Thinking overconfidence equals competence may be your recruitment problem
We’ve all been there. Seeing someone swoop in with extreme confidence, talking so surely about a subject you think you know about and then it hits you: you are just an ignorant fool!!
That person seems to be the most knowledgeable expert there is and their words are pure truth and they must be extraordinary at their jobs.
And after some time, reality dawns on you and takes you on a disappointment journey: that person is just over-confident and it gave you the illusion that they are capable.
Well, they are! They are capable to tell you all about how they are extraordinary, but that’s all. They do not get the job done.
If in your workplace a lot of people look like the description above, then your company has a recruitment problem. And your business might just be in danger.
I’ve been confronted to that more than I wish I had. When I was just starting working, there was this super-expert consultant that joined the team and you would here every 2 seconds: “I am an expert on that, I’ve been teaching it to X and Z”. And I’m not paraphrasing, it would be the exact phrase. He did believe it, and so by extension we all did. Who would sell himself that directly without having the needed competencies?!??
That is until I had a practical question and my boss decided to reunite the entire team with the expert to help us solve it. It took him 4 hours to go over the online documentation of the tool with us — which, by the way, took us barely 15 minutes when we were searching for answers. He just took each phrase from there and retold it to us by changing the words. And the more we pushed for a deeper analysis and had subsequent questions the less he could tell us. In the end we were all frustrated to have lost time on something that we have already studied and no more wiser on the topic. The “expert” genuinely thought that he had solved the problem. The worst part? It took 6 months of that before he was let go from the team and a huge amount of wasted money (experts tend to have a high daily rate).
Since then I was confronted a lot with incompetent boasters that most often had leadership roles. It always hurt the performance of the teams and the company. Valuable projects that could have been delivered on time and budget were constantly postponed, non-necessary tasks were considered a priority, unclear vision made it hard for the teams to understand their own work and the list goes on and on.
So why do we do it? Why do we mistake confidence or over-confidence for a competent, capable professional? And why the recruitment process has not changed by now to tackle this?
After reading a while about this, it seems that our bias on confidence comes from ancient times. Thousands of years ago, the person who was the most courageous and strong was the one that could fight and protect, so naturally we turned to them for leadership. At that point in time, we valued strength and it was normal that the most powerful physically were in confidence about themselves. Their capabilities were proven early on so it was their competence that created confidence and not the other way around.
Our brains have inherited this belief, therefore it is something that comes instinctively to us. In some way, it is something natural that we do and we should not be ashamed of that.
But we need to stop this instinct taking over. In our modern society, it takes more than physical strength to do certain jobs or to lead. Confidence is not always built on true competence anymore, it may be a result of education, environment we live in, self-helping books…
Turning to the most confident person cuts our potential to evolve towards something bigger. We might feel more secure because we believe that the most confident person in the room will solve our problem, but there is a high chance that no progress will be made.
So how to make sure we overcome this bias?
We need to be aware about why we consider someone competent.
Is it because this person is so charming and witty and makes us feel special or is it because she/he/they can prove with tangible results that they have solved a problem at some point?
Don’t get me wrong, a competent person can be charming as well, but if there is no provable fact behind the words then maybe we are allured by the confidence they have.
Knowing that we carry this bias within ourselves, we can try to ask the right questions to find out the truth.
The best way is to ask specific questions about how something should be done:
- Carrying out a project for which stakeholders are not aligned on the scope
- Defining a marketing strategy
- Creating a document in Word
- etc
A competent person will be able to tell you how they would do it, an over-confident/non-competent one will probably feel insulted and will avoid answering the question straight away and beat around the bush. An over-confident person who is not capable will not even admit they do not know how to do something.
How to integrate that to the recruiting process?
Well, a suggestion would be to draft a list of job related tasks and ask specific details about how the person would do these tasks. Maybe you will not have the whole picture but it will be a good start on understanding if they can perform their duties.
That would be simplest way to adjust your interview process.
A more complex route would be to have an immersive interview experience, where your candidate is confronted with a work scenario and manages to perform well. Allowing the candidate interact with the team and acting as if they are already in the job will show you most of what you need to know. In this case you will have tangible proof of their competence AND their compatibility with others.
Educating your recruiters and managers can also be a tremendous step into improving the process. They need to be able to identify the over-confidence bias and make sure their decision is based on facts and not feelings only . If your recruitment team is not aware about the mistakes they make, they cannot adjust. Also, allowing mistakes to happen and having a tolerant, but firm attitude towards that will make people question what they did right and what could be adjusted.
In the end we need to make sure that our brain does not trick us into believing in something that is no longer a truth and that we do not assume that a competent person should also be confident as this is not always the case.
