Personnel Review

“With recruitment I always feel I need to listen to my gut”: the role of intuition in
employee selection
Andrew Miles Eugene Sadler-Smith
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Andrew Miles Eugene Sadler-Smith , (2014),"“With recruitment I always feel I need to listen to my gut”: the
role of intuition in employee selection", Personnel Review, Vol. 43 Iss 4 pp. 606 - 627
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PR
43,4
“With recruitment I always feel
I need to listen to my gut”: the role
of intuition in employee selection
606 Andrew Miles
Liaise Loddon Limited, Basingstoke, UK, and
Received 24 April 2013
Revised 21 March 2014 Eugene Sadler-Smith
Accepted 6 April 2014 Surrey Business School, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

Abstract
Purpose – This qualitative study of managers’ use of intuition in the selection process aimed to
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understand if and how managers use intuition in employee hiring decisions and suggest ways in which
the use of intuition might be improved. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach – Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with
managers from a range of backgrounds, and with varying experience of recruitment and selection.
Findings – Findings revealed that reasons for the use of intuition included personal preferences,
resource constraints and recognition of the limitations of more structured approaches. Intuition was
used an indicator for performance, personality and person-environment fit. Intuition tended to be used
with requisite caution; participants were aware of its limits, the potential for bias and the difficulties
in justifying its use; several participants used their intuitions in concert with more structured,
non-intuition based approaches.
Research limitations/implications – The small-scale investigative study has limited generalisability.
The paper concludes with five specific recommendations on how to improve managers’ understanding and
use of intuition in employee selection.
Originality/value – Despite increased interest in intuition in management there is a paucity of
qualitative studies of intuition-in-use in management in general and in personnel in particular. This
research helps to fill this gap.
Keywords Qualitative, Decision making, Intuition, Hiring, Employee selection, Gut feel
Paper type Research paper

Introduction
In spite of the widely held view amongst IO psychologists that “analysis outperforms
intuition in the prediction of human behaviour” (Highhouse, 2008a, p. 336) interviewer
intuition remains AN “elephant in the room” of employee selection. Managers may
frequently place more faith in their ability to “read people” (Myers, 2002, p. 189),
and cleave to selection choices based on an “overall”, “impressionistic”, or “holistic” but
essentially intuitive judgement rather than using objective evidence garnered by
using the tools and techniques of employee selection. How can we make sense of such
seemingly arational behaviours and choices? In this paper we report a small-scale
qualitative study which addressed the need for more empirical research on why
and how managers used intuitions in their employee hiring decisions (Slaughter and
Kausel, 2014).
Dries (2013) encapsulated the paradox of intuition in selection thus: organisational
Personnel Review decision makers on the one hand overestimate the validity of intuition whilst
Vol. 43 No. 4, 2014
pp. 606-627 simultaneously underestimating the validity of paper and pencil tests. Highhouse
r Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0048-3486
(2008a) made the point more forcefully: one of the greatest achievements of IO
DOI 10.1108/PR-04-2013-0065 psychology has been the development of selection decision aids, but one of its greatest
 failures has been an inability to convince employers to use them. Highhouse (2008a) Role of intuition
also laid some of the blame at the door of popular books which “extol the virtues of in employee
intuitive decision making” (p. 334) such as Blink: The Power of Thinking Without
Thinking (Gladwell, 2005) and Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious selection
(Gigerenzer, 2007). The nub issue for Highhouse (2008a, p. 336) was the “considerable
irreducible unpredictability” of employee assessment that imposes a “glass ceiling” on
the effectiveness of the process as a result of the fact that there are determinants 607
of performance that are not known or are unknowable at the time of hiring. Although
there is a plethora of knowledge regarding applicants’ reactions to employee selection
procedures (Diab et al., 2011) there is a dearth of understanding about why managers
find intuition so appealing and how they use it in employee selection decisions.
Slaughter and Kausel (2014) in a state-of-the-art review of employee selection
decision research argued that descriptive information about how intuition-based hiring
decisions are made and why managers “cling” to intuition is lacking and that
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qualitative research in the form of interviews in this regard “can be especially helpful”
(p. 75). These various shortcomings and suggestions motivated and supported the
need for our research.
This paper contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the nature and
significance of intuition in business and management (Burke and Miller, 1999;
Dane and Pratt, 2007; Hayes et al., 2004; Miller and Ireland, 2005; Parikh et al., 1994;
Sadler-Smith and Shefy, 2004; Salas et al., 2010), as well as debates surrounding the
salience of intuition in HR in general and selection in particular (Allinson and Hayes,
2000; Colarelli and Thompson, 2008; Diab et al., 2011; Eisenkraft, 2013; Fisher, 2008;
Highhouse, 2008a, b; Jones and Saundry, 2012; Lodato et al., 2011; Klimoski and Jones,
2008; Monks et al., 2012; Myers, 2002; Nickson et al., 2008; Skinner, 2004; Spence
and Petrick, 2006) and the shortcomings in the practices of employee selection in
some sectors (Lockyer and Scholarios, 2007). In spite of these various efforts there
are surprisingly few studies devoted to researching the role of intuition in employee
selection practice. Moreover its salience is likely to be amplified in the non-HR
specialist settings which prevail in many organisations hence we felt it was important
to address this issue in the research.

