Most companies want to recruit the best people.  For most, the talent they can attract is the difference between being good and being great.  Despite this however, so many still do an awful job of the whole recruitment process.

Just as you can rightly expect candidates to do a great job of selling themselves to you when they apply, the inverse should also apply.  New research reveals the importance of how you advertise your roles.

The study, conducted by a team of Belgian psychologists, revealed that the uniqueness of the recruitment process goes a very long way to determining the number and quality of applicants you’ll receive.  This is even more so in competitive fields where candidates will have many jobs to choose from.

The researchers sent out a real job application to nearly 2,000 applicants.  Half of these were sent via email, as is the industry norm, whilst the other half were sent using a hand-written postcard depicting a coffee mug and a blank daily agenda.  Both email and postcard had the same design and included exactly the same content about the vacancy.

Of the 2,000 people that were sent the job information, 62 of them actually applied for the job.  This is where it gets interesting though.  Of those 62 applicants, a whopping 82% of them received the postcard, with just 18% of applicants coming from the email group.  So nearly 5 times as many potential candidates.

What about the quality though?  It turns out that the postcard candidates were generally better educated as well.  So they got nearly 5 times as many applications from better qualified candidates.  The researchers believe that the unusual method grabbed the attention of the better qualified people who perhaps weren’t actively looking for a new job.

We tend to go through life on a kind of autopilot, with our unconscious brain doing most things for us, so attempting to recruit people via unusual means can snap us out of this and bring our conscious brain into play.

A good recent example is when Vala Afshar attempted to find a new social marketer purely via Twitter.  No paper resumes were accepted.  I believe Vala was very happy with the candidates he received.

So the next time you want to hire some hot new talent to your company, make sure your recruitment process grabs their attention.

Michael Fitzgerald, contributing editor at MIT Sloan Management Review, talks with WellPoint executive Lori Beer about how the company, which is one of the largest health insurers in the United States, is using technology to help doctors and nurses be more efficient and effective.  Of particular interest is the use of IBM’s Watson to help provide diagnosis.  If you work in healthcare, or merely have an interest in it, this is worth a watch.

I’ve done a few public talks and presentations now, and I’m usually overcome with nerves beforehand.  It’s just not something that comes at all naturally, and as a result it’s often not as enjoyable as it could be.  Some new research from the University of Rochester suggests that there is a way to overcome these nerves, and it’s all down to how you perceive the signs of stress we experience.

“The problem is that we think all stress is bad,” explains Jeremy Jamieson, the study’s lead author and assistant professor of psychology at the University of Rochester.

He suggests that we have the wrong impression of the signs of stress we often see before doing something important.  Those butterflies in the stomach and sweaty palms shouldn’t be seen as something to worry about, but rather as a sign that the body is getting geared up for action.  So in other words, it’s a good sign that these things are happening because it means the body is ready.

“Those feelings just mean that our body is preparing to address a demanding situation,” explains Jamieson. “The body is marshaling resources, pumping more blood to our major muscle groups and delivering more oxygen to our brains.”

How to use stress to your advantage

The researchers used the Trier Social Stress Test to induce stress in the participants in their study.  Participants were asked to give a five minute talk about their strengths and weaknesses.  The catch was that they were given just three minutes to prepare.  What’s more, around half of the participants had a history of social anxiety.

To test their hypothesis the participants were split into two groups.  The first group were told about the ‘correct’ way to intepret stress signals and told to perceive them as beneficial to their task.  The second group however received no such information.

Both groups then had to deliver their speech in front of two judges, with the judges very much from the reality TV school of judging, with each instructed to provide frequent negative, non-verbal feedback throughout the speech.  This included things like shaking their heads or tapping their clipboards as if bored.

After the talk, participants had to perform a mental task, whereby they were asked to count backwards in steps of 7 from a start point of 996.  During this exercise the judges continued their passive aggressive barrage.  The idea was to again test how the participants performed under stress.

Stress is good

Interestingly, the participants who received stress preperation did better on the trial.  The once without any prep beforehand were found to exhibit the kind of fight or flight threat responses typical in stressful situations.  This contrasted with the other group, who had much better physiological responses, and confirmed this with their perception of being more in control of the situation.  Fascinatingly it was found that the prepped group pumped more blood through the body per minute compared to the other group.

The moral of the story is that our reaction to stressful situations seems to be shaped by our perception of stress itself.  So if we want to feel better in such circumstances we need to start thinking more positively about stress.

I suspect most of you will have heard the news that former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher died this week.  A polemic figure of world politics throughout the 80′s, many of her critics charge her with responsibility for the rise in individualism and selfishness they see in society.

Most of that comes from Thatcher’s famous ‘no such thing as society’ comment.  It’s worth remembering the context of that speech however, and in particular her last sentence

There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.

There have been many studies looking into altruism and how it occurs, not least when there is a group of people in a position to help.  A nice example of this is the bystander effect, where a group of people ignore the distressed even though only one of them need offer assistance.  The feeling is that there are lots of others that can do the deed, so I don’t need to do anything myself.

