Considering past performances key to hiring appropriate employees

Managers with the duty of recruiting people, often make wrong choices as they rely strictly on generic performance measures rather than the context of past performance, a new study has suggested.

A new study by Associate Professor Don Moore from University Of California, Berkeley's Haas School Of Business finds employment managers tend to ignore the context of past performance.

The article has been co-authored by Samuel A. Swift, a Berkeley-Haas post-doctoral fellow; Zachariah S. Sharek, director of strategy and innovation at CivicScience; and Francesco Gino, associate professor at Harvard Business School.

Moore said that their research had showed that people evaluating workers have a great deal of trouble considering situational factors or context.

Study participants were asked to evaluate a situation similar to this hypothetical scenario:

In addition to studying hiring decisions by human resource managers, the researchers also studied graduate school admissions decisions and found similar results.

Moore said that the team's results suggested that alumni from institutions with lenient grading had a leg up in admission to grad school, and the reason for that is the admissions decision makers mistakenly attributed their high grades to high abilities.

Moore describes this behavior as an example of the "correspondence bias"-a social psychology term that describes when people have the tendency to draw inferences about a person's disposition while ignoring the surrounding circumstances.

The study found that while the decision makers said they wanted to consider situational influences on performance, when given the opportunity, they failed to do so. The paper documents a systematic bias in the habit of thought.

Moore, however, remains hopeful that changing that behaviour is possible on an individual and collective level.

The findings of the study has been published in PLoS One.