Theoretical background
It is long-established that human decision makers are far-removed from the rational actors
which scientific management assumes (Kahneman and Klein, 2009; Simon, 1987).
Rather, our decisions and choices are governed by two, sometimes complementary
sometimes competing, modes of cognition one of which is “cold”, objective, rational,
reflective and analytical (generally referred to as “System 2” processing), the other which
is “hot”, subjective, affective, reflexive and intuitive (“System 1”) (St Evans, 2008;
Haidt, 2001; Lieberman, 2007; Stanovich and West, 2000). Both systems are integral to
effective problem solving and decision making in personal and occupational settings.
Recent theoretical developments provide a solid foundation for more theory-driven
research in personnel selection (see: Lievens et al., 2002).
Within this broad dual-processing theoretical architecture, intuitions themselves
may be conceived of as involuntary “affectively charged judgments that arise through
rapid non-conscious and holistic associations” (Dane and Pratt, 2007, p .40). They are
an outcome of System 1 processing and a manifestation of expertise (Klein, 2003)
captured succinctly as “analyses frozen into habit and the capacity for rapid response
through recognition” (Simon, 1987, p. 63). Simon’s axiom reminds us that the capability
 PR to intuit is built-up over several (e.g. ten or more) years’ practice, reflection and
43,4 feedback (see: Ericsson et al., 2007). In professional domains, such as management,
intuiting is uniquely suited to situations characterised by complexity, uncertainty and
time pressure (Burke and Miller, 1999; Klein, 2003). Under such conditions, including
those pertaining to selection, experienced managers tend to be guided by holistic
judgements based on “gut feelings”. So much so that there is a commonly held, deeply
608 ingrained and highly resistant-to-change belief that choosing the right employee is
often best-treated as a matter of experience and intuition (Highhouse, 2008a).
For example, Burke and Miller (1999) in their study of senior managers in the
USA reported that 40 per cent of participants used intuition to make personnel or
people-related decisions including interviewing and hiring. This finding corroborated
earlier research findings by Parikh et al. (1994).
More recently scholars have argued that intuition is non-unitary, i.e. there are
several different types of intuition, namely: expert intuition, creative intuition, moral
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intuition and, especially relevant to our study, social intuition (Dane and Pratt, 2009;
Gore and Sadler-Smith, 2011). In so far as social intuitions are concerned, strong
empirical evidence for the processes underlying holistic, impressionistic intuitive
judgements may be found in so-called “thin slice” research. Ambady and colleagues
observed that ratings by untrained observers based on evaluative thin slices (video
clips between two- and ten-seconds in length) can predict important outcomes with
high levels of accuracy including students’ rating of teachers (Ambady and Rosenthal,
1993), effectiveness of sales managers (Ambady et al., 2006), surgical malpractice
(Ambady et al., 2002b), and physical therapists’ performance in terms of patient
outcomes (Ambady et al., 2002a). Thin slices are more valuable for assessing
interpersonal rather than non-interpersonal task-related skills and provide powerful
predictions of performance, explaining approximately 15 per cent of overall variation
based on aggregated data (Eisenkraft, 2013).
Whether we like it or not first-order, face-to-face social judgements (Highhouse,
2008a) such as whether or not a job candidate is likely to make a suitable subordinate,
co-worker, team member or boss, are always likely to elicit context-specific instinctive
and intuitive assessment of traits, motives, and intentions (Colarelli and Thompson,
2008; Klimoski and Jones, 2008) through the processes of social intuition. The
associations involved are divergent and broad, based on the holistic integration of
numerous sources of information from multiple channels (Gore and Sadler-Smith,
2011). From the perspective of the interviewer social intuitions are involuntary
and difficult-to-control whilst from the perspective of the interviewee, even though it
may be possible to consciously and effortfully manipulate the content of the verbal
channel of communication, for most people (skilled liars excepted, see: Porter et al.,
2008) states such as anxiety are communicated implicitly and effortlessly to
interviewers through tone, pitch, and gesture (DePaulo, 1992).
Myers (2002) alerted us to the perils of interviewer and interviewee intuition in
such situations. The source of the “interview illusion” (Myers, 2002, p. 191), which can
result in a gap between the interviewer’s impression of a candidate and reality, are
manifold. For example, an unstructured, intuition-based interview may focus more
on a candidate’s declared intentions and future behaviour but these are likely to be a
less useful predictor than their past performance (Myers, 2002). Similarly, most
interviewers are likely only to get feedback on candidates their intuitively based hires
several months or years (or even not at all) after the decision was taken and hence learn
very belatedly whether the decision was a “hit” or a “miss”, furthermore they do not
 normally get any feedback on the potentially successful hires they intuitively failed to Role of intuition
appoint (Fisher, 2008). Ultimately over-confidence in, and delayed and incomplete in employee
feedback on the correctness of intuitions, allied to hindsight bias resulting from
overemphasising “intuitive hits”, may lead managers not only to assume that events selection
were more predictable than they were in reality but also to an inflated self-perception of
and unreasonable confidence in their intuitive hiring ability (Ames et al., 2010; Fisher,
2008; Myers, 2002). Such attribution errors may lead managers to ascribe successful 609
hiring decisions to their own intuitive expertise while placing the blame for failures on
other factors, such as the process itself or where they were overridden, the poor
judgement of colleagues. The consequences for selection and assessment practice in
organisations as well as professional policies of bodies such as CIPD are significant.
However, whilst this paper is not implied advocacy for intuition or an explicit critique
of the rational model, it is noteworthy that intuition is largely ignored by professional
codes of conduct.
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Ames et al. (2010) framed the issue of whether or not interviewers should trust their
intuitions as essentially a metacognitive question and observed that the accuracy of
first impression judgements tends to be modest, whereas first impression confidence
tends to be relatively high (thus supporting the somewhat sardonic precept that
intuitions are “sometimes wrong but never in doubt” Sadler-Smith, 2008, p. 28), and
“for the vast majority of impressions, accuracy and confidence tend to be unrelated to
one another” (Ames et al. 2010, p. 273). The conflation of accuracy and confidence may
be a result of the substance of a message and its forcefulness being interpreted
as proxy for its validity (e.g. “If I got a quick and clear answer, it must be true”) (Ames
et al., 2010, p. 274), i.e. “confidence is a fallible cue to accuracy” (Ames et al., 2010,
p. 275). This effect is amplified by the automaticity and potency of affect (“gut instinct”)
in intuitive judgements.
In sum: since adaptive psychological mechanisms such as social intuitions are
often automatically and “stubbornly” (Highhouse, 2008a, p. 333) relied on alongside
or in preference to other more objective methods of employee selection (such as
personality assessments tools which are “evolutionarily novel”, Colarelli and
Thompson, 2008, p. 347), it is vital that intuitions are deployed as effectively as
possible in order to militate against their down-sides and maximise any likely benefits
which may accrue from their use (Hogarth, 2010; Myers, 2002; Sadler-Smith, 2010).
Answers to the core question of our study (i.e. if, how, and why the intuitive perspective
remains so appealing to management practitioners) are important not only for human
resource research but also for the improvement of managers’ selection practices and the
design of HR policies (even if it turns out only to be to provide exhortations to avoid
intuition at all costs).

Method
Sample and procedure
A convenience sampling strategy was used in order to obtain participants for this
exploratory study. Our intention was to interview both HR specialists and managers
from as wide a variety of organisations as was practicable. The sampling strategy was
chosen to meet this need. We advertised via social media for participants with
experience of employee selection who would be willing to be interviewed. The use of
personal social networks resulted in access being granted to large organisations, while
the use of different social networking sites resulted in the respondents coming from
a wide range of backgrounds in terms of role, organisational size, and experience.
 PR There were 13 participants (ten of whom were from a managerial rather than an HR
43,4 background) representing organisations ranging from small (under 15 employees)
to large (over 100,000) employers. Five of the participants were self-employed or
working in smaller companies (digital design, project management, corporate
healthcare consultancy) and eight participants were employed by multi-nationals
(healthcare, technology, media sectors). Participants ranged from HR executive
610 to senior management level. Participants were labelled A-M for the purposes of
the analysis.
Data were collected using semi-structured, in-depth interviews. During the
interviews participants were encouraged to talk about selection decisions made in
previous jobs as well as in their current role (the interview protocol is contained in the
Appendix). Interviews lasted approximately 45 minutes on average. Interviews were
recorded digitally and transcribed verbatim. Prior to their interview, based on a variant
of the Critical Incident Technique (Flanagan, 1954), each respondent was asked
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to prepare by recalling two specific hiring decisions they had made, one with
a positive outcome, and one with a negative outcome. In the interviews, which were
interviewee-led, interviewees were asked to talk about these decisions.
In practice the discussion of the incidents often led into more general dialogue
around selection in general, hence participants tended to talk about a wider range of
incidents. All of the interviewees made mention of intuition, and hence afforded
opportunity for follow-up and probing.

