How Job Hiring Is Increasingly Like Dating

Dating as a term in the context of hiring for a job is fraught with negative implications and the potential for litigation. All sorts of taboos and procedural violations come to mind.

But according to recent research, as the following article explains, that is exactly how the process of selecting candidates for open positions often works.So think not of romance but of cultural matching. Do not consider attraction, but compatibility. These hair splitting differentiations are still worrisome and possibly biased or inappropriate, but they are also reflective of the corporate hiring reality.

They may also contain a scintilla of productive truth. Work today is increasingly team-oriented. The ability to work well with others of myriad cultural, ethnic, religious, geographic, racial, attitudinal and psychological backgrounds is essential to optimal performance in today's workplace. So an interviewer's wondering about whether they might like you is not necessarily as problematic as it might seem. Which is not to say that giving in to the inclination to hire clones of one's self is acceptable or beneficial. However, assessing whether the candidate is able and willing to contribute within the context of the office doing the hiring - or whether that person can institute change in a way that is not destructive - may well be an important issue to consider. JL

Rachel Silverman reports in the Wall Street Journal:

The back-and-forth of job interviews often feels like dating. ‘Will they like me?’ candidates wonder. ‘Will they stick around?’ companies ask.

Turns out, hiring managers at elite professional firms really do tend to evaluate candidates as if they were potential romantic partners or new friends,
, according to recent research by Kellogg management professor Lauren Rivera.

The Kellogg study found that employers tend to evaluate candidates on whether they’d be likely to hang out with them, rather than strictly focusing on a person’s qualifications for the job.

Even dating site eHarmony is getting into the recruiting game. The company is developing a recruiting site to more effectively match companies to candidates, says Grant Langston, vice president of customer experience.

“Where do people not experience a lot of compatibility?,” says Mr. Langston. “One of the first things we came up with was jobs We are currently trying to isolate what are the things that make an employee a good fit.” The product, which is in the early stages, may come out next year.

According to the Kellogg research, professionals involved in hiring placed more emphasis on how comfortable or excited they were about candidates than on applicants’ cognitive or technical skills.

That doesn’t mean employers hire unqualified workers, Rivera says. But, she adds, her findings show that “employers hire in a manner more closely resembling the choice of friends or romantic partners” than what we might expect. Hiring managers pay especially close attention to criteria such as similar education level and schools attended, shared leisure pursuits and a mutual “spark,”— factors similar to those people use when choosing a friend or mate.

In her study, comprised of 120 interviews with hiring professionals at elite U.S. investment banks, law firms and consulting firms, more than half of the hiring professionals ranked “cultural fit”—similarity of background, interests and self-presentation—as the most important factor in an interview.

The danger, of course, is that workers from cultural backgrounds that don’t match their evaluators’ backgrounds may be at a disadvantage when they’re up for a job. Especially when it comes to elite jobs, people who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds might not get the same consideration a well-off candidate would, Rivera says.