Yahoo Finance Hiring managers prefer natural talent to experience: study
A job search has led a hiring manager to narrow the field down two candidates: One boasts more experience, while other has more natural talent, but which prevails?
According to a new paper, the latter trumps the former in the eyes of many employers.
University College London professor Chia-Jung Tsay conducted a series of studies to see if hiring managers are predisposed to prefer a candidate who is a “natural” over another who is a “striver.”
The first experiment recruited 212 participants 44 per cent of whom were novices, with little-to-no professional experience with entrepreneurship and other portion of were classified as experts, who had, for example, founded a startup.
Participants were then presented with information about a job seeker named Charles, who had quickly risen to a high-ranking gig at a recycling company.
Half of the group received a profile about Charles that indicated he was a “natural,” or someone who had been a leader from day one, and the others saw one that hinted he was a “striver,” who became a leader after developing critical relationships.
Participants then listened to the audio recording of a business pitch, ostensibly by Charles, and then were asked to evaluate him and his proposal on several elements, such as likelihood of success, the skills he demonstrated, their willingness to invest his company and if they would want to hire him.
In the end, the participants who received the profile that presented Charles as a “natural” were more likely to give him and his business plan higher marks.
A follow-up study, which asked an additional 383 participants to go through the same process, produced similar results.
In both studies, participants who were categorized as experts were also more likely to favour the candidate who displayed more natural ability.
“(T)here exists the belief that certain achievements cannot be explained solely by perseverance and hard work — that natural talent plays a role, and some ‘have it’ and others ‘do not,’” Tsay wrote.
A third study attempted to parse why people tended to prefer natural ability to experience.
In this experiment, 294 participants were shown 18 pairs of candidates for help with a new business and asked to pick one from each.
The individuals differed across five categories: leadership experience (two, five or eight years), management skills, IQ (100, 130 or 160), investor capital that they had previously raised ($50,000, $100,000 or $150,000) and natural ability compared to their drive.
And the results echoed the findings from other studies, about 60 of per cent of participants preferred the natural over a striving entrepreneur and were willing to pick the former even if they were added costs to associated with picking a candidate with less experience.
“Whether it is the routine hiring of employees in business settings, the early identification of talent in primary and secondary education, or the assessment of the moral character of a judge or jury member, we must consider the impact of naturalness bias in those who make these critical decisions,” Tsay wrote.