Data analysis
Following the interpretive approach of Butterfield et al. (1996) we aimed to “obtain
a better understanding of how managers actually think and feel about these
situations [y] we were at least as interested in learning the managers’ perceptions
as we were in learning of the reality”, we allowed “responses to be relatively
unconstrained” and for “rich meanings and interpretations” to be conveyed from
managers to researchers (pp. 1485-1486). We do not lay any claim to a grounded
approach. A three-phase process of unitising, categorising, and classifying
comprised the content analysis. In the first phase (unitising) individual “thought
units” (TUs), i.e. “a complete thought or idea” relevant to the selection process
were identified in the interview transcripts (Butterfield et al., 1996, p. 1483). Clear
references to intuition or synonyms for intuition, and what could reasonably be
thought to be references to intuition, were selected; for example “with recruitment,
I always feel I need to listen to my gut instinct” (Participant H). The resulting TUs
were transferred onto index cards, with notes made on each as to which interview the
TU had come from, and if the respondent was referring to a positive or negative
selection experience. The process generated initially over 700 TUs. These were
filtered in the first part of the categorising phase.
While ideas for themes and categories formed inevitably during data collection and
analysis, the aim was to “let the data speak for themselves” (Butterfield et al., 1996,
p. 1483). Themes were allowed to emerge by matching similar cards together, based on
internal convergence and external divergence. The first filter that was applied was to
look through the TU cards for anything that appeared to refer to intuition, including
“instinct”, “gut feel”, etc. The second filter was based on re-reading the cards to look for
possible emergent themes with the aim of removing TUs that were simply describing
the selection process and focus attention on those that were concerned with the
research question. The filtered 328 TUs were then sorted into similar first-order
 categories using the internal convergence/external divergence method referred to Role of intuition
above and each category given a label “in an attempt to capture the shared message in employee
of the thought units within it” (Butterfield et al., 1996, p. 1484).
Once all the cards had been sorted into categories they were re-read and re- selection
checked against the labels; at this point some categories were re-labelled and some
cards reassigned. In order to check the reliability of this process an independent
researcher was given a list of the final categories and a random sample of 70 cards 611
(20 per cent of the total) and asked to sort the cards into the listed categories. In total,
50 out of the 70 cards (71 per cent) were sorted correctly, giving a Cohen’s k for
inter-rater agreement of 0.70 (Randolph’s free-marginal multi-rater k) calculated using an
online k calculator (Randolph, 2008) and indicating “substantial” inter-rater agreement.
In the classification stage, the categories were grouped into six second-order themes.
This was a subjective process based on the immersive approach to the data described
above (Marshall and Rossman, 2006; Rossman and Rallis, 1998). An overview of the data
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structure is shown in Table I.

Theme Category (first-order code) Sample statement

Perceived problems Specific occasions when
with selection selection failed
General unreliability of
selection process
Use of rational Use of tests/set tasks (positive
methods opinion)
Use of competency questions/
structured interview (positive
opinion)
Use of assessment centres
(positive opinion)
Use of psychometric tests
(positive opinion)
When and why a rational
process is inadequate
Perceptions of Intuition as hard to explain
intuition
Intuition as a physical feeling
Pace of intuitive judgments
Intuition as experience
Intuition as a predictor of
personality
“He did a really good [interview and] test
[y] then we popped him into his team
and he [y] was like a completely different
guy” (E)
“There’s a huge unpredictability in any
recruitment” (F)
“[A task is a] really good way of testing
and making sure the person we hire is the
right one” (H)
“I look at the things that are critical to me
in terms of competency and ability in
those areas and take questions from a
bank of questions” (A)
“[An] assessment centre [y] done in the
right way [y] is about as easy a selection
process as you can do” (A)
“There’s lots of caveats around
psychometric tests. But [y] used in the
right way, they’re very useful” (A)
“Nothing’s perfect, and a test is not
perfect” (D)
“This gut feeling, it’s very, very hard to
quantify” (B)
“It’s like a physical kind of [y] it’s like a
little tripwire in my head” (B)
“You form an opinion of somebody pretty
quick” (F)
“As you get a bit older you just get a bit
more comfortable following your gut” (B)
“Generally how they came across [y]
what kind of person they would be like to
work with” (H) Table I.
Overview of data
(continued) structure
 PR Theme Category (first-order code)
43,4
Intuition as a predictor of
performance
Intuition as a predictor of “fit”
(specifically, not personality in
612 general)
Intuition as bias
Intuition as an impression of
physical appearance
Other definitions of intuition
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Effectiveness of When and why an
intuition unstructured/intuitive
approach is inadequate
Negative statements about
intuition
Positive statements about
intuition
Justifying the use of Participants unwilling/unable
intuition to rely on intuition
The influence of others’
intuitive judgements (or lack of )
Positive interplay of intuitive
and rational judgement
Role of rational and Ensuring fairness/objectivity in
intuitive judgement; the process
additional outcomes Ensuring fairness/value in
and reasons feedback
Table I.
Findings
In what follows we discuss the themes, illustrate them with relevant “power quotes”
and offer additional “proof quotes” in Table I (Pratt, 2009, p. 860).
Problems in selection
Two categories emerged within the “Problems with Selection” theme: “failures of the
selection process” and “difficulty and unpredictability of selection processes”.
Participants described specific failures in selection, where despite their belief that
Sample statement
“A colleague [y] had a massive gut
instinct about someone else [y] and she
was hired, and she is brilliant” (I)
“Once I saw her up against the others, I
had quite a strong feeling that she had a
good organisational fit” (K)
“Maybe I felt like I was being judgemental
– a judgement that was fed by
stereotypes” (D)
“Everything about him was soft.
He looked soft, he had soft hair,
he had a soft face, soft body, soft
clothes” (D)
“I thought there was something funny,
I thought the answer was all right but,
there was something odd there” (B)
“An unstructured interview lacks the
transparency of a structured
competency-based interview” (A)
“It’s not reliable because it’s just your gut
feel and as you might get it horribly,
horribly wrong” (C)
“I do think that gut reaction [y]
speaks a lot because it’s the only
thing you can rely on in the face of
all that information” (E)
“I couldn’t articulate [the gut feeling], so
[y] I just couldn’t make it stick because
all the other evidence was contrary” (E)
“[Intuition] is more of a valid response if
it’s shared” (C)
“No matter how hard you try to be as
systematic, as pragmatic, whatever you
want to call it, that [gut] feeling is there”
(M)
“Everyone follows exactly the same
process so it’s completely objective” (A)
“You really need to give robust feedback
and the best way of ensuring that you can
do that is to have a good process that
stands up to scrutiny” (A)
 the process was robust and promised to be effective, the candidate simply failed to Role of intuition
perform when in the job. For some participants this came as a surprise: in employee
It was a very good interview [y] his CV was really good [y] he ticked the boxes in terms of selection
potential experience [y] he came through really well [y] he did a writing test [but failed in
the job] [y] Honestly, I have absolutely no idea [why the selection process failed] [y] I sit
there and I do think about it often. I just don’t quite know (Participant E).
Others appeared to view the process as inherently more risky, and seemed less 613
surprised by its failure:
Maybe he didn’t have the grit and maybe we didn’t pick up on that in the interview [y] it’s
sometimes quite difficult (Participant M).
Of the selection process in general, participants acknowledged its imperfections in
two main areas: the “unpredictability” of human behaviour and the “inadequacies”
in the process:
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There is a real unpredictability factor about people, and I don’t think any process is ever
going to totally unpick it (Participant B).

