Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

by Daniel Kahneman

The three principles—once more, decomposition, independent assessment on each dimension, and delayed holistic judgment—do not necessarily provide a template for all organizations trying to improve their selection processes. But the principles are broadly consistent with the recommendations that organizational psychologists have formulated over the years. In fact, the principles bear some resemblance to the selection method that one of us (Kahneman) implemented in the Israeli army as early as 1956 and described in Thinking, Fast and Slow. That process, like the one Google put in place, formalized an evaluation structure (the list of personality and competence dimensions that had to be evaluated). It required interviewers to elicit objective evidence relevant to each dimension in turn and to score that dimension before moving on to the next. And it allowed recruiters to use judgment and intuition to reach a final decision—but only after the structured evaluation had taken place.