Recruiting: Do you want the best? Give away the job!

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How do you find the best person for a job?

One possibility: You just draw.

Photo: skynesher / Getty Images

SPIEGEL:

Professor Liu, you are a respected scientist and you have a job at a university.

Did you win it in a raffle?

Liu:

No.

But of course, professional advancement is not only a result of your own ability, but also to do with chance.

Hard work and good networking are very important requirements for my work, as for many other jobs.

But luck is an underrated factor.

I was often in the right place at the right time.

SPIEGEL:

You say: As soon as you have a shortlist of applicants for an important position, let the lot decide.

Usually, however, there are still many rounds of talks trying to find the very best person.

Liu:

Sure, if you know exactly who the very best person is, you should take them. But what are the right criteria for this? If you get to the bottom of this question, you realize that it is almost impossible to ignore your own prejudices. Like it or not, we prefer people who are like us. That creates a lot of problems, because to be successful you need diversity and different perspectives. Unfortunately, companies also tend to confuse identity diversity with intellectual diversity: People from different places or with different backgrounds do not automatically think differently. But that is essential for diversity. And you only get these people if you turn on the random number generator. Incidentally, this is also a very good tool against nepotism.

SPIEGEL:

At what stage of the hiring process should the random number generator be switched on?

Liu:

Relatively late. Let's say you have a management position to fill, then there are prerequisites that all applicants must meet from the outset: They need a few years of experience, they must have a university degree and have leadership skills. The differences between the applicants become smaller and smaller the closer the selection becomes. That creates a problem: Which criteria are decisive now? Here we are back to the prejudices - and now origin, gender and other criteria that are actually not important for the job can tip the scales. You can assume that all people on this shortlist are suitable for the job, otherwise they would not have got that far.So you can relax and take someone off the list - and get rid of the unconscious bias that paralyzes diversity and creativity.

SPIEGEL:

What kind of jobs are suitable for such a process?

Liu:

Not just the top management level, people are very similar to each other anyway. And that's a problem. Take a challenge like climate change. You need people with political expertise, behavioral researchers, physicists, meteorologists; no one, no matter how smart, can combine all the skills that are needed to solve this complex problem. With a topic like this, it is clear to everyone: You need different ideas and perspectives to tackle it successfully. That also applies to other challenges. Hiring the best people doesn't help if the team isn't diverse enough. However, it is often very difficult to determine who has additional skills and can initiate the decisive change in perspective. A random selection helps a lot.

SPIEGEL:

You presented your idea with the random number generator a few years ago.

But it doesn't seem like she got her way in recruiting.

Liu:

Yes, that is difficult indeed.

In theory, the advantages are very clear.

But for many, it immediately calls into question their own model of life if one draws instead of looking for successes and merits - even if in the end neither one nor the other decides, but rather biases.

But one does not like to believe that.

A selection that is not made at random creates another problem: People feel like the chosen ones, as the best qualified people.

Arrogance and overconfidence are not far off.

SPIEGEL:

You say that the second best person could often be better than the best.

Liu:

Often it is just luck that takes a person to the top.

Take the Canadian professional hockey league.

40 percent of the players have their birthday between January and March.

But this is no coincidence: You have to join a team at a very young age, and the coaches naturally choose the strongest children from a given year, but have to stick to that year.

Even the greatest talent hardly has a chance if it was born in December.

The best candidates are unlikely to bring more diversity to the team because they have benefited from such luck factors.

In this respect, the second best person is often more interesting for the post.

SPIEGEL:

The world is an unjust place, and the random generator should fix it?

Liu:

The world is never as fair as we would like it to be.

But the motivation to be one of the successful ones leads people to believe that successful people deserve to be successful.

We actually know that this is not always the case: Many students at elite universities such as Harvard or Oxford come from rich families.

Perhaps one should lower the bar there too.

SPIEGEL:

Back to the company.

If you use the lottery procedure, it probably happens, similar to the women's quota, that employees say: Hey, you only got your post through luck, so don't tell me what to do now.

Liu:

That can be a real barrier indeed.

The random selection can be extremely helpful, but if the company culture doesn't support it, then the people selected in this way quickly become scapegoats for everything that goes wrong in the company.

It's a difficult process.

Those who are there and believe that they have only made a career through their own earnings do not want the newcomers to get over the quota and put obstacles in their way.

Then these women may not be able to perform as well because of these toxic structures, and those who have disabled them will feel validated too.

SPIEGEL:

It is probably very offensive for the company's HR managers to be told that a dice or a coin can do their job better than they do themselves.

Liu:

Of course. But they have to be aware that we cannot make the best decision. It just feels like it. An example from the world of finance: Bankers always believe that they have to take a close look at borrowers, even in face-to-face meetings. Unfortunately, this is not particularly effective. If you form a control group in which you raffle the credits, the defaults there are no higher than in the group of those personally selected. There is no link whatsoever between performing in a conversation like this and the risk of default, making it an inadequate tool for predicting who will and who will not pay on time. Worse still, a process like this usually just sorts out women and minorities.

SPIEGEL:

Let's assume: I would now be the HR manager of a larger company and your arguments would have convinced me.

Where do I start?

And how do I communicate this in the company?

Liu:

Again: It depends on the company culture.

If that is open, you can start immediately and communicate openly that you will be able to decide on the lot within the shortlist in the future.

If the culture doesn't already have that, you have to be more subtle.

You can always give reasons why a certain person got a certain job.