Most of this article can be summed up in: "Focus on what you're capable of, not what you've done.". In their test scenarios, they found that this brought more interest and pay.
This is a rather well written article that explains why you should focus on potential rather than your track record with examples from various studies.
The author asserts (quoting studies) that this is because of "our unconscious preference for potential over actual success."
This is alone is very insightful and interesting to me.
I think this article is a tad more than your summary and totally worth reading in its entirety.
Recruiting is a very interesting process. Unless you happen to be pre-IPO Google/Facebook/Hot Start-up, you are typically constrained by the following:
1) The kind of person you want to hire is either too expensive or unattainable. Let's assume this person's output equals 100%.
2) The person you can afford to hire probably grades out at 50% to 75% output of the ideal hire.
3) The minimum output you need to justify paying another person is 40%.
I'm just throwing numbers out there but this is directionally the situation you're dealing with (especially in a hot market). Some would say #1 is a '10x' player and the actual gap between #1 (what you want) and #2 (what you can afford)is much much greater than what I lay out above.
If that's the case, you can begin to see why hiring mangers aren't opposed to hiring #3's (or training someone up to #3 output) who have #1 potential over proven #2's with (perceived) limited upside. Of course the process of identifying candidates with #1 potential is a separate matter.
Ideally you can hire #2's with #1 upside but it's hard to get people like that since more often than not their current employer makes a big counter-offer and/or promotion to keep them. Consequently, you end up in a situation where you can hire someone who is 1) unproven with upside or 2) proven with limited upside.
It's really interesting that the test subjects said they preferred the guy with the most achievement, yet actually picked the one with the most potential. It makes you wonder how many of those "how to get a job" articles are written with the achievement mindset even though it's not what employers are really looking for.
I've always thought myself a total tool when it comes to interviews. I absolutely hate talking about myself, rather, I talk about my work or other peoples work
The article seems to be reading into the results too much. In my experience, people generally like to go with the underdog. It's like a game for them. These guys know they aren't picking the people who are going to design the mission to mars. People like the mystery in certain things. It makes for a lot of fun, and a much better pay off when it works out for the best.
The most interesting part to me is the effect of wording in the Facebook ad. I wish they'd said how strong the effect is:
"they compared two versions of Facebook ads for a real stand-up comedian. In the first version, critics said "he is the next big thing" and "everybody's talking about him." In the second version, critics said he "could be the next big thing," and that "in a year, everybody could be talking about him." The ad that focused on his potential got significantly more clicks and likes."
Does anyone have any pointers to or comments on the implications for the hiring/manager side based on this research? Namely, when hiring, should one consciously avoid the bias toward high-potential candidates versus experienced candidates? The article doesn't comment on this aspect, and I couldn't get a sense of whether the players/candidates went on to perform equally well. Unfortunately the full text of the actual research paper referenced in the article is behind a paywall.
In practice I think it comes down to whether you're trying to minimize risk or maximize reward. The former, conservative, strategy values past experience, since a known entity would seem to reduce the possibility of massive failure. The liberal strategy values future potential, thus attempting to optimize on likelihood of massive success, but simultaneously increasing the chance of massive failure.
If you want to make X, think of it as a machine, isolate the core parts and tools. Then hire candidates based on past deliverables and years experience with what you think's needed to make X.
If you want to disrupt X, hire people with a) ideas you subjectively find interesting, and b) valuable skills and knowledge which exceed your own with those tools/topics.
In my experience, as hiring groups grow, they become more conservative. What a company looks for in Engineer #1 is different than Engineer #1000. The more opinions involved, the more the group seems to decide based on risk rather than reward.
Let me propose a better conclusion that has the potential succeed over vague claims about the human subconscious.
One of the best ways to get hired is to, like all great American beers, have the great taste of social proof with the less filling property of appearing to be inexpensive. Business people very much want qualified, capable employees, but they want them at the best possible price. Giving off the appearance that you are capable but unproven makes a business person's leverage sense tingle like no tomorrow. This, at least, has been my experience. Your mileage may vary.
I'm not sure that, as far as the general population goes, craving the "next big thing" is a global phenomenon. Those more concerned with getting attention (citizens of wealthier countries) over practicality might be more inclined to care. That would certainly help explain the hipster population plaguing the United States.