Surely [recruitment and selection] cannot be this difficult right? (Participant G).

Selection is not an exact science to start with [y] it’s difficult (Participant M).
Comments reflected a view that selection is to an extent “probabilistic”, and that there
are likely to be factors which may determine future performance that are not knowable
easily at the time of a candidate’s appointment.

Use of rational methods

As far as rational methods themselves were concerned, set tasks such as in-tray
exercises or presentations were felt to be useful and seen as an objective way
of assessing both “hard” and “soft” skills and which could be combined with other
methods:
You can almost imagine what they are going to be like in front of a customer (Participant D).

We can ask all the competency-based questions in the world, but until you give them
something to do, you often don’t know which way they’re going to go (Participant H).
Participants were aware that combining selection methods can be used to overcome the
limitations of a specific method:
There’s [sic] lots of caveats around psychometric tests. But I think in their best iteration, used
in the right way, they’re very useful [y]We’ll put [candidates] through [a psychometric test]
and use that as the basis to structure a second round interview [y] honing in on some of the
key competencies [y]. You can sit down and say to the candidate “You’ve been through
the interviews, you did the [psychometric test], you’ve had the feedback from that and this is
fundamentally why you’re not suitable for this role” (Participant A).
However, a number of criticisms of rational selection methods were made by some
participants (making up about a third of the TUs in this theme). Criticisms were either
directed at the methods themselves, or at the practical difficulty of using them in
particular recruitment situations or business contexts. For example, rational methods
were sometimes criticised for being too restrictive, too complicated, too limited, or
beyond the resources of the respondent’s organisation. Comments suggested that the
 PR rational methods available to respondents may be irrelevant to the specific recruitment
43,4 problem they faced, or did not suit the respondent’s particular preferred approach:
If you’ve got a field colleague who has to [y] make  number of money towards a target,
then that’s a completely different set of skills that you’re looking for, and so the one-size-fits-
all questionnaire doesn’t necessarily fit (Participant E).

614 I don’t think we’re a big enough company to do [psychometric tests] [y] [If] you’re getting
500 people to apply for 50 jobs a year then you can probably run them (Participant F).
Convincing non-HR managers of the utility of rational selection methods may lie in
ensuring that such techniques are tailored to the specific hiring context in the firm,
and that an understanding of the manager’s personal preferences and capabilities
as well as resource constraints are taken into account. What became clear during
the course of the interviews was that in some situations (e.g. time- or other resource-
constrained) intuition may be the only viable approach for managers.
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Use of intuition
A number of participants described intuition as being “hard to explain”, understand or
quantify, which may account for attribution errors – managers struggle to explain a
phenomenon which does not appear to be associated with the effortful or conscious
processing of information, i.e. intuiting (the process rather than the outcome) is
non-conscious and therefore difficult to “locate”:
I don’t know [how I recognise intuition], because if I knew, it would make life a lot easier
(Participant J).

How would you explain instinct, that’s really hard? (Participant C).

This “gut feeling”, it’s very, very hard to quantify (Participant B).
Intuition (the outcome of the process of intuiting) is acknowledged as “affectively
charged” (Dane and Pratt, 2007, p. 40) and one participant (G) used metaphor profusely
in describing intuition:
[A] twinge [y] gut reaction is really a good way of putting it. But it’s like a physical kind of
[y] it’s like a little tripwire in my head [y] it’s a bit like a flick switch in my head [y] it’s just
so feather-light [y] (Participant G).
Participant G’s account fits with the notion of intuition as embodied/somatic which,
when combined with the non-conscious aspects of intuiting, further sets it apart from
conscious, rational, affect-free processing. Participants also reported intuitions as
emerging rapidly:
You form an opinion of somebody pretty quick (Participant F).
Intuition was seen as a manifestation of experience. Simon (1987, p. 63) described
intuitions as “analyses frozen into habit and the capacity for rapid response through
recognition”, later encapsulated in the notion of “intuition-as-expertise” (Sadler-Smith
and Shefy, 2004) and “intuitive expertise” (Kahneman and Klein, 2009). Participants
described intuition as both rooted in, and derived from, experience and as something
that they became more comfortable with the more experience they had. Managers’
self-confidence in their levels of intuitive efficacy must however be viewed sceptically
given that subjective confidence in intuition is unlikely to be a valid indicator of
either intuitive expertise or the accuracy of an intuition-based prediction given the
 well-documented potential for biases and errors in intuitive judgment (Ames et al., Role of intuition
2010; Kahneman and Klein, 2009): in employee
[Intuition is] I suppose, from your learned experiences with other people (Participant C). selection
That [gut feeling] comes with experience because you use your experience to think, hmm, I’ve
seen your type before (Participant M).
615
As you get a bit older you just get a bit more [y] comfortable [y] following your gut
(Participant G).
Intuitive expertise takes time and the right environment to develop properly, hence
managers should be suspicious of intuitions that are not based on relevant learning
and valid experience (Hogarth, 2010).
Participants accorded considerable importance to intuition as a “predictor of
personality”. Moreover personality was considered an important contributor to
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employees’ performance:
A sense you’ve got of the person and their character, and what they can bring to the team in
addition to their skill set [y] If she was going to have to be put in front of important
[business partners], how charming would she be, and how sensitive would she be to the
people that she was talking to? (Participant H).
Participants reported themselves as feeling capable of detecting accurately and
predicting the consequences of both positive and negative personality traits and they
valued intuition as an informal assessment of job-related personality traits:
My gut instincts in the fact that she is incredibly ambitious are right [y] You’re trying to
think personality fit [y] I mean that is totally gut instinct [y] how can you measure that?
(A positive impression later confirmed by positive experience when the candidate was hired)
(Participant I).

