Put It All On Green

What if you could find the qualities you were looking for among your candidates faster and better? And what if that also saved you some money and time?

As a hiring manager you're always on the look-out for new talent. Or at least that's what you say you're looking for. Really, if we're being honest, you need to hire someone as a back-fill and you have a process that involves multiple weeks -- a month, maybe -- of resume review, interviews with different panels from different levels of the organization, and if you're on your game you have a technical interview/skill demonstration of some sort. And then you deliberate. And a proportion of your candidates drop out of the process because, surprise, they got offers elsewhere in the meantime.

And so you make an offer to the best remaining candidate -- you know, the one who for some reason wasn't hired by someone else -- and maybe they accept it. And then more time goes by before you onboard them as you do a background check -- you do a background check, right? -- that they agreed to based on a conditional offer of employment. Presumably they pass that because no one from previous employers is going to take the liability of possibly being sued for defamation by telling you what a schmo this person was. And then the 'winner' candidate onboards and it's Day 1 and they are your hero!

Don't forget the internal candidate that you didn't hire/promote? You know it's because of their "hallway file," i.e. their reputation for, well, being a schmo. But you need to tell them that no really we liked you it was that this other person had more of what we're looking for. Whatever that was.

What is it, really, that you're looking for?

Can you define it? Don't jump to "I know it when I see it" -- what is "it"?

Here's the thing: your process is failing because it's running a Stroop test and grading it wrong.

You remember the Stroop effect -- the word GREEN printed in red ink. Your brain wants to read the word. Naming the actual ink color takes real effort, and under time pressure, most people just say the word instead. 

That's not a metaphor for hiring. That's a description of it.

A resume is the word. A confident answer in a panel interview is the word. A brand-name former employer, a fluent explanation of a project that may or may not have gone the way they're telling it -- yep, that's all the word, printed loud, in large font, practically shouting itself. The actual skill underneath, the thing that will still be true six months into the job, is the ink color. And your interview panel, like every subject who's ever sat down for a Stroop test, is going to default to reading the word. Not because they're bad at their jobs. Because that's what people do when the word and the color disagree and someone's waiting on an answer.

So the candidate says GREEN (polished, articulate, the right 'elite' college) and the panel reads it back as green, because that's what the word said. Nobody actually named the ink color.

Then you hire the word. And a few months later you find out what color it actually was. And it's not green.

That costs you green. It costs you the internal candidate who had the right color but never learned to spell it out loud. And it costs you the external hire who interviews beautifully and turns out to be red.

You don't want Red.

The fix isn't a better black-ink process: more resume screens, more interview rounds, more panels reading the same word out loud to each other. The fix is something built to measure ink-naming, not word-reading: an assessment that tests for the trait itself, under the noise of self-presentation, instead of asking people to self-report it and hoping the panel resists the pull to just read the word.

That's what a Pythia Cyber Cybersecurity Talent Stack assessment does. It's built to catch the color, not the caption.

You don't want Red.

The only place on the planet that you can find Green candidates using green ink is with Pythia Cyber.

Ask us how you can get the right read on your applicants for external or internal hire using a Pythia Cyber Cybersecurity Talent Stack assessment.

(image credit: By Wikipedia editors - Slightly edited screenshot from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=128129196)