Not my words, but those of Bertrand Russell! He summed up in one sentence what many of us know to be very true, a phenomenon that causes endless problems when interviewing for new staff as the more able candidate is less likely to be as confident or push their abilities compared to the less able who may come across better and more confident at interview.

This has been scientifically proven and is now known as the Dunning–Kruger effect. It is a cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it”.

The less competent therefore suffer from ‘Illusory superiority’, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than in actuality; by contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from ‘illusory inferiority’. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. “Thus, the mis-calibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the mis-calibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.

So if you can not rely on past performance, interview testing or educational background to assess skills competencies what can you rely on. The smart money has completed framework assessment to define the required skills competencies required for each role in their organization. Despite much work to enable them to define competency the difficulty is that many of the required competencies are softer skills that are harder to define and measure.

The Axia Profile competency modeling process helps organisations develop a framework competency. For larger organisations and teams this can be created on a bespoke basis clearly identifying the competencies of elite performers that are missing in the less productive team members. For smaller teams and organisations our generic reports have been developed over many years and already specify the key competencies for general roles such as management competencies and sales competencies. Using the Axia profile not only identifies these competencies but provides a measure of your existing team and a benchmark for all new potential hires.

So to find the most cost effective route to developing your own framework competency and avoid being the victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect at interview contact AxiaMetrics today

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