Does Psychology Really Matter When Hiring Someone

Yesterday, Inc, had an interesting article on why psychology should play a bigger role in the hiring process.  I agree to a certain extent.  Obviously, you don’t want your office to resemble a loony bin, but I don’t want a bunch of people that look like and act like me to running around the office either.

Its our idiosyncrasies, for bettetr or worse that make us who we are and create corporate culture.  Its the individuals that are little quirky and “unusual” that I want on my team when the crap starts hitting the fan.  Why? Because these individuals are resourceful and at their core, they are ultimate hustlers and will get the job done.

If you’ve seen The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, you’ll understand where I’m going with this.  If you haven’t, I highly recommend it, and I hope the rumors are true of a sequel being in development.  But back to the discussion at hand.  In the movie, Lisbeth who is a young computer hacker is exactly the type of person I would like to have  on my team.  She’s smart and goes balls to the wall.

Now, if you this article in Inc as the barometer for evaluating potential employees, Lisbeth wouldn’t make it past the first 10 seconds of walking through the door, let alon the first interview.  There’s a lot of emphasis placed on first impressions, and I get that. But I think we’ve all been wrong on a few occasions.  There are people that I’ve met in the past, and after our initial meetings I knew were probably never going to speak again because we didn’t click.  However, I’m glad my first impressions were wrong, because I am great friends with some of these individuals.

I don’t take issue with the article, just the study that was conducted that lead to the article.  There are so many talented individuals sitting on the sidelines right now, and just because they didn’t have a desirable personality score or don’t fit in pretty little box are now being excluded from a job they would probably kick ass in.

I see it happen all the time, and it’s a shame that it does.  I’m not faulting recruiters either because they’re just doing their jobs.  The system needs to be fixed sooner than later.  The Mark Zuckerbergs, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and countless others were all the Lisbeths of their time and they turned out just fine.

Am I way off base on this?  I welcome your thoughts in the comments section below.