What Is Evidence-Based Hiring and Why Is It Important?

You might think all hiring is based on evidence: information from resumes, gut feelings from interviews, and performance on skill tests. There’s “good” and “bad” evidence regarding hiring, and effective evidence-based hiring relies on the former. 

In the context of effective evidence-based hiring, good evidence refers to the factors most predictive of job outcomes–based on data and science. 

According to popular HR software, Criteria, evidence-based hiring is “based on the evidence compiled from extensive research in organizational psychology. This evidence is used to determine scientifically which factors are more likely to predict job performance than others. Organizations can improve their hiring outcomes by building a hiring process incorporating more predictive factors and weighing them more heavily.” 

In the current labor climate—where turnover (and its costs) remains high, quality candidates are few and far between, and hybrid work makes detecting threats more difficult—more and more companies are turning to evidence-based hiring to attract quality employees and prevent bad hires. 

Evidence-Based Hiring Is a Two-Way Street 

Evidence-based hiring is about streamlining the hiring process for both candidates and companies. Many organizations–scared of making bad hires–have designed bloated, bureaucratic hiring processes rife with bias and impressionistic assessments. Their intentions are good: to make the best possible hire for their business. But, the outcome is not what they seek. 

Quality, modern-day employees won’t tolerate drawn-out, overly complicated hiring anymore. That process doesn’t account for the metrics that determine employee productivity and retention. Plus, it leaves room for prejudice and discrimination in a world where many companies want to diversify their workforce. 

As a result, organizations are being pushed to bring more fairness and data-driven insights to the hiring process. They’re adapting to the modern labor landscape by creating hiring frameworks based on data and research rather than impressions. They’re using numerical ratings for interviews rather than qualitative assessments to better predict quality candidates in the future. They monitor problematic interviewer feedback to screen for bias, malpractice, and evaluation skills. 

And so much more. 

Bias-Free Hiring Is a Paradigm Shift

Evidence-based hiring isn’t an overnight fix–it’s a process.  

It’s about changing your organization’s hiring culture through science-backed research and internal data collection. It’s about combining the insights from that research and internal data and then iterating on the hiring process over time. It’s about improving every day to grow the workforce that best suits your business over time. It’s about ongoing information-sharing and continuous education for hiring managers and teams–so they can implement the findings into the hiring process. 

Check out this graphic from industry-leading contract recruiting platform, ContractRecruiter, to better understand the core principles of that paradigm shift:

The ongoing quest to uphold the above principles is the driving force behind evidence-based hiring and recruiting practices. 

It’s Never Too Late to Start

Are you curious about how to set up an evidence-based hiring and recruiting process at your organization? Are you not sure where to start?

On America Back to Work we sat down with industry expert Ryan Cleaveland of Spotter Staffing. He shares his top tips for overcoming intuition-based hiring in favor of evidence-backed hiring. Listen to it here.