Why Less Is More

Why we deliberately restrict the number of personality gauges in our recruitment interview guides.

PeopleMaps has hundreds of personality gauge scores available to us. We could easily produce interview reports containing dozens of gauges, giving employers enormous amounts of information about every candidate.

So why don’t we?

Why do we deliberately restrict the number of gauges we include in our Recruitment Interview Guides?

The answer is simple.

More information does not necessarily lead to better decisions. In fact, quite often it leads to worse ones.**

And when it comes to recruitment, the consequences of making poor decisions can be enormously expensive.

The Problem Isn’t a Lack of Information

One of the biggest challenges employers face when recruiting is deciding what actually matters in the job.

Ask a manager what they’re looking for in a new employee and you’ll often get a long list of desirable qualities.

They want someone who is organised, adaptable, creative, methodical, independent, collaborative, decisive, cautious, outgoing, analytical, and good under pressure.

Ideally, they’d like all of these things.

But here’s the problem.

Not everything matters. In fact, most things don’t matter nearly as much as we think they do.

Some characteristics are essential to success in a particular role. Others are useful. Many are simply preferences the manager would like to see.

And some are in direct conflict with each other.

Neither characteristic is necessarily better than another.

What matters is what the job actually demands.

The difficulty is that employers are often reluctant to make these distinctions. Rather than decide what is essential, they simply add another requirement to the list.

And another.

Eventually, almost everything becomes important.

Which means nothing is particularly important.

Conflicting Requirements: You Can’t Have a Tall Short Person

One of the reasons PeopleMaps gauges come in pairs is to expose something that employers frequently overlook.

**Conflicting requirements.**

Managers often describe their ideal candidate using characteristics that pull in opposite directions.

They want someone who is highly organised but also extremely adaptable. Someone who works independently but constantly involves others. Someone who is cautious and methodical but makes instant decisions.

Of course, people can adapt their behaviour to different situations. But their natural preferences don’t necessarily support every demand equally.

When we present gauges in pairs, these conflicts become much easier to recognise.

Consider a manager who wants someone who is both highly organised and highly adaptable.

We can show them the two gauges and ask a simple question.

**Which matters more in this particular job?**

Suddenly, the manager has to make a decision.

They can no longer simply tick both boxes and hope the perfect candidate turns up.

It’s rather like asking for a tall short person.

They don’t exist.

And yet, when it comes to recruitment, employers routinely create lists of requirements that are just as contradictory.

The gauge pairs make these conflicts visible.

They force managers to confront the practical realities of the job and make choices about what matters most.

This is not about compromising on quality.

It’s about recognising that the ideal candidate is not someone who possesses every desirable characteristic imaginable.

**The ideal candidate is someone whose natural preferences align with the demands that actually matter in the role.**

The Interview Becomes the Dumping Ground

When employers fail to decide what matters at the beginning of recruitment, they inevitably push the problem further down the process.

Usually, straight into the interview.

Instead of establishing a clear picture of what success in the role requires, they invite candidates to an interview and hope the right person will somehow reveal themselves.

The thinking goes something like this:

*”I’ll know the right candidate when I see them.”*

It’s an approach that sounds reassuring, particularly to experienced managers who have conducted hundreds of interviews.

But it’s also naïve, expensive and ill-informed.

Because interviews don’t reveal anything like as much as most employers believe they do.

Consider this.

**Everyone who has ever been hired has been interviewed.**

Yet employers continue to make poor hiring decisions.

They continue to recruit people who underperform, struggle with the demands of the job or leave within a few months.

If interviews were the answer to recruitment problems, why do we still have so many recruitment problems?

The issue isn’t that interviews have no value. It’s that we expect far too much from them.

 The Research Is Rather Damning

Research has repeatedly challenged the confidence employers place in interviews, particularly traditional, unstructured interviews.

In a fascinating 2013 study, researchers Dana, Dawes and Peterson demonstrated that unstructured interviews could actually make predictions less accurate.

Participants were asked to predict students’ future academic performance. Those who conducted interviews sometimes made worse predictions than those relying on valid background information alone.

Even more remarkably, interviewers developed confident impressions when interviewees provided random answers.

Think about that for a moment.