My concern with him was that he was soft (A negative impression later confirmed by
negative experience when the candidate was hired) (Participant D).

With respect to personality this resonates with Schmid Mast et al.’s (2011) findings,
however while managers may with some justification generally feel confident in their
intuitions in this respect, it is important to bear in mind that intuitions are more fallible
in judging a target’s honesty (Schmid Mast et al., 2011).
“Intuition as a predictor of performance” was accorded considerable significance by
a number of participants:
I just got this feeling that he was going to really, really struggle (A negative impression later
confirmed by negative experience when the candidate was hired) (Participant B).

A colleague [y] had a massive gut instinct about someone else [y] a really good feeling
about her, and she was hired, and she is brilliant (A positive impression later confirmed by
positive experience when the candidate was hired) (Participant I).
And also regarding performance in particular contexts, for example assessing how
candidates might perform under pressure:
You have a gut feeling for people and how they react under pressure (Participant E).

When they’re under pressure, how are they going to behave, how are they going to hold
themselves? (Participant G).
 PR Intuition was also reported as being useful in predicting performance where a
43,4 candidate’s ability to make an immediate positive first impression was regarded as
a key part of the role, for example for sales staff:
A salesperson should electrify you [y] so if you haven’t got that in a conversation, they’re not
a salesperson, don’t waste your time (Participant D).

616 If somebody’s going to be a sales person [y] if they can’t get that first impression bang on
when you meet them then that’s how they’re going to present themselves to every client
(Participant F).
For these types of situations, participants felt that their own subjective first impression
was a valid means to assess a candidate’s ability. Intuition was also seen as a way
of assessing an individual’s potential to contribute to a team’s performance in those
situations where their unique contribution might not be easily identifiable or
measurable. For example, in describing the difficulty of hiring software designers and
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developers:
The best you can do is to get a feel for their interests and the websites they would use online
to find out the information they would need [y] I have quite a good feel for recognising a
good designer or developer that isn’t very good [yet], but has a lot of potential [y] as well as
spotting someone who already is [good] (Participant J).
Participant J described how looking at a website that a candidate had worked on
previously could give some idea of their ability, but as the site would have been built
by several different people, the candidate’s own input might be difficult to assess,
hence one way of assessing a developer’s talent and potential was to use a subjective
impression based on J’s experience in digital media and design. The term “fit”
also was used by a number of participants in referring to a candidate’s potential
for assimilation into the organisation’s culture; intuition was seen as a valid way to
judge organisational fit:
I’ve had gut instincts that someone is a really good fit (Participant I).

I had quite a strong feeling that she had a good organisational fit (Participant K).

There is a gut feeling about [y] how a candidate would fit with people outside of their
immediate team (Participant L).
A number of participants used intuition as a quick-and-easy method for assessing fit
which otherwise might have to be assessed by arriving at by matching an objective
measurement of organisational culture against the candidate’s profile. This is
a potentially complex assessment exercise which may be beyond the resources
and capabilities of many non-HR specialist managers and organisations with small or
non-existent HR functions.
A number or participants expressed concerns that their intuitions might
be based on stereotypes and hence recognised the potential to succumb to biased
judgements:
If you’re in the same trade for a long time [y] I’ve seen my bosses do it in the past, they
become quite blinkered [y] I won’t pick somebody over there because I can’t see him because
of my blinkers, but you might need somebody over there [y] I think we’re all guilty of
occasionally falling in the trap [y] I expect “animal A” and I get “animal B”, and I don’t
really want “animal B” [y] but maybe “B” has got a lot of qualities that “A” hasn’t got
(Participant M).
 Participants also reported making intuitive judgements based on candidates’ body Role of intuition
language or physical appearance, and also were able to report cases of such in employee
judgements being subsequently confirmed by experience:
selection
When you’re interviewing, what they say verbally is such a small proportion around how
they manage what they’re telling you [y] I think non-verbal’s a lot [y] when you ask them
difficult questions do they wriggle? (Participant G).
617
I’ve got to be honest, that there’s a part of [my impression was] that she looked the part
(A positive impression later confirmed by positive experience when the candidate was hired)
(Participant K).

Everything about him was soft. He looked soft, he had soft hair, he had a soft face, soft body,
soft clothes (A negative impression later confirmed by negative experience when the
candidate was hired) (Participant D).
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Interviewers respond positively to aspects of physical appearance towards which they

are favourably disposed (e.g. attractiveness). A corollary is that it may be possible for
a candidate to actively manage the way he or she comes across in the interview
through self-presentation tactics.

Effectiveness of intuition
Participants’ statements about the inadequacy of intuitive or unstructured methods
highlighted several issues, for example lack of confidence in a process that lacked
a rational component and the difficulty of justifying intuition:
Managers might make a personal connection with somebody and not with somebody else, but
that’s not really judging their competency for the role (Participant A).

Should a candidate ever challenge, why didn’t I get the job [y] the kind of open-ended CV
style interview [y] gives you too much opportunity to get yourself into a hole as a hiring
manager (Participant A).
Managers might reject intuition simply because it is not rational (with the danger that
its potential may also be overlooked or ignored). On the down-side several participants
considered intuition to be inaccurate, unreliable, and inconsistent also they recognised
that intuitive judgements might be seen as unfair:
Obviously gut instinct goes wrong sometimes (Participant I).

It’s not reliable because it’s just your gut feel (Participant C).

Gut instinct on one day can be different to another day (Participant I).

I mean, of course I’m going to be questioned on [my instinct] (Participant H).

