and large isn’t amenable to a structured process because there are no hard answers. Psychometrics or character profiles might give you some pointers but they aren’t infallible, because if candidates have done a few they’ll know how to game them. Your judgment is always the key decider and that’s inevitably guided by unexpected comments, little asides, the tenor and nuances of their interactions with you, the very elements that require intuition, even if it’s an unspoken part of the process.

Here’s Paula Dowdy, board member and senior executive:

One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is around people. Execs smother their instincts and intuition because they’re optimists and like to give people chances. Or they look at a CV and say, “Oh, he went to Harvard, has a medical degree, worked at this big company and his credentials are awesome.” But the fit isn’t then right, the passion, humility, or collaboration is missing, or the ability to take a team along with them isn’t there. When you make a hiring mistake at senior level it’s not just about the individual time loss, but about talent beneath and everything that doesn’t get done.

Judgment of people in the interview process is vital, and for me it’s the tiny things that distill the BS. That’s what to dig into when something doesn’t feel right.

Paula’s spot-on. The biggest mistake that leaders make is not listening to themselves then hiring the wrong person, particularly when under pressure to fill an empty role. Everyone I asked when writing Intuition At Work had made that mistake, including me.

A solid process and structured interview obviously lead to a better hire as it’s easier to compare your candidates. But even when that produces someone suitable, it doesn’t mean they’ll be a great hire. By their nature, interviews encourage people to exaggerate or boast, and chronic self-promoters often get the most positive evaluations. That partly explains why there is so much preposterous behavior in large organizations: people with serious personality traits can come over as incredibly relaxed, charming, and confident and if your intuition isn’t hard at work, you may fail to spot that.

That’s why it’s important to really probe what you hear particularly around their colleagues and co-workers for whom they will have less empathy or consideration. Notice inconsistencies or discrepancies and pick up on them: people with dark triad attributes are less likely to be consistent, which is where multiple interviews are useful.

Tip: Simply ask yourself during any interview, “What am I seeing and not seeing with this person?” then notice what comes to mind. When you listen to your intuition, you’re more likely to bring in the right people, as telco senior executive Dr Matthews Mtumbuka found:

Recently I was recruiting quality assurance engineers. I was given four candidates to pick two. They were all ranked using a methodology, so I wasn’t expected to pick number three or four. But as I was interviewing number four, I felt she was the best candidate. Intuition helps you dig deeper, and that’s what I did. I said, “I’ll be honest with you, you weren’t recommended you were number four, but something tells me you’re the best candidate.” Naturally she said, “Well I am” and I said, “Can you prove it?” She told me to call this engineer, so then and there I did: she got a great recommendation. To cut a long story short, we changed the outcome and hired her.

She’s been amazing: my business has problems with fuel cartels, and she unraveled the biggest one, revealing exactly what was happening. She’s been a great hire and that was intuition adding value in the recruiting process. I think it’s helpful to mix analytical and intuitive methods for the best results.

If you’re an expert like Dr Matthews Mtumbuka, you can identify the things that will make someone good at their job even if it’s hard to articulate exactly what they are.

Tip: At the end of an interview and before chatting to any colleague who might have also been with you, take a breath. Notice what arises when considering this particular candidate. What is or isn’t attractive about them? Why? What feelings are you aware of? What images come to mind? Sounds? Impressions? Metaphors? How would you feel about a six-hour car journey with them? Or introducing them to someone you greatly respect?

Even if you’re a new manager, bring others on your team into your recruitment process. Not only does it help them acquire this important skill, but they’ll develop their intuition in the process as well.

This excerpt is adapted from Intuition At Work: Using Your Gut Feelings To Get Ahead (Sequoia Books/2024) © Jessica Pryce-Jones. Reprinted with permission of the author.