**The interview gave people more confidence in their judgement, without necessarily making their judgement more accurate.**

A 2024 meta-analysis by Wingate, Bourdage and Steel, involving more than 30,000 individuals, reported that interviews explained approximately 9% of the variation in subsequent job performance.

That doesn’t mean interviews are worthless. It means there is an enormous amount about someone’s future performance that an interview simply cannot explain.

While some would argue that structured interviews, with consistent questions and clearly defined assessment criteria, perform better than informal conversations, I would also add that personality-centric interviews deliver more still.

Even a well-structured interview is only one part of a sound recruitment decision.

And this brings us back to the importance of deciding what matters before the interview takes place.

Make Several Small Decisions Instead of One Enormous One

At PeopleMaps, we believe that one of the most important parts of recruitment happens before a single candidate is interviewed.

It’s when we work with HR and the hiring manager to establish which personality preferences genuinely matter for success in the role.

We have hundreds of gauges available, but we ask employers to select only a handful.

And we deliberately restrict their choice.

Why?

Because **forcing someone to choose is forcing them to think.**

If a manager believes that being highly organised is essential, we might ask whether adaptability is equally important.

If the job involves constant interruptions and shifting priorities, perhaps adaptability matters more than rigid organisation.

If the role requires sustained concentration on detailed work, perhaps the ability to focus on one task is more important than a natural preference for multitasking.

These aren’t always easy decisions.

But they’re much easier to make when discussing the demands of a job than when sitting opposite a candidate and trying to decide whether to employ them.

Each decision helps establish what success actually looks like.

And each decision removes another source of uncertainty from the interview.

**A series of small, considered decisions made early in recruitment is far more manageable than leaving everything to one enormous decision at the end: “Should I hire this person?”**

That is one of the most important reasons we restrict the number of gauges.

Information Overload: When More Becomes Less

There’s another reason.

Information overload.

Our job at PeopleMaps isn’t simply to provide employers with information about candidates.

**Our job is to help employers make better hiring decisions, and to make those decisions easier.**

Those are two very different objectives.

We could produce a 40-page personality report containing every conceivable characteristic of a candidate.

It might be fascinating.

It might even look impressive.

But would it help a busy line manager make a better recruitment decision?

Probably not.

Every additional gauge introduces another piece of information to consider, another comparison to make and potentially another reason to hesitate.

Before long, the interviewer becomes distracted by information that has little bearing on whether the candidate will actually succeed in the job.

In our experience, most people can comfortably work with around six pairs of gauges before the additional information starts becoming distracting rather than helpful.

That’s a practical observation from our experience, not a universal psychological limit.

For this reason, our Recruitment Interview Guides typically concentrate on a small number of carefully selected gauge pairs.

Not because we lack the information.

**Because we know that selecting the right information is more valuable than providing all of it.**

Interviews Are About Having the Right Conversations

I think we’ve lost sight of what an interview is supposed to achieve.

At its simplest, an interview is about two strangers getting to know each other in a very short space of time.

That’s all.

It’s not about catching people out with clever questions.

It’s not about trying to trick candidates into revealing something they would rather keep hidden.

And it’s certainly not about reading minds.

**It’s about having conversations. The right conversations.**

The difficulty is knowing which conversations to have.

When you meet someone for the first time, you know almost nothing about them. You have a CV, perhaps an application form, and a limited amount of time.

You need to discover how this person thinks, how they prefer to work, how they respond to the demands of the job and whether they are likely to succeed in your particular environment.

That’s an enormous amount to discover in a short conversation.

And it’s why the PeopleMaps Recruitment Interview Guides are designed the way they are.

They are not simply reports that tell you about someone’s personality.

**They are designed to act as a catalyst for the right conversations.**

The gauges highlight specific personality preferences that matter to the job. The accompanying interview guidance helps the interviewer explore those preferences in a practical, meaningful way.

But here’s the important point.

**It’s not just what the report tells you that matters. It’s where the report takes the conversation.**

A gauge might suggest that someone has a strong preference for working independently.

That’s useful information.

But the real value comes from the conversation that follows.

How do they feel about being closely supervised? What happens when they have to collaborate constantly with colleagues? How have they handled situations where they had little freedom to decide how to approach their work?

