There's an oft-discussed philosophical idea: is a particular process an art or is it a science?
The idea is that if something is a science it is empirical. It's repeatable. If you follow exact instructions you should expect a particular outcome.
On the other hand if something is an art then it may require intuition, creativity, or subjectivity. As the process unfolds you will adapt and change your inputs to it. Unlike a science, you're not following an exact checklist.
Let's apply these ideas to hiring: Is hiring an art or is it a science?
Many organizations strive for goals like maximizing profitability, making growth stable and predictable, being capable of serving a larger group of customers, etc.. These sorts of goals incentivize creating processes in a scientific manner. And that makes sense, because if you can craft your processes into repeatable, predictable, and profitable ones, then growth becomes a function of how much capital you put into the system.
How do these business incentives pertain to hiring?
There are many places where repeatable, empirical systems can be applied. For example, all of the following are common:
- Moving applicants through well-known hiring stages like: apply, screen, interview, offer, hire.
- Using rubrics for assessing applicants in a standardized manner given a particular job's requirements.
- Utilizing personas to categorize desired applicants:
- Is the applicant deeply experienced? Are they ready to "hit the ground running"?
- Does the applicant have little professional experience? Will they require considerable training? Despite that, do they have high upside or high aptitude?
It makes sense to set up these structures so that organizations can optimize for the outcomes they seek. These sorts of processes create useful standardization that can surface information like where the deficiencies are in your hiring process and therefore where your efforts should be focused.
But despite our best efforts to make hiring repeatable and predictable, it is always comprised of human elements. Countless interactions in the hiring process are made between one or more people. How people respond and react is dependent upon the experiences that they have had leading up to that moment. This is true of interactions with job seekers and applicants as well as amongst colleagues on a hiring team.
Making a judgment of an application requires you to synthesize input from these many fuzzy, human inputs. You are going to pick up on communication styles, body language, details like how you were feeling when you had a particular interaction, etc.. If you're a social scientist you may be more empirical about how to proceed with decision-making following these interactions, but more likely than not your brain is subconsciously interpreting these things and categorizing them unbeknownst to you.
This isn't to say we shouldn't apply empirical tools to hiring. To the contrary, we certainly should, because individual steps of hiring being predictable and repeatable helps us in numerous ways. And being aware of how your biases can help you achieve better outcomes.
Even with these patterns in place, it's important to recognize we cannot control every aspect of hiring because of the human element of it. There are unknowns that we must contend with. We should be prepared to sometimes go off track, to dig into the unknown. Most importantly, we should learn from it and apply our learnings in the future, so that we can develop wisdom in decision-making.