I don’t think I rely on [intuition] as much because [it’s not] fair to candidates (Participant G).
Such attitudes may themselves be biased and founded in a set of negative assumptions
about intuition rather than an appreciation of situations in which intuition is likely to
be more or less effective. Participants also expressed confidence in intuition (e.g. in
situations of information overload), and described it as a valid part of the selection
process, based on positive past experiences:

With recruitment I always find I need to listen to my gut instincts (Participant H).
 PR I do think that gut reaction and your own personal experience speaks a lot because it’s the
only thing you can rely on in the face of all that information (Participant E).
43,4
These positive statements appear may be based on generalisations and participants’
reflections on their own positive experiences where their intuition appeared to have
served them well (their intuitive “hits”) but overlooking those occasions where it let them
down (intuitive “misses”). There is the clear danger of attribution errors and hindsight
618 biases in intuitively derived judgements, and this is a likely concern for HR practice and
policy. Again, an informed understanding of the strengths and limitations of intuition is
likely to lead to more informed judgements about how and when it could be used.

Justifying the use of intuition

Participants’ views on the usefulness of intuition for selection decisions were
somewhat mixed. For example, Participant A felt that intuition should be kept out of
the process altogether, and even those participants who expressed favourable opinions
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about intuition also tended to express some uncertainties and caveats about its
usefulness on its own. Reassuringly, participants overall either felt unwilling or unable
to rely on intuition alone, feeling that intuitions needed to be tested either by seeking
confirmation, for example by eliciting the intuitions of colleagues, or by subjecting
their feelings to analytical scrutiny.
Participants held these views for various reasons. Some viewed intuition as less
valid than other sources of data, or as an unfair means of taking hiring decisions.
Intuitive judgement sometimes presented only a part of the overall rating of the
candidate, and was not considered at the time to have sufficient weight to overrule
other factors (even if the issue later turned out to be a major issue in one candidate’s
subsequent performance). This lack of “weight” was associated with the inability
of intuitions to counter other sources evidence, or from a consideration of other
contextual factors such as the power and status of the intuitor:
Why did I overrule it [intuition]? Why did I not listen to it? Because I didn’t value it as much
as the other things I was hearing (D’s intuitive doubts were later confirmed to have been well
founded by the candidate’s performance once hired) (Participant D).

If ever I get a gut feel, I just try to knock that gut feel out somehow by asking questions that
are going to disprove [it] (Participant C).

At the time I [y] didn’t have the ability or in fact the role where I could have [said] this isn’t
right, I can’t tell you why but it just isn’t, he doesn’t feel right, whereas now I could have that
quite easily (Participant E).
Although intuition is recognised as having a part to play, there was a tendency to
downplay its importance or to give candidates opportunity to counter the impressions
made by intuition:
I thought this isn’t going to work out within [y] the first couple of minutes [y] but then
I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt (Participant I).
Also difficulties in articulating intuition, and the absence of any demonstrable process
(intuiting is non-conscious), made it difficult for managers to argue for its validity:
I do remember thinking; I’m not sure about you. You know when there’s something that
doesn’t [y] but I couldn’t argue with the skills, with the display, with the [y] nothing [y]
I couldn’t articulate it so [y] I just couldn’t make it stick because all the other evidence was
contrary (Participant E).
 Related to the articulation and shared interpretation of intuitions, some participants Role of intuition
felt they would have more confidence in their own intuitions if they knew they were in employee
shared by a colleague. But there were also suggestions that managers should avoid
mentioning their own intuitions to avoid prejudicing colleagues’ intuitive judgements, selection
moreover it is difficult to convince a colleague of the value of your intuition if they do
not share it:
[Intuition] is more of a valid response if it is shared (Participant C). 619
The gut feel [wasn’t discussed because] my boss was going to do that for herself [y] she
didn’t need mine (Participant K).

I tried to raise an objection based on the gut feel[y] and [the colleague] didn’t get it at all
(Participant E).
This has implications for the improving the interpretation of intuitions. It may be
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improved by free-and-frank discussion of the subject and by managers incorporating

feedback from others to build their intuitive judgement skills (see: Sadler-Smith and
Shefy, 2004).
Comments surrounding the interplay of intuitive and rational judgements
were represented by the largest number of TUs. It was widely acknowledged
by participants that rationality and intuition had a part to play in the selection process
(i.e. combination of both should yield a better outcome than solely relying on one
or other):
The gut feeling you get is perfectly relevant [y] but it’s not the only thing you consider
(Participant D).

No matter how hard you try to be as systematic, as pragmatic, whatever you want to call it,
that [gut] feeling is there (Participant M).
Participant M further summed up the realities of selection for many managers
confronted by the need to hire employees:
It’s a matter of just simply not trying to shut your eyes to anything (Participant M).
There were also indications that managers might value their face-to-face intuitions
over more objective assessments in the assessment of team roles:
I would take more from her, and her experience, or her answers, than I would from the [team
profiling assessment], the profile would get less of a rating (Participant K).
The most frequent response from participants was that intuitions should be
scrutinised using and supplemented by rational approaches. Moreover, intuitions have
to be expressed in a way that is interpretable by others and also justifiable to
stakeholders:
Well, can we investigate what the [intuition] is? I appreciate it’s not going to be [y] it’s
because of A, B and C, but I want to try and understand that better [y] what I’m saying is,
can we get anything else out on the table to understand what it is you’re worried about [y]
There’s just something that was not quite right about you. Right, what does that mean?
(Participant L).

Participant B adopted a rule-of-thumb for capturing intuition in the selection process

within the context of a highly systematic recruitment process based on a series of
tests and interviews (i.e. competency-based interview questions which are scored
 PR numerically and entered into a spread sheet). In this instance candidates must achieve
43,4 a minimum score to be offered a job:
We’ve found the weighted spread-sheet alone didn’t enable us to objectively deal with any
doubts, that gut feel thing, about if in doubt, throw him out, so we introduced the second score
to, objectively handle the gut feel [y] The gut feel turned into the “suitability score”
(Participant B).
620 If managers are more aware of intuition, and are more able to correctly identify it and
to understand its potential usefulness, they are more likely to be confident in relying on
it where appropriate. An understanding of the nature of intuition should also enable
managers to combine intuitive and rational judgement more effectively, and to explain
its use more clearly and confidently to others. Ultimately, the ideal outcome would
be an environment where invalid intuition-like processes are correctly identified and
excluded, while potentially useful intuitions are openly admitted to, recognised,
collectively interpreted and valued.
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Ensuring fairness
Finally, participants expressed the need for an objective process that could stand up to
scrutiny if challenged and provide clear and constructive feedback for candidates via
a rational approach per se or the “rationalisation” of intuitions:
We were doing that [y] so that everyone was treated equally (Participant J).

You really need to give robust feedback, and the best way of doing that is to have a good
process that stands up to scrutiny (Participant A).

