Use your instinct to pick the best person for the job: Psychologist

Despite the focus on recent years on scientific assessment processes, gut instinct can be a valuable tool in recruitment decision-making, but recruiters must activate the part of their brain which allows them to trust their intuition, according to Monash University psychology lecturer Simon Moss.

Moss told the ATC that research had shown that when individuals were in a calm, self-assured state, they were best able to make good decisions which were based on intuition.

This happened when they were presented witht hte choices, he said, then removed themselves from the situation and thought about something different entirely, before returning to the choices and making an intuitive selection.

"That sort of intuitive process - considering the range of options, then relaxing for a while and doing something that reduces anxiety, and then returning with a gut reaction decision - tends to optimise decisions"

Moss said this was "particularly true" when a decision was complex, and  involved options which varied on a number of dimensions.

"The perfect situation for that of course is in the recruitment and selection situation because of the course our candidates vary on many different unpredictable attributes"

He said this didn't mean that psych testing, appraisals and other logic-based tools were unnecessary, but they were "just part of the mix".

"We [should] look at all the information and then draw out an intiuitive decision to optimise the candidate we should be selecting"

Shortlist update 15th April 2008

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TV has five years........
THE INTERNET will revolutionise television within five years, due to an explosion of online video content and the merging of PCs and TV sets, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates says.

I'm stunned how people aren't seeing that with TV, in five years from now, people will laugh at what we've had," he told business leaders and politicians at the World Economic Forum.

The rise of high-speed internet and the popularity of video sites like Google's YouTube has already led to a worldwide decline in the number hours spent by young people in front of a TV set.

In the years ahead, more and more viewers will hanker after the flexibility offered by online video and abandon conventional broadcast television, with its fixed program slots and advertisements that interrupt shows, Mr Gates said.
"Certain things like elections or the Olympics really point out how TV is terrible. You have to wait for the guy to talk about the thing you care about or you miss the event and want to go back and see it," he said.

Internet presentation of these things is vastly superior."
At the moment, watching video clips on a computer is a separate experience from watching sitcoms or documentaries on television.
But convergence is coming, posing new challenges for TV companies and advertisers.
"Because TV is moving into being delivered over the internet - and some of the big phone companies are building up the infrastructure for that - you're going to have that experience all together," Mr Gates said.

YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley said the impact on advertising would be profound, with the future promising far more targeted ads tailored to each viewer's profile.
"In the coming months we're going to do experiments to see how people interact with these ads to build an effective model that works for advertisers and works for users," he said.

Advertisers are already racing to adapt their strategies to the growing power of the web, and more and more promotional cash is tipped to migrate from television to web sites in future.

Reuters January 29th 2007