Make Better Bets

Here’s something you’ve probably never heard before:

This may seem like a ridiculous statement but understanding and appreciating how Bayesian inferences are being applied by your staff to identify and select talent can significantly improve your recruiting process.

Now, for the few readers left willing to follow my train of thought let me briefly explain what I mean by this.

Think of your most experienced recruiter as a professional poker player. Most anyone can learn the math behind poker, but a pro considers more than just the cards in his hand to determine risk and reward. He will make initial assumptions about how the people at the table will play their hands, but then adjusts his original assumption (or base rate) based on the intel he gathers as the games move along. His many hours at the poker table tell him that the young kid with tattoos will play bold and risky but with each hand he will adjust that impression until he has a clear picture that will give him the edge. These are Bayesian inferences, which can be defined as a method for adjusting the probability of an initial hypothesis (or belief) as more evidence or information becomes available.

Your best recruiters are able to draw from their years of experience to build an initial impression of a recruit that is fairly accurate (the base rate). They are also really good at collecting better information about the recruit and then adjusting their initial impression based on how they weigh and judge the relevance of that information. Conversely, less experienced staff will create less accurate initial impressions and will incorrectly adjust or fail to adjust their initial impression based on the data they are able to collect. If you can get your less experienced recruiters to think more like your experienced recruiters, then you can increase the probability of getting the right athlete on your team. Here are five recommendations, leveraging what we know about Bayesian statistics, that may help to improve your next recruiting class:

I recognize that recruiting is an inherently risky process that will never be a perfect science. You will often be put in situations where you must offer a scholarship with limited information. The good news is that every team faces this challenge. Therefore, teams that are better at making accurate initial impressions and taking full advantage of data they collect to adjust their impressions will increase their odds of making the right recruiting decisions. Implementing some or all of these recommendations here will help you and your staff to make the best bets based on the “cards you were dealt”.

The content in this post was influenced by: Duhigg, Charles. Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business. 2016.

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