We’ve never interviewed someone and said we have a bad feeling about it, we’ve always said
[y] their interpersonal [score was] two out of five (Participant B).
However, one participant preferred to avoid admitting openly in her/his organisation
to having made an intuitive decision and was prepared to offer an alternative
interpretation for the outcome to candidates:
[When] you instinctively feel that they’re not very good, I think you just say that
comparatively there was someone else who has a bit more experience (Participant H).
In this instance a post hoc rationalisation was used to “cloak” an intuitive assessment
of a candidate’s suitability, this response resonates with models of human judgement
and decision making which argue that intuitive sensemaking may often precede
rational sensemaking (Haidt, 2001; Sonenshein, 2007).

Discussion and implications

Our findings underscored the importance of context and supported the view that the
hiring behaviours of decision makers are often a function of the organisational and
business environment in which selection decisions are taken. For example, rational
assessment methods were generally well regarded and used by participants. Criticisms
of such approaches emanated from the recognition that they were either incapable of
assessing certain specific qualities or were not well-suited to particular hiring contexts.
Moreover the use of methods such as personality tests and assessment centres
sometimes exceeded the resources of the organisation. This was especially so in the
case of smaller firms. This constraint may help explain managers’ stubborn reliance on
intuition, but is worrisome given the significance accorded to personality in employee
 selection (Moy and Lam, 2004) A negative consequence is that managers may reject Role of intuition
objective assessment methods that have high up-front costs, opting instead for a more in employee
“intuitive approach” (the up-front costs of which are minimal), without fully
appreciating the potential longer-term costs and consequences of not using objective selection
methods (see: Fisher, 2008; Highhouse, 2008a). In terms of the “up-side” of contextual
knowledge, and from the perspective of “intuition-as-expertise”, our findings support
the view of intuition-based hiring as based on managers’ intuitive appreciation of 621
context as a result of experiences and learning (prior analyses “frozen into habit” and
conferring the capacity for “rapid response through recognition”) (Simon, 1987; Klein,
2003; Klimoski and Jones, 2008; Sadler-Smith and Shefy, 2004; Salas et al., 2010) and
their confidence, whether warranted or not, in their ability to “spot talent”.
In so far as intuition itself was concerned, participants recognised that intuitions
occurred involuntarily in the selection process and espoused a variety of positive and
negative attitudes towards them. Echoing the point made earlier, perceptions of
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intuition’s effectiveness varied according to context. It was seen as being useful

or effective in situations where there was an absence of hard data and when the hard
data itself was felt to be inadequate, and as an approximate indicator of a general
“overall impression” of a candidate. It was less useful or effective when quantification
or competence-based assessment was required, when used in a wholly unstructured
way, and when it reinforced stereotyping of candidates. Moreover, our data supported
the view that there are individual differences in the significance accorded to “faith in
intuition” (see: Epstein et al., 1996). This finding resonates with Lodato et al. (2011) who
observed that managers who preferred intuition-based hiring are likely to be
“experiential” (i.e. feelings based) thinkers.
Learning is a root problem (and solution) in the use of intuition in selection
decisions. Without an appreciation of the value of non-intuition based hiring as well as
the “pros” and “cons” of intuition-based hiring managers are more likely to be seduced
by subjective confidence (“feelings of rightness”) and duped by their own hindsight
biases (e.g. remembering their intuitive hits, whilst “burying” their misses). In the
absence of meaningful feedback (e.g. weak data on the performance of those whom
they appoint on the basis of a gut feeling, as well as on those who they chose not to
appoint) managers are unlikely to develop good hiring-based intuition. In terms of
the practical implications developing good intuitive judgement depends on the nature
of the learning environment. For example, Hogarth (2010) described “kind” learning
environments as those where the information processed leads to valid inferences
(feedback is neither missing nor distorted). In “wicked” learning environments on
the other hand “samples of experience are not representative and feedback might be
missing or distorted” and “mistaken beliefs can lead to dysfunctional actions in the
form of self-fulfilling prophecies” (p. 343).
A further problem stems from an overreliance on individual interviewers’ intuitive
judgements, especially given the fact that participants themselves felt they would have
more confidence in their own intuitions if they were shared by or could be shared with
a colleague. Effective interpretation of intuition is an important corollary of this
finding. Furthermore, and as noted earlier, so-called “thin slices” can provide powerful
predictions of performance based on aggregated data, hence to maximise the value
of intuitions and simultaneously guard against individual inconsistencies and
idiosyncratic biases it may be better, where possible, to collect and combine the
intuitive judgements of multiple interviewers and “pool” impressions even if it is of
only one or two other interviewers.
 PR An important and consistent finding was participants’ perspective that intuitive
43,4 and rational approaches are best used to complement each other. For example, in
situations where objective methods are proven to work well on a stand-alone basis
(e.g. in the assessment of cognitive abilities), intuitions are not required and should not
be accorded any role whatsoever in the process, for example “she had an intelligent
look in her eyes” is not a valid assessment of intelligence (Kahneman, 2011, p. 233). By
622 the same token, if a pool of candidates is identified as equally competent through
objective means, an intuition-based approach in a face-to-face interview may be one
way, and sometimes the only way, of distinguishing between equally well-qualified and
capable candidates especially when a choice has to be made and additional data are not
readily available. As noted, one participant reported a bespoke system he had
developed to capture subjective intuitions in an attempt to render any holistic
impressions which arose during the interview amenable to scoring. More generally the
adoption of a structured and systematic approach militates against the problems
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of focusing on performance-irrelevant factors, applying different standards to