Some new research by the University of Missouri set out to explore just how influential groups are when it comes to helping others.

“In our study, individuals who didn’t want to share money tended to influence others to not share money,” says Karthik Panchanathan, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri.

“We don’t know what psychological mechanism caused that, but perhaps potential givers did not want to be ‘suckers,’ who gave up their money while someone else got away with giving nothing. Selfish behavior in others may have given individuals an opportunity to escape any moral obligation to share that they might have felt.”

The study has implications for how non-profit organisations can effectively go about their fundraising, with an emphasis placed on the personal aspect of charitable giving.  The bystander effect is so powerful because people assume that there are others available to lend a hand, so they need not bother.  Organisations need therefore to make it clear that individual contributions do matter.

The study consisted of three seperate experiments, although each had a consistent core that saw participants given money that they could either give to others or keep for themselves.

The first experiment allowed no communication between givers, with people acted either on their own or in groups of two or three.  They found that those acting on their own gave the most money compared not only to the other groups, but indeed when compared to every group in all three experiments.  Recipients were given nearly double what they received from those within a group.

The second experiment shifted things slightly by allowing donors to see both who had donated and what they had donated, but they were forbidden from actually communicating with them.  The final experiment added that communication layer to the mix, allowing donors to send text messages to each other.  This however had the consequence that resulted in the largest number of pairs donating nothing at all.

“Communication among givers and knowledge of others’ donation amounts increased the variability in the quantity of money given,” says Panchanathan. “We had hypothesized that the ability to reason with the other givers would have encouraged more equitable distribution of money, but instead we found that it resulted in some groups giving very little and others giving significantly more.”

To find out why this happened, participants were asked a series of questions to classify them as either pro-self or pro-social.  Pro-self people tended to prefer keeping money for themselves, whilst pro-social types were more likely to give money to others.

What’s interesting was that when pro-self people were teamed with pro-social people, it tended to be the pro-self person whose opinion dominated.

“The pro-socials caved to the pro-selfs,” says Panchanathan. “Generally, people who started off refusing to give anything would not budge. If one person gave nothing, their partner would tend to reduce the amount they gave, even if that partner had originally argued for giving a larger sum.”

All of which gives donating a game theory’esq air, where no one wants to be suckered into giving whilst others ‘freeload’.

There’s a famous experiment conducted in the 60′s that looked at delayed gratification.  The experiment put some marshmallows in front of a child.  They were told that they could eat the marshmallow now, but if they waited a bit they could receive extra marshmallows.  Around 1/3 of the children in the experiment managed to wait the 15 minutes asked of them before they gave in to temptation.  Research has linked the ability to delay gratification in the experiment to success later in life.

Could such decisions have their origins in our neurology though?  A study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience set out to explore.

“Activity in one part of the brain, the anterior prefrontal cortex , seems to show whether you’re getting pleasure from thinking about the future reward you are about to receive,” explains study co-author Todd Braver, professor of psychology in at Washington University in St. Louis. “People can relate to this idea that when you know something good is coming, just that waiting can feel pleasurable.”

The study aimed to show whether impulsive people that found waiting for a reward very difficult saw different parts of the brain triggered when they were in the waiting state.

The study gave people a drink of fruit juice that they could either have right away, or after a minutes wait, so not a huge wait, but was it enough to trigger a shift in brain activity?

The results were fascinating, and showed that in impulsive people, an area of the brain called the Ventral Striatum (VS) saw a lot of activity as the delayed reward grew ever closer.  In people thought of as more patient however, this area remained much more constant.

The researchers suggested that the differences can be interpreted as an indication of how people perceived the reward.  In patient people they suggested that the reward remained just as enticing before they waited as when they actually received it.  In impulsive people however, they weren’t very excited to begin with, but became more so as the reward became closer.

“This gradual increase may reflect impatience or excessive anticipation of the upcoming reward in impulsive individuals,” says lead author Koji Jimura, a former postdoctoral scholar in Braver’s lab.

Are impulsive people bad innovators?

Another interesting finding concerned the anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC).  This is believed to be the part of the brain concerned with thinking about the future.  As you might imagine, this part of the brain saw more activity in patient people than in impulsive ones, as they took pleasure from what was to come.  The wait was literally as exciting as the reward itself.

“The aPFC appears to allow you to create a mental simulation of the future. It helps you consider what it’ll be like getting the future reward. In this way, you can get access to the utility and satisfaction in the present,” says Braver.

It’s what economists refer to as anticipatory utility.  The study is kinda saying therefore that impulsive folks appear to have difficulty imagining the future because their brain prefers to receive rewards straight away.

Does this mean that impulsive people are not very good at innovation or the kind of thinking that requires them to look to the future rather than the present?  It kinda goes against the common perception of innovative people who are able to go with their gut feelings on things and act spontaneously.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments.