When recruiting we can’t let intuition be our only guide.
you’re examining their qualities, and some of those might seem impressive, or not, but really what you want to know is how common are those qualities among people who perform a certain way at this task in your organization, or your sector in general. So you should determine some of the qualities you’re looking for, and then try to understand the base rate of those qualities in your industry (i.e. how common they are), so you can really understand how to compare candidates.
David Epstein’s newsletter conversation with robyn hogarth and Emre Soyer
and this gem: in a study of surgeons:
groups that had some experience and some reflection time performed better than the groups that had more procedural experience but no reflection time.
David Epstein’s newsletter conversation with robin hogarth and Emre Soyer
And this magic formula story about learning from experience, from Hogarth’s book Educating Intuition:
“In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lessons… famous New York City physician renowned for his skill as a diagnostician. The man’s particular specialty was typhoid fever, and he examined patients for it by feeling around their tongues with his hands. Again and again, his testing yielded a positive diagnosis before the patient displayed a single symptom. And over and over, his diagnosis turned out to be correct. As another physician later pointed out, ‘He was a more productive carrier, using only his hands, than Typhoid Mary.’ Repetitive success, it turned out, taught him the worst possible lesson.”
robin Hogarth quoted in David Epstein’s newsletter
