Will Rogers is famous for saying, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression.” Talent gurus have written hundreds of articles emphasizing this sentiment to help job seekers nail that next opportunity. All serious sales job candidates heed similar guidance. The wisdom on leaving the right impression doesn’t stop there. Many experts and well-known career websites provide in-depth guidance on “how to leave a lasting impression,” and others suggest “your last impression is as important as your first impression.”
Let’s face it. The big conclusion is that impressions matter a whole lot in the sales hiring process. It seems that what matters most is what we do first and what we do last. But what about all that “stuff” sales candidates do in the middle? The extensive interviewing, question answering, and conversations that take place between the beginning and the end of the process? Is that all meaningless? Unfortunately, the experts are right, but not for the reasons you might think. They are providing sage advice to help harness two well-known and related cognitive biases… The Primacy Effect and the Recency Effect.
The Primacy Effect is our tendency to remember the first pieces of information better than information we hear later. So first impressions matter, because our brains are biased to recall initial interactions rather than information that comes later in the process. This can be good or bad news depending on what that first interaction is like.
If a sales candidate starts an interview with a joke, you will likely remember their humor more than the job-related information you are seeking. Another Primacy Bias example is when a well-qualified candidate shows up late or makes a typo on a resume, and one mistake seems salient as a reason to disqualify them despite all other signs pointing to potential excellence.
The Primacy Effect also yields unwanted bias when interview order affects our judgment of talent. For example, when we interview several sales candidates on the same day, the Primacy Effect makes the first candidate more memorable. For this reason, they will likely be the standard by which all other candidates are evaluated. This means that much better-qualified candidates may not receive a fair evaluation, just because they are interviewing later. In the immortal words of Ricky Bobby (of Talladega Nights fame), “if you ain’t first, you are last.”
Whereas the Primacy Effect is about the information that came first, the Recency Effect is a bias towards the information we see last. It probably comes as no surprise that we tend to remember information and events that we experienced most recently. As it turns out, it is important to leave a lasting impression, even though it shouldn’t be.
Similar to Primacy Effect examples, you are likely to remember the last interaction better than others when interviewing sales candidates. At decision-making time, it is easy to make a biased decision based on what is easier to remember.
Perhaps one candidate closed on a high note, overshadowing signals related to job performance potential. Conversely, if a sales candidate misspeaks, tells a bad joke, or decides to get serious about compensation requirements, that last interaction could lead the talent decision-making astray.
Let’s not forget the misfortune of being candidate 3 out of 5 to interview on the same day. Due to Recency Bias, they may have to shine very bright to be fairly evaluated against that memorable but potentially less qualified final candidate.
The Primacy and Recency Effects are cognitive biases that thwart high-quality decisions and damage organizations’ capacities to fulfill diversity, equity, and inclusion objectives. In concert, they lead to decisions that have little to do with future job success.
Being the first or last candidate shouldn’t impact one’s ability to get a job, but it does. Despite what Primacy Bias and Recency Bias tell us, all of the job-related information in the middle predicts job performance better than first and last impressions.
There is nothing wrong with making a strong first and last impression. But as hiring professionals, we need to avoid biases like the Recency Effect and the Primacy Effect and base decisions on objective, job-related information.
The Primacy Effect and the Recency Effect are powerful human biases that can do great harm to salesforce quality and diversity. Luckily, there are tried and true methods for erasing their effects, and investing in them is a small cost for the value they return.
These insights have us thinking about new ways to optimize the hiring process. We hope they have you thinking as well. Book a demo now to learn more about Perception Predict, and start honing in on the optimal sales candidates to propel your organizations’ success.