How Does Malcolm Gladwell’s Theory Support Background Checks?

To what extent does a background check help you out in the hiring process? It’s true that a person is not just the sum of everything they have done. They may have hidden talents that were never made use of in the past. Their education and work experience may not truly reflect their capability. And you, as an entrepreneur or manager who is doing the hiring, may choose to trust your own intuition about that person. How does Malcolm Gladwell Theory support background checks?

Back-Up Your Intuition With a Background Check

Many people who work in human resources have a finely tuned ability to find the right person for the job. At the same time, it doesn’t hurt to have your intuition backed up with the help of a background check. You can make your decision about who to hire in your usual way. Go through your usual process of looking through resumes, interviewing, testing, asking friends for recommendations, or getting your colleagues to interview the person again. These are all good ways of determining whether that person is right for the job. But don’t neglect to do the background checks.

Malcolm Gladwell and Talking to Strangers

In his last book, Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about how people sometimes make better decisions about who to trust based on knowing their background. The process of speaking to someone face to face and judging them by their expressions can actually lead you astray, according to Gladwell. But the statistics that you come up with from their past can’t do so.

Should You Go By Work Experience or Personality?

For example, you may have two candidates for a certain job. Maybe one of them has 10 years of work experience according to their resume but they don’t make a very good impression on you during the interview. Maybe they just don’t have the kind of people skills necessary to do so. And maybe the other candidate only has 5 years of experience but seems easy to talk to in the interview. You might be inclined to go with the second person.

A Background Check Can Help You Make the Right Decision

The background check might show you that the first person does, in fact, have all the experience they claim to have. And they may get glowing recommendations from the people they have worked with. The second candidate, on the other hand, may be lying about their work experience and might only have 2-3 years of work experience. Plus, they have left their jobs on bad terms too. Once you know this, doesn’t it change your point of view and help you to make a better decision?

Conclusion

Contact us to learn more about how background checks are a much more reliable way of hiring candidates than intuition. Check out Malcolm Gladwell here.