“The gut-feel proponents start to seem like people who eschew antibiotics in favor of good old-fashioned bloodletting.”

That was the tone of the article from Inc. Magazine’s interesting cover story about what they call the new science of hiring.

But there are tools that work and others that don’t. This article provides a good overview of the different tools that are efficient. For instance, the conventional unstructured interview is much worse than the structured interview or the behavioral interview.
But structured interviews can be improved when we combine them with assessments. According to the article, even though the assessment industry is rich with 2,500 options, it can be very effective. Especially for large organizations which have a large volume of similar positions. For instance, users of Taleo Assessment easily tailor various assessments to their companies and cultures and saw dramatic improvement in retention and quality.

Another interesting quote was the requirement made by some companies to provide 12 references!
That leads us to the most important questions: Do the tools improve business performance? What value do they create? It is not the question asked in the article: Do you believe in the science of hiring or not? We must be more focused at the real process level: What is reasonable to ask a manager to do?

After asking a manager to schedule and interview dozens of candidates, review all their tests and assessments, and speak with their references, it can be seen as too much to ask.

Technology enables managers and HR to automate much of that today. But until managers understand the wisdom of the quote below, we may see only approximate approaches:

"I think the hiring process is the most important process in business, but it's probably the least disciplined in terms of how it's executed across American business."