One question leads to another.

And another.

The conversation follows a path that might never have occurred to the interviewer without the report.

It’s down these paths that you begin to discover the information you actually need to make a hiring decision.

The interviewer isn’t following a rigid script or trying to catch the candidate out.

They’re getting to know the person.

And because the conversation is guided by personality preferences that have already been identified as relevant to the job, the limited interview time is being spent on things that matter.

**A good interview guide doesn’t just give you better questions. It leads you towards better conversations.**

And better conversations lead to better understanding.

What We Leave Out Is Just as Important as What We Include

This is perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of our approach.

When we exclude a gauge from an interview guide, we’re not saying that the characteristic is unimportant in every circumstance.

We’re saying that it hasn’t been identified as one of the most important considerations for this particular job.

That distinction matters.

A characteristic that is critical in one role may be largely irrelevant in another.

Even two organisations recruiting for apparently identical positions may need very different people because their working environments place different demands on employees.

This is why we believe recruitment reports should be job-specific, rather than generic descriptions of someone’s personality.

The objective isn’t to discover everything about a candidate.

**It’s to discover the things about the candidate that matter most to their likely success in your job.**

Our Role Fit Benchmark helps establish those priorities, while the Interview Guide helps employers explore the relevant personality preferences and potential areas of difficulty.

It gives the interview a purpose.

Instead of asking general questions and hoping to recognise the right person, the interviewer can investigate the characteristics already identified as important.

Better Interviews Start Before the Interview

There is an important distinction here.

We aren’t suggesting that interviews should be abandoned.

Quite the opposite.

We want interviews to be more useful.

But that means changing their purpose.

An interview should not be an exercise in discovering what you’re looking for.

You should already know that.

It should be an opportunity for two people to get to know each other, to explore how the candidate naturally approaches their work, to discuss the demands of the role and to understand where there may be a good fit or potential difficulties.

The personality gauges help direct those conversations.

They can also help protect against a particularly dangerous recruitment mistake: confusing someone’s ability to perform well in an interview with their ability to perform well in the job.

Some excellent employees are poor interviewees.

And some excellent interviewees turn out to be poor employees.

The two abilities are not the same.

When you know what matters before the interview, you’re less likely to be distracted by an impressive performance that has little relevance to the actual job.

Less Information. More Clarity. Better Decisions.

There is a temptation in personality profiling to believe that more detail means greater sophistication.

More gauges. More charts. More pages. More complexity.

We take a different view.

Sophistication isn’t measured by how much information a system can produce.

It’s measured by how effectively that information helps someone solve a problem.

For recruitment, that problem is straightforward.

How do you identify the candidates who are naturally suited to the demands of your particular job, and who are therefore more likely to perform well and remain in the role?

The answer doesn’t lie in overwhelming employers with hundreds of personality measurements.

It lies in identifying the handful of characteristics that really matter, recognising conflicting requirements, understanding each candidate’s natural preferences and using that information to guide the right conversations.

And crucially, making a series of smaller decisions throughout the recruitment process, rather than leaving everything to the interview.

**We restrict the number of gauges because we want employers to focus on what matters, rather than become distracted by everything that doesn’t.**

That’s why less really is more.

And that’s why better recruitment begins long before the interview.

—

*Martin Gibbons is the co-founder and CEO of PeopleMaps, a pioneer in workplace personality applications, and author of Retention. For more than 25 years, he has worked on applying personality psychology to practical business problems, including recruitment, employee performance and staff retention.*

### Research references

1. Dana, J., Dawes, R. M., & Peterson, N. (2013). *Belief in the unstructured interview: The persistence of an illusion.* Judgment and Decision Making, 8(5), 512–520. [Read the research](https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/5BBA77932EF22EBEAA1E8020126A1925/S1930297500003612a.pdf/belief-in-the-unstructured-interview-the-persistence-of-an-illusion.pdf).

2. Wingate, T. G., Bourdage, J. S., & Steel, P. (2024). Meta-analytic research on employment interview validity, published in the *International Journal of Selection and Assessment*. [Read a discussion of the findings](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/happybytes/202407/are-job-interviews-failing-us).

3. Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. E. (1998). *The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings.* Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 262–274.