The Role of Perceptions Versus Reality in Managers’ Choice of Selection Decision Aids

We agree with Scott Highhouse (2008) in that it is fair to say that managers rely more heavily on intuition and experience over analytical approaches when making selection decisions. However, our experience suggests that many managers do not believe in the myth of perfect selection and admit that selection errors exist and will be made in the future. So why do managers continue to use, if not prefer to use, intuitive approaches in the face of more valid analytical selection decision aids? Managers want to make good hiring decisions and likely would not use intuitive procedures if they thought that they were ineffective. Thus, we are writing our commentary from the perspective that managers must not be aware or willing to admit that their intuitive methods are not as valid as analytic selection tools. We will focus our examples on the use of unstructured interviews because that is a predominant intuitive approach, but these arguments apply to managers’ preference for a wider variety of intuitive methods. We propose that it is not the actual accuracy of a manager’s past unstructured interview assessments and corresponding selection decisions that is important. Instead, we propose that the manager’s perception of his or her ability to make accurate candidate assessments using unstructured interviews is what drives the decision to use them again in the future. We propose three possible explanations that go beyond those presented by Highhouse in explaining this phenomenon, including attribution theory, decisionmaking biases, and the effects of confidence and credibility.