From the abstract of the study behind the article [1]:
When people seek to impress others, they often do so by
highlighting individual achievements. Despite the intuitive
appeal of this strategy, we demonstrate that people often
prefer potential rather than achievement when evaluating
others. Indeed, compared with references to achievement
(e.g., “this person has won an award for his work”),
references to potential (e.g., “this person could win an
award for his work”) appear to stimulate greater interest
and processing, which can translate into more favorable
reactions. This tendency creates a phenomenon whereby the
potential to be good at something can be preferred over
actually being good at that very same thing. We document
this preference for potential in laboratory and field
experiments, using targets ranging from athletes to
comedians to graduate school applicants and measures
ranging from salary allocations to online ad clicks to
admission decisions.
What causes this apparent preference for potential achievement over actual achievement? According to the study's abstract (the study itself is behind a pay wall), it's a mind trick: uncertainty "stimulates greater interest and processing, which can translate into more favorable reactions." More of the same from the HBR piece:
When human brains come across uncertainty, they tend to pay
attention to information more because they want to figure
it out, which leads to longer and more in-depth
processing. High-potential candidates make us think harder
than proven ones do. So long as the information available
about the high-potential candidate is favorable, all this
extra processing can lead (unconsciously) to an overall
more positive view of the candidate (or company). (That
part about the information available being favorable is
important. In another study, when the candidate was
described as having great potential, but there was little
evidence to back that up, people liked him far less than
the proven achiever.)
That's a nice theory, but another explanation, which doesn't seem to have been considered, is that in many cases something that has the potential to reach a value of X is actually more valuable than something that we know, with certainty, has a value of X. That's because a thing that has the potential to reach X also has the potential to reach beyond X, but a thing that has already been measured to be X does not.
In other words, you are given two probability distributions: one wide, one tight. The wide one, you are told, has the potential to contain X. But the tight one, for certain, is centered on X. Now, which do you pick?
If you're in a situation were values of X are nice but values beyond X are gold, then you pick the wide distribution. That's because the tight distribution is centered on "nice" and, being tight, offers almost no hope of straying into "gold" territory.
This reminds me of the results of a small study at University of Virginia on attraction. [1]
47 females were shown pictures of men at other schools (fabricated) and told each man was either not interested in them, quite interested, or their interest was unknown. To give a quick summary, "...women were more attracted to men when there was only a 50% chance that the men liked them the best than when there was a 100% chance that the men liked them the best."
I think humans are for the most part optimistic gamblers. We'd rather take a chance on something that has the potential to be something great than go for something that is a proven good. While many are logical enough to realize that such an impulse has its failings, we quickly go down the path of confirmation bias because we can't help but dwell on the unknown -- spending far too many brain cycles making up analysis trees and running through them. The known is too easy to file away.
The something we're talking about has as much chance to go below X as above. You don't seem to be considering that, as your theory could also explain people picking the "sure thing" on the grounds that the other thing might not reach its potential.
The point I was trying to make is that the payoffs for X, for many real-world situations, are dwarfed by payoffs for "beyond X." So, in those situations, it's not a mind trick but rational to bet on the rare but high-paying "beyond X" potential, even though a sure "X" is available.
In other words, when Payoff(X) < Sum(Probability(x) * Payoff(x) for all x > X), it's rational to take the bet, not the sure thing.
The problem is that, usually, for people with experience, awards, etc, the probability of other people surpassing the former is pretty small. "The next big thing" is a strict subset of "Maybe the next big thing".
If you tell me that a company has sold $3m in shoes every year for the last 10 years, I might believe that they are going to sell $3m next year as well. However, there are tons of other variables that may be important, such as other companies entering the market, issues with morale inside of the company, or the overall economy.
If, in comparison, someone tells me that there are projections that the company will sell $3m next year, if I believe the people who are making the projects are at all competent I am going to assume that they not only had access to historical data, but that they put the time to look into a bunch of other factors.
In essence, unless I believe that the projects are put together by people whose knowledge of the shoe industry is less than mine (which is unlikely: I know nothing about shoes) it is actually the case that the projection is less of a gamble (aka, has less variance) than trusting my interpretation of the "measured" historical information.
I don't know if you're right but the article's explanation is very probably wrong (assuming the findings are right) -- we're cognitive misers, and don't do a lot of thinking unless we are prompted to do so, either by ourselves or by an experimenter in a controlled experiment. We usually hate to think (type II, conscious, reflexive thinking) and to process information.
