The Hindu Business Line : A study of snap judgments

It's been said ad nauseam that India continues to be considered a major resource pool for low-cost and technically skilled manpower. But a closer analysis will make things obvious about the costs involved in maintaining an Indian office - the hot job market and its after effects, the difficulty in getting the right skill sets, the recruitment costs, spiralling salaries and the high attrition rates. For product companies on the learning curve, the time taken for a new recruit to be productive adds to the costs considerably, especially with a 25-30 per cent attrition level.

In this scenario, it is crucial for organisations to watch out for ways and means to increase the productivity of their employees so that the corresponding value addition will outweigh the costs. The optimum utilisation of manhours becomes a vital area of time audit especially in the higher management echelons.

Logical thinking

It is a common belief that good decisions can be derived only by logical thinking; gathering as much information and deliberating as long as possible. This involves considerable utilisation of costly expensive manhours to make decisions. However, recent research in this area has thrown up a surprising pointer - we can make quick decisions in life especially under stress or compulsion, using intuition or spontaneous association of thoughts or past experience and that, these may actually be as good as the conscious decisions made by logical and considered thinking.

Many studies have been conducted on the processes of the human mind and such quick decision-making ability is attributed to a part of the mind called the adaptive unconscious, a powerful computer that processes a lot of data in the background.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book titled Blink deliberates on this capability of our mind to make snap judgments, the ability of the our human mind to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience. But, he cautions that such snap judgments are fallible due to other residual interests, emotions and sentiments of our mind. However, we can control and teach ourselves to make better snap judgments. He states: "When our powers of rapid cognition go awry, they go awry for a very specific and consistent set of reasons and those reasons can be identified and understood."

Surprisingly, and contrary to belief held so far, Gladwell Malcolm reveals the point that an appropriate level of stress is important for such snap decisions. Our mind, faced with a life-challenging situation, drastically but effectively filters the range and amount of information that we have to deal with and takes on only what is relevant to reach a focused but quick decision. However, if the level of stress due to pressure exceeds the acceptable and optimum band of stress, our bodies begin shutting down in a way that many sources of related information are made inert and we end up making erroneous judgments.

Dave Grossman in his book On Killing makes a case for advantageous stress and argues that the most optimal state of "arousal" - the range in which stress improves performance - is when our heart rate is between 115 and 145 beats per minute. After 145, complex motor skills start to break down and at 175 we begin to see an absolute breakdown of cognitive processing.

This means that if we can simulate the appropriate level of stress, and train ourselves, we could gather an enormous amount of relevant data in very little time to make snap decisions. And these decisions may be as good as the conscious decision derived by logical thinking using conventional techniques of information accumulation and assessment which are factored in by relatively higher time cost. The gains in productivity at work, as well as the time we gain in our personal lives, are immense if we could arrive at our decisions more quickly.

Costly exercises

So to try this postulate, we identified a major activity in our organisation where expensive manhours were used for accounted towards decision-making. As a growing multinational company into product development, offering an integrated product suite for the securities and investment management industry, we have a huge need for software hands with specific skillsets for our centres. The Mumbai arm alone has a 50 per cent annual manpower growth and today holds nearly 70 per cent of our development kitty. Consequently, recruitment interviews turn out to be `costly' exercises as senior resources like team leads and managers spend considerable time gathering information and deliberating on the information gathered to effect good hiring decisions. Hiring today has turned out to be one of the key forks that ultimately makes or breaks an organisation.

The organisation here comprises of many smaller teams, average size of the team being around six - which requires similar skillsets like C++ developers, business analysts, testers (QA) and so on.

Earlier, each team was conducted interviews for their open positions, which resulted in the same candidate being interviewed many times by multiple teams, which had a major impact on the productivity of all these teams. In small teams, the contributions of an hour of a senior employee's time resource impacts the overall productivity of the team and that's when we attempted to improve the productivity in the recruitment process. We streamlined the recruitment scheme wherein we nominated selection committees (comprising four seniors, including team leads) for each specific skillset, to conduct the technical round of the interview. The tasks of these committees were to identify the candidates to be interviewed (from the short-listed resumes provided by the recruitment team) and conduct the interviews and submit their recommendations for hiring to the respective managers for the final round of the interview.

