Stubborn Reliance on Intuition and Subjectivity in Employee Selection

The focus of this article is on implicit beliefs that inhibit adoption of selection decision aids (e.g., paper-and-penciltests, structured interviews, mechanical combination of predictors). Understanding these beliefs is just as importantas understanding organizational constraints to the adoption of selection technologies and may be more usefulfor informing the design of successful interventions. One of these is the implicit belief that it is theoreticallypossible to achieve near-perfect precision in predicting performance on the job. That is, people have an inherentresistance to analytical approaches to selection because they fail to view selection as probabilistic and subject toerror. Another is the implicit belief that prediction of human behavior is improved through experience. This mythof expertise results in an overreliance on intuition and a reluctance to undermine one’s own credibility by usinga selection decision aid.

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