Hiring the best brokers is key to standing out in a competitive market, but spotting the top guns may be harder than you think.
Hiring the best brokers is key to standing out in a competitive market, but spotting the top guns may be harder than you think.
In a study published in the latest article of Psychological Science, researchers found that when interviewing potential staff, employers had a tendency to rank good applicants poorly if other strong contenders had been interviewed earlier in the day.
“People are averse to judging too many applicants high or low on a single day, which creates a bias against people who happen to show up on days with especially strong applicants,” said the report.
The report suggested that interviewers may irrationally feel that after a particularly strong set of candidates that a weak candidate “is due”. Another option is that interviewers attempt to correct what they see as mistakes in their ratings by rating a candidate lower in order to fit with the expected daily distribution of talent.
New brokers who arrived at an interview following a set of equally strong applicants would need almost two years extra experience just to be seen on a level playing field, the researchers found.
And this kind of bias, warned the report, is not just an issue when hiring brokers, but can easily spill over to other areas of the broking and finance world.
“Although we have focused on well-defined daily subsets, a similar bias may occur when people conduct larger sets of evaluations and generate subsets spontaneously in their mind,” the researchers said.
This could mean that brokers qualifying leads, for example could rate a potential deal less highly if seen after a strong set of leads. Similarly, the report suggested, lenders could wrongly turn down good applications if they had seen a number of good ones already that day.
Experienced brokers and lenders may think they are immune to this kind of thought, but the report found that the results were the same amongst all interviewers, regardless of experience.
“We were able to document this error with experts who have been doing the job for years, day in and day out,” said researchers.
To avoid missing out, suggested the report, brokers need to make a conscious effort to rate each situation independently and be aware that they have the potential for bias.
How do you go about bringing in top talent? Place your comments below.
