HR Blog

Using brain scans as an instrument for selection: where lays the added value?

Last week was an excellent week for the Dutch professor Willem Verbeke. His idea to use a brain scan as a means of selecting people has been eagerly picked up on by the media. Next to the cover story in Vacature magazine, the topic was also discussed in several newspaper articles and Verbeke had the pleasure of being interviewed by Phara de Aguirre on her late night show.
Like many others I could not look over the topic but to me it rather seemed like much ado about nothing. Instead of being a giant leap forward in the field of recruitment and selection, I had the feeling we were taking a step back.
Major scientists within the field of cerebral research, like Christine Van Broekhoven, openly admit that they are only at the beginning of really understanding the way the brain works and that conclusions must be drawn with the necessary caution.
What kind of predictive value does a brain scan have for Recruitment & Selection (R&S)? What does a brain scan really tell us about an applicant or an employee?
In these tools, I have noticed an attempt to launch a trend in using more diagnostic and perhaps cheaper means of assessing candidates. Tools that use a more clinical approach to determine what is hiding in our brains, in order to then draw all kinds of conclusions about how one would function in a professional context. These types of technique for measuring and diagnosing appear to pass over all evolutions made in the world of R&S and Talent management, omitting crucial factors like education, training, social context, personal values, interests, free will, drive and talent development. Moreover, the idea of basing an assessment on a scan also springs forth from a very deterministic view of the world. A view where hereditary traits – so far as these can be detected ahead of time – determine how we function within our talents and competences without considering any outside influences or the possibility of personal development.
Where than lies the added value of a cerebral scan? The link between ‘empathy’ and ‘sales competences’ is one we’ve been aware of quiet a while already. Moreover being able to detect this trait is something we’ve also been successfully doing for the past few years through means of a good questionnaire in combination with a behaviour oriented interview or via an assessment centre.
The more qualified selection procedures have been able to map out both personality traits and IQ for a long time. (It is rather striking that this is exactly what they are going to do through use of a cerebral scan.) The past years a consensus has been reached that a thoroughly thought-out use of a combination of selection methods – which bring into account both ‘congenital factors’ and ‘evolving factors’ provide the best predictive value.
Moreover, in applying these techniques, there is a continuous effort to setting up a meaningful interactive process between the applicant /employee and the employer in which al dimensions can be discussed.
As far as I am concerned this remains something best left to competent and trained professionals. The idea that all this could be replaced by a brain scan doesn’t quiet seem realistic.
Finally, a concern, the idea causes me, is that the examples the professor uses in his argument look for defects and impairments like autism and psychopathy. (In order to then say that psychopaths probably don’t make great managers, and that managers often show a certain degree of autism…)
Anyway, what would the mode of action be if a light form of autism is detected in a candidate? Not hiring him or her just to be sure? Or giving that person a promotion? Where do we draw the line? How do we expect a candidate to deal with the results we provide him with? What about privacy?
If we evaluate the worth of our instruments in terms of being able to find possible “defects or impairments” that might or might not ever reach the surface in certain situations, we have to ask ourselves the use of what we are working on.
Rather than doing this, is it not more useful to focus on the positive and the strengths within people as well as believing in factors like self-determination, motivation, context, role models, development… ?
These are perhaps very open-ended questions but I look forward to debating on them with you.