Each technical interview was performed by a panel of any two from the committee and the time taken for an interview varied from 45 minutes to 75 minutes, and averaged an hour. Though about 20-25 per cent of interviews ended in selection, only around 25 per cent of those selected or offered positions actually joined. This meant that for every candidate taken in, an average of about 20 interviews had to be conducted, growing weighing into about 40 manhours (two senior resources on an average for one hour) for interviews alone.

To slash on manhour consumption, we tested out a rapid decision making module in the recruitment interviews with the following strategy.

A third interviewer on a rotation basis was introduced from among the committee members. In order to induce the necessary stress level or compulsion to derive at a quick decision, the time provided to the interviewer was the initial five minutes and he had to submit his recommendation along with reasons (as this was a test case the information collected was used only to study the postulate). Meanwhile, the regular interview panel continued with the usual interviews and submitted their recommendations. Their decision was neither not impacted nor bound by the five-minute interviewer's recommendation. Proper counselling was given to the interviewers to avoid the pitfalls of snap decision-making, and to be wary of the interests, prejudices and stereotypes shadowing the decisions. The test drive went on for two months covering 30 interviews and the results were amazingly positive. The variance in the decision of the rapid interviewer from the regular interviewer was only 9 per cent and was an astonishing zero per cent in cases of rejection!

Even though this sample was small, (a total of only 35 interviews) the results were promising. Similar studies were carried out on a the sample size of fresher interviews, which had a two-tier system - a written test for technical skills followed by the interview for personal assessment. So in this case, the interview was held to test only mental aptitude and not information and scholastic capability. Even here, the results matched the earlier study. This clearly indicated the efficacy of the procedure in both concrete theoretical testing as well as qualitative and subjective assessments. Ninety per cent congruence in results signals significant future time cost savings in the organisation, especially in a process that has so far been consuming approximately five high-end mandays.

Additionally, the regular interview panel also reported that the initial focused questions asked by the rapid interviewer helped them too to arrive at a decision early.

As we had rotated the five-minute interviewers from among the panel, a spin-off was that the interviewers were able to improve their skills on rapid decision making and it was clearly reflected in the actual time being taken for the panel interviews. What was most encouraging was that the duration of the average interview time reduced to half (to 30 minutes from the one hour earlier) which itself was a major improvement in on the productivity.

That apart, the results tended to match perfectly towards the end. Of the total three mismatches, two of them were in the first week itself. This clearly indicates that the five-minute interviewers were able to sharpen their skills in making quick decisions as they went along.

Striking a balance

The fallout of this study was that all recruitment interviews in our organisation had were constrained to be completed in 12 minutes. If, with five-minute interviews, if we are able to match the results of a normal interview in 90 per cent of the cases, we sure can live with it! We now believe that with 12-minute interviews we would be able to maintain a good balance between productivity and accuracy in assessments.

The same concept is currently being applied in other areas in our day-to-day work and the improvement in productivity is clearly visible. The idea is to induce a comfortable level of stress or compulsion, by reducing the time available for arriving at a decision. After all, haven't we seen stress proving to be a great performance stimulant for athletes and competitive sportspersons? Needless to add, the level of stress is to be maintained at a comfortable level failing which it can result in disastrous consequences.

This study has made us have a paradigm shift in our orientation towards stress, albeit at an optimum level. We now realise that organisations can increase their productivity to a considerable extent by training our employees to make rapid decisions in all areas. The bottomline is that increase in productivity eventually translates to value addition at the same costs. In a competitive arena boxed in by spiralling cost pressures, nothing could be more welcome.

(The writer is VP, Product Development, GoldenSource Corporation.)

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