On the other hand, we usually don't like risk, unless to save us from losing, because we have a big loss-aversion. If offered to take $10 now or a 50% chance to win $20 in a month, most people will choose $10 now; but when asked to "lose" $10 now or a 50% chance to lose $20 in a month most people will choose the later option.
I'm not sure how to square this with the findings reported in the article, so I'll leave it at that...
In all the very good discussion here, and not one mention of the menu at the top of the HN page. The first text link in the menu bar is... "new"
There's an entire section devoted to new, or future Page 1 articles.
The inclusion of the link must mean that there was either a demand for it or a belief that readers would want to know about the articles with future potential to make the first page. Anecdotal at best, but it seems to support the idea that there is some innate bias toward the next new thing.
I'm suspicious of a study that uses athletes with skills that can be quantified via statistics. Most jobs aren't nearly as quantifiable, and so the interviewer has to evaluate on squishier things such as cultural fit. I'm thinking of Paypal rejecting that guy who liked to shoot hoops, mainly because he used the word "hoops."
Not that using more squishier measures is wrong. It just is. Ergo, I don't see how this study means anything in the real world.
Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. is a motivational psychologist and author of the HBR Single Nine Things Successful People Do Differently and the book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals
To editor who OK'd the book title ("Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals")? Did you not read the "Nine Things Successful People Do Differently"? Or, do you believe that a total lack of originality is the way to reach your goals?
(1) See a market opportunity in yachts 55 feet long. Need to hire a yacht designer to get the engines, hull shape, hull construction, safety, other engineering details right and supervise the construction including selecting the people for the interior design and finishing the interior. Want (A) someone who has done such work with high success for two dozen yachts from length 30 feet to 150 feet or (B) someone with the potential?
(2) Have a small but rapidly growing Web site and need to hire someone to get the server farm going for scaling the site. They need to design the hardware and software architecture, select the means of system real time instrumentation, monitoring, and management, work with the software team to make needed changes in the software, design the means of reliability, performance, and security, get the backup and recovery going, design the server farm bridge and the internal network operations center (NOC), write the job descriptions for the staff, select and train the staff, etc. Now, want someone who has recently "been there, done that, gotten the T-shirt" or someone with the 'potential' of doing that?
(3) Need heart bypass surgery. Now, want someone who has done an average of eight heart bypass operations a week for the past two years with no patient deaths or repeat operations or someone with that 'potential'?
(4) Similarly for putting a new roof on a house, fixing a bad problem with the plumbing, installing a new furnace and hot water heater, installing a high end HVAC system, etc.?
War Story: My wife and I were in graduate school getting our Ph.D. degrees and ran out of money. I took a part time job in applied math and computing on some US DoD problems -- hush, hush stuff. We had two Fortran programmers using IBM's MVS TSO, and in the past 12 months they had spent $80 K. We wanted to save money and also do much more computing. We went shopping and bought a $120 K Prime (really, essentially a baby Multics).
Soon I inherited the system and ran it in addition to programming it, doing applied math, etc. When I got my Ph.D., soon I was a prof in a B-school. They had an MVS system with punched cards, a new MBA program, and wanted better computing for the MBA program. I wanted TeX or at least something to drive a daisy wheel printer. Bummer.
At a faculty meeting the college computing committee gave a sad report on options for better computing. I stood and said: "Why don't we get a machine such as can be had for about $5000 a month, put it in a room in the basement, and do it ourselves?". Soon the operational Dean wanted more info, and I lead a one person selection committee. I looked at DG as in "Soul of a New Machine', DEC VAX PDP 11/780, and a Prime.
The long sitting head of the central university computer center went to the Dean and said that my proposal would not work. I got a sudden call to come to the Dean's office and met the critic. I happened to bring a cubic foot or so of technical papers related to my computer shopping. I'd specified enough ordinary, inexpensive 'comfort' A/C to handle the heat, but the critic claimed that the hard disk drives needed tight temperature and humidity control or would fail. I said: "These disk drives are sold by Prime but they are actually manufactured by Control Data. I happen to have with me the official engineering specifications for these drives directly from Control Data.". So I read them the temperature and humidity specifications that we could easily meet. The critic still claimed the disks would fail. Then I explained that at my earlier site, we had no A/C at all. By summer the room got too warm for humans, so we put an electric van in the doorway. Later we had an A/C evaporator hung off the ceiling. Worked fine for three years. The Dean sided with me.
