Applicant Tracking System, or applicant target practice?

^{“Understanding ourselves, navigating the world around us, making sense of others, and recognising the impact we have on them. Because who are we, really, if not shaped by one another?”}

^{Happy Thursday, everyone. I’m Shaida Darian, a Business and Organisational Psychologist. I’m fascinated by three questions: Why does this happen? What can we do about it? And when should we act? Join me down the rabbit hole. With any luck, we’ll find Wonderland.}

Subscribe | Past essays | Advertise with us | Insane Media | Writer Opportunity

🤝 This edition is brought to you by iSpring

Before creating a course, make sure training is actually the right solution. The free Training Needs Analysis Template gives you a quick, practical framework for assessing performance gaps, determining whether training is needed, and identifying what learners really need. 

Use it to structure your analysis, ask the right questions, and make more informed L&D decisions before investing time and resources in course development. 

Bring more clarity to your next training project!

Download the template

As we get closer to the weekend, we tend to replay the week: things we did right, what fell short, and what we probably overcomplicated.

I’m Shaida Darian, a Business and Organisational Psychologist, and I do this more than I’d like to admit. I’m always noticing small contradictions and patterns at work, especially when systems that look perfectly sensible on paper meet the much messier reality of how people actually behave.

One recurring contradiction I’ve noticed is how neatly people can be reduced to criteria before they join an organisation: qualifications, years of experience, competencies, keywords. Then they arrive, and performance becomes far less tidy. The people who succeed are often the ones who can adapt, navigate people and situations, build trust, solve problems no job description anticipated, and make themselves useful when circumstances change.

This week, that collision starts with Applicant Tracking Systems. We’ve built increasingly sophisticated tools to identify the “right” candidate. Useful, certainly. But precision only matters if we’ve defined the target properly.

We have perfected the art of filtering candidates, without getting any better at identifying who will succeed.

At the heart of this sits a century-old problem in selection science: the criterion problem. Defining what successful performance means is notoriously difficult. Human performance is multidimensional, contextual, and stubbornly resistant to being compressed into a neat numerical target.

When we automate recruitment, it naturally favours criteria that are easier to measure. Yet workplace performance extends well beyond technical capability. But as psychologists famously showed, true workplace success depends just as heavily on “contextual performance”. This is the unwritten work: cooperating with others, helping colleagues, persisting when things get difficult, and holding the team together. Research has shown that managers weigh these invisible, human-centric contributions almost equally to technical output when evaluating their teams.

This gap exposes a fundamental disconnect in hiring: what we measure before someone walks through the door is rarely what we value once they are inside. Take criteria such as “years of experience”. They look reassuringly objective on a screen, but they can be a poor shortcut for future success. A major review found that pre-hire experience has a surprisingly weak relationship with actual job performance.

But before we throw out the software and return to raw intuition, we must face an equally uncomfortable reality: human instinct is notoriously terrible at this, too. Further research confirms that consistent, structured formulas regularly outperform recruiters relying on overall “gut feel”.

Consistency only becomes useful when we have defined the right outcome to predict. The technology can aim with impressive precision. But precision is useless if we are pointing the laser at the wrong target.

Automating selection only works if you have done the slower, harder work of defining what success requires. To build a hiring process that matches reality, leaders should:

A screening algorithm can hit its designated target with impressive precision and still miss the point entirely if the target itself is wrong.

As organisations invest heavily in making hiring faster and more automated, the more meaningful measure appears further downstream. A hiring system proves its value when the candidate it identifies as “optimal” goes on to adapt, collaborate and thrive in the role.

If we don't bridge that gap, we are simply perfecting our aim before deciding where the bullseye belongs.

If something here speaks to you, I’d love to hear it.

Until next week,
Shaida

P.S. Where do your pre-hire criteria stop matching what your team surely values and rewards? Reply to this email and let me know.

If you’re new here, I’m over the moon you’ve joined us! To help me craft content that’s actually useful (and not just noise in your inbox), I’d love it if you took 1 minute to answer this quick survey below. Your insights help shape everything I write.

💡 Dive into our other newsletters - where psychology meets the founders, creator economy, e-commerce marketing, and AI founders.