Conductors have it easy when recruiting they let their future orchestra musicians audition, ideally behind a screen, so that their judgement is not influenced by their appearance. This gives them direct experience of an important job requirement. The selection of applicants in other sectors is not that simple.
The aim of recruitment is to ensure that applicants can successfully fulfil the job in question. The safest option would be for companies to try out candidates for a certain period before deciding whether they want to hire them.
Nobody has the time for that. That’s why companies define situations critical to the success of the position and test them. For an orchestral musician, it is critical that they can play a difficult piece of music flawlessly and interpret it appropriately – hence the audition. Whether she can fit into the orchestra, play together with others as a team and improvise in a crisis is not yet certain.
It’s all about observation
When recruiting for other positions, it is also possible to give candidates a task: they solve case studies, give a presentation, or simulate a difficult employee conversation in a role play. This allows the applicant’s skills to be observed. Assessment centres (AC) are based on this: Assessors observe applicants as they tackle specially designed, success-critical challenges for the position in question and draw conclusions about their skills and strengths.
Storytelling is cost-effective
One disadvantage of this approach is that people behave differently in exam situations than they would if they thought they were unobserved. This is known as the Hawthorne effect. In addition, although ACs are informative, they are time-consuming for both sides and expensive for the company. Furthermore, not all factors critical to success can be tested: e.g. perseverance, inventiveness, initiative, or tenacity cannot be observed at short notice.
And this is where storytelling comes into play. An applicant’s story about a successfully overcome challenge achieves the same effect: skills can be observed. The prerequisite is that you tell the story in a structured way and with the necessary details. Visual imagination activates the same areas of the brain in the listener as visual perception. Our brain therefore makes no difference whether we perceive something with our physical or our mental eye.
And the whole thing seems to work even if you don’t know the concept. For example, as a head-hunter I used to say that I saw candidate A as opposed to candidate B in this position. Creating a match between applicants and jobs therefore seems to be a visual act, whether consciously or unconsciously.