In the end we got a Prime. What we got was a near exact copy of what I had run in grad school, down to the terminals and the Belden general purpose 5 conductor signal cable used to connect the terminals at 9600 bps. The system became the world site for TeX on Prime, lasted 15 years, and was a great success. The system was running one year after that faculty meeting. I was made Chair of the college computer committee.
That faculty meeting had been only two weeks after I had arrived on campus. There was one big, huge reason my planning was accepted: I'd been there, done that, and gotten the T-shirt. That is, in contradiction to the article, what mattered was actual, prior accomplishment, not 'potential'.
Why the industrial psychological researchers came to their conclusions I don't know, but I don't believe their conclusions.
You're talking more about one-time jobs; the article focuses on hiring people for long term employment or in places where a bad experience is only mildly annoying (restaurants, comedians). In both cases, the risk of a bad decision isn't as high as the (perceived) possible reward from a good one.
When you're hiring a plumber, the best possible outcome is not very different from an average outcome with an average plumber, and the worst is significantly worse.
The claim in the article is tough to swallow and seems to have been written to get attention.
I can't believe the claim as stated, but there might be a way to restate their claim and get something believable in some narrow cases.
First, however, for your "One-time jobs"? I was appointed Chair of the college computing committee and held that position until I left the college after five years. I was also appointed to other computing committees in the university. And I gave a graduate course on computer system selection and management. So my role was 'long-term' and not just "one time".
Indeed, my next job was at Yorktown Heights in using artificial intelligence for monitoring and management of server farms and networks, and likely that position was based partly on my success in computer system management. So, I pursued that work long-term and not just "one-time", and at each step that I was given the responsibility was heavily from my accomplishments and not just my potential.
If you are a yacht company, you may want to build yachts in several sizes, and then you will likely want to hire a yacht designer for the long term and will, again, want someone with accomplishments and not just potential. Believe me, you don't want to build a yacht and discover that the performance is poor because the engineering was wrong. Once I saw that happen; it was a sad story.
If you are running a hospital and want a heart surgeon, no doubt for the long term, again you want to hire based on accomplishments and not just potential.
If you are running an HVAC company and need a technical leader for the long-term, then again you want someone with a lot of relevant accomplishments and not just someone with potential.
I don't see the issue as short versus long term, but I do see an issue, so let's move on to that:
E.g., in my computer selection, there was an accusation that I was just selecting again what I had done before and, thus, was possibly not getting the best selection for the time and for the college. Interesting claim. Actually my first recommendation had been for the Data General system as in the book 'The Soul of a New Machine'. When that system was just too expensive, I fell back to the Prime system. The main competitor was the DEC VAX already quite popular on campus and with some good advantages in applications software for the physical science departments. But for the B-school, those application software advantages didn't apply, and the Prime was easier to manage and use and provided much more computing per dollar. So, the Prime was a good choice.
So, here was the fear of going with a person with accomplishments: Such a person may just redo what they did before and not really make the best decision for the new time and place. I'm not saying that people should or usually do have this fear, just that they may have this fear in some cases anyway.
So, more generally suppose the need is for a lot of creativity and originality but where past accomplishments, knowledge, and experience are not very important. E.g., maybe are hiring a graphic artist for, say, the box for a new consumer product to be sold from shelves in retail stores. So, if hire someone with "accomplishments", say, who had just designed a successful box, then may fear that the box they design for you will be too much like the last box they designed and not original enough. But that explanation is not the claim of the article.
The claim of the article is stark: For doing essentially any task X, people prefer to hire a person with the potential of doing X instead of someone who has actually done X. This claim is doesn't pass the giggle test.
It looks like we are entering the campaign season of the US presidential election!
In practice many people tend to overvalue potential, regardless of what the logical outcome would be. For example, investors tend to overprice stocks based on potential growth. This can be seen in the fact that high P/E stocks typically underperform low P/E stocks when considering risk-adjusted returns.
Not sure how much it relates to the article, but I enjoyed the war story. Good stuff.
There's a lot of garabge in online HBR in recent years, mainly on their blogs, as they grovel for traffic like any other site using whatever means possible. I am rarely tempted to even read HBR links that get posted here.
I agree. It matches the submissions guidelines too:
If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."