different applicants and basing evaluations on inconsistent criteria (Eisenkraft, 2013;
Highhouse, 2008a, b). One should not lose sight of the fact that intuitions are
judgements (Dane and Pratt, 2007), therefore intuition-based hiring is one means by
which “hypotheses” about candidates may generated (e.g. “I thought there was
something funny [y] something odd there”), a corollary of this is that immediate
feedback on the validity of the judgement may not be available until sometime after the
hire has been made, this further underscores the need for knowledge of results as basis
for developing “educated intuitions”.
Organisational decision makers usually want to hire a suitable person in as timely
and efficient manner as possible (Klimoski and Jones, 2008) and intuition is always
likely to be an important element of the hiring process so long as human judges are
involved. In so far as whether intuition-based hiring is “good” or “bad” we concur with
Ames et al. (2010) that the evidence does not support a blanket “yes” or “no”. Miller and
Ireland (2005) considered intuition to be a “troublesome decision tool” (p. 29), Hogarth
(2010) argued decision makers should only consider trusting their intuitions when
past experience is “both representative of the situation relevant to the decision and
supported by much valid feedback” (p. 343). Sadler-Smith and Shefy (2004), in the
light of the potential pitfalls of intuition, offered managers practical guidelines for
developing better “intuitive awareness” (p. 88). The general caveats that these various
authors draw attention to are underlined and amplified in light of our findings and the
fact that intuitions occur involuntarily in the complex, dynamic, and uncertain social
setting which characterises hiring process, therefore it is imperative that “gut feelings”
are acknowledged and managed effectively.
In taking this agenda forward there are further pertinent theoretical issues which
our research brings into sharp relief. Highhouse (2008a) referred on the one hand to the
“irreducible unpredictability” of the employee assessment and selection process and
on the other to the mistaken belief that it is possible to achieve near perfect precision in
predicting a hire’s performance in the job role. How are we to make sense of this
conundrum? Kahneman and Klein (2009) in debating the powers and the perils of
intuitive judgement drew attention to the attributes of the decision environment itself
and the role it plays in the development of intuitive skill. They used the term “validity”
to refer to the causal and statistical structure of the relevant decision environment. For
example there are likely to be available early cues that a burning building will collapse
(much of Klein’s early research was on intuition in fire-fighting), however similarly
 valid and publically available cues about how a particular stock will perform is highly Role of intuition
unlikely to be available (if it were many would use it). Therefore to learn to recognise in employee
the likely relationships between objectively identifiable predictive environmental
cues and subsequent events and final outcomes in the first (high validity) case is more selection
plausible than in the second (low validity) case. Therefore reliable intuitive expertise is
much more likely to develop when the decision maker operates in a high validity
environment in which he or she can learn the causal rules that govern the relationship 623
between cues, events, and outcomes (Kahneman and Klein, 2009).
An inference that may be drawn from Highhouse’s (2008a) argument is that the
relationships between the objectively available cues and outcomes do not render
employee selection a high validity environment in so far as intuitive expertise is
concerned. This issue of the validity of the selection environment is an unresolved
question and therefore presents an important debate for employee selection
researchers. Relatedly, as noted above, a number of researchers have mooted the
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existence of a “social intuition” (Dane and Pratt, 2009; Gore and Sadler-Smith, 2011)
drawing on various theoretical resources including emerging insights from social
cognitive neuroscience (Lieberman, 2007). The validity of social intuition in employee
selection is unknown currently. Hence, a further issue for employee selection and
intuition researchers to explore is the role played by the proposed construct of
social intuition in the employee selection process and its efficacy in determining
the outcomes of employee selection decisions. For example, does “good” social
intuition enable some managers but not others to recognise cues that are predictive of
employee performance? If such intuitive expertise exists can it be articulated
and interpreted, and integrated subsequently into an organisation’s employee selection
procedures?
In addition to these implications for research the following practical
recommendations are offered to practitioners and policy makers: first, managers
should understand and accept that selection is probabilistic, and that perfect prediction
is impossible. The selection process is an assessment of the benefits and risks of hiring
a particular candidate, and errors will be made however rigorous the process, and
however experienced the recruiter. Furthermore, choosing the right candidate is not the
sole function of selection, and managers will have other agendas, including furthering
wider business interests; second, managers should systematically choose rational
selection aids that are capable of assessing relevant performance-related qualities in
candidates. The choice of methods should take into account specific hiring contexts
and the views and preferences of hiring managers. A “one size fits all” approach is
unlikely to be effective; third, organisations and managers should better understand
the nature and role of intuition as a distinct form of information processing with its
own strengths and limitations. More emphasis should be placed on intuition in
management education, and managers should be more open to discussion and
understanding of intuition. To support this, organisations should endeavour to create
environments in which good intuitive judgement can be developed and learned via
coaching and feedback; fourth, managers should aim to develop and deploy a
“cognitively versatile” style of decision making for employee hiring in which intuition
and analysis are used in contextually appropriate and mutually reinforcing ways,
for example by seeking more data when interviewer’s intuition says “yes” but the hard
data says “no”, or by interrogating the data more scrupulously when it says “yes” but
the interviewer’s intuition says “no”. This approach could be formalised within the
organisation’s policies.
 PR Conclusion
43,4 By way of conclusion we offer a brief summary in terms of our research questions, namely
if, why, and how management practitioners make intuition-based hiring decisions.
As far as whether or not managers use intuition in hiring decisions, the answer appears
unequivocal. All participants discussed the use of intuition in employee selection
(described variously as “intuition”, “instinct”, “gut feel”, etc.) and it was relied on to
624 varying degrees according to the individual and the context. Intuition was perceived as
being hard to explain, based in experience and manifested as a physical feeling which
emerged rapidly and involuntarily. Some participants were more convinced of its benefits
than others however we did not seek to embark on any quantitative analysis of individual
differences in this regard as a basis for generalisations (though this could be an area for
further investigation). The reasons for the use of intuition included personal preferences,
resource constraints and recognition of the limitations of more structured approaches.
Intuition was used an indicator for performance, personality and person-environment fit.
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Intuition tended to be used with requisite caution. Participants were aware of its limits,
the potential for bias and the difficulties in justifying its use. Several participants used
their intuitions in concert with more structured, non-intuition-based approaches.
The topic of practitioner beliefs about selection method and processes is “gargantuan”
but it is an area into which “research has made little or no inroads” and represents
a “severe shortcoming” (Anderson, 2005, p. 19) of the field. In terms of the contribution of
our research, to the best of our knowledge, there are no qualitative studies that have
investigated the use of intuition in employee hiring decisions moreover there are relatively
few qualitative studies of intuition in management per se. This small-scale investigative
piece of research contributes both to the general intuition literature as well as making
a modest incursion in research into intuition-based hiring decisions. This perceived gap is
an important one to fill given the high importance that is attached to intuition-based
hiring in practice and the consequences and costs of getting such decisions wrong.
The research also provides a contribution to on-going more general debates about
practitioner attitudes and beliefs about selection methods and processes. Our findings
provide justification for researchers, practitioners and professional bodies to attend
explicitly to intuition – an elephant in the room of employee selection. They provide
a basis for further investigations of a phenomenon which is a fundamental aspect of
human nature, somewhat neglected in human resources research but widely recognised
and used in human resource practice.

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Appendix. Interview protocol
1. Current job title and organisation.
2. Experience of recruitment – how long, how many, etc.
3. Do you tend to have regular close contact with people you have hired?
4. Asked to think of two hiring situations, one positive, one negative, have you been able to do so?
5. Can you tell me about one of them – start with whichever you prefer?
6. How was the decision made?
7. What influenced the decision?
8. What assessment methods were used? Why? What objective information was available/sought?
9. Ask re mix of intuition/rational analysis and how this proceeded.
10. Did I/RA refer to different aspects – “I felt they would fit in, but thought they didn’t have the
required skills”?
11. What later confirmed/contradicted that decision?
12. Can you tell me about the other?
Corresponding author
Professor Eugene Sadler-Smith can be contacted at: e.sadler-smith@surrey.ac.uk

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