What is Voodoo Hiring?

The Illusion of the "Black Art"

Why do smart leaders struggle to hire well? According to legendary management expert Steve Kerr, it's because people unfamiliar with great hiring methods treat the process as a "mysterious black art". They rely on subjective judgment and pet techniques rather than a scalable, predictable system.

This faith in unstructured processes is what we call Voodoo Hiring. The ultimate goal of Voodoo is a quick decision based on a gimmick, a personality check, or a gut feeling. But in reality, Voodoo Hiring is the reason "the hiring success rate of managers is a dismal 50 percent".

The core issue is that it's "hard to see people for who they really are" in a brief, staged interview. Your process must penetrate the polished facade and surface-level performance.

The Top Voodoo Mistakes That Kill Predictability

If you recognize these methods in your organization, you know why your process is unreliable:

• The Art Critic: Decisions based purely on gut instinct or chemistry. This is "terribly inaccurate" and easily fooled by candidates who simply interview well.
• The Prosecutor: Using aggressive, irrelevant trick questions or logic puzzles (like "Why are manhole covers round?") designed to trip candidates up. Knowledge and job ability are not the same thing.
• The Fortune-Teller: Relying on hypothetical questions like, "What would you do if...". Candidates respond with the ideal, textbook answer , but "it's the walk that counts, not the talk".
• The Sponge/Chatterbox: