Can you hire fast walkers?

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Some time back, an older manager shared an interesting piece of advice; ‘don’t hire slow walkers’.  The logic goes like this;  slow walkers are slow workers; no one walks slowly to their work station, and then hurries up when the work. A slow walker is a worker.

So- when you are interviewing people, see how much spring they have in their step.  Watch them walk to you as approach you; are they a fast walker or not?

What you think?

Let’s talk about what this means, and what you think. Obviously I don’t actually know what you think, but probably something like this.

Is this likely to be true? more likely than not. Is this likely to be fair? Very unlikely.

But what this does allow us to do is think about how we assess people, and whether tests are accurate, and whether they are fair. Because these are very different things.

Slow walkers- old wisdom or old wives tale?

Every so often, I remember I’m a scientist in this space, so I remind myself:

-              Something can’t be held to be true, until it is shown to be true.

-              If not is not proven to be true, it cannot be asserted to be true until proven untrue.

In short, there are known ways to fairly assess suitability to a role, and everything outside of that is ‘an old wive’s tale’; i.e. some combination of superstition, unfounded hunches, intuition, and gut feel, but could be right, wrong, sometimes true or often not.

See here for more on the ‘truth’ of selection tests.

Fair tools, and unfair tools.

There are a range of selection assessment tools that we have measured (structured interviews, personality tests, references, cognitive testing etc), and we know about them.  But these tests aren’t fantastic- the best tests only have ~50% validity, and at work ~10%- close to guesswork. 

But there are many, many tests we intentionally do, or unintentionally do; the most obvious is ‘fit’, but also appearance, and handshake assessments we do.  Have you ever formed an opinion on a candidate based on what questions they ask at the end of the interview?  Is this a valid test?

In short, there are methods we know about the validity of, but there are also assessment criteria we still use, that are outside of science.  Right or wrong, we do, and will, assess candidates on the little things as well as the big things, via tools that may or may not be fair.

See here for more of fairness of interview tools

The importance of body language

The most interesting thing about body language is that it is almost impossible to lie with body language.  We can act, we can suppress body language, but short of ‘putting on an oscar-worthy act’ humans will really struggle not give themselves away with their body language.

Walking speed is just a subpart of body language.  Combined with eye contact, leaning forward, staring out the window, umming and arring, being distracted by their phone, a candidate is sending you information with their body language. 

Listen here for an excellent selection tool.

So…can you do it?

Can we assess walking speed?  That is up to you.  It may not be fair test, or it may be completely unfair (see here for fair vs fair tests).  You shouldn’t be taking people’s star-signs into account when hiring, just from a good business point of view, let alone fair to the candidate.

But, body language is communicating data to us.  They are telling us things about their attitude, their mindset, their keenness, and given its not something they can mask, fake, or change easily, it can be good data.  You’re assessing body language anyway whether you want to or not, so it may be worth noticing from time to time. 

In introduction to selection, we run through the validity of selection tools. 

In smarter recruitment, we help you analyse how to get your processes better suited to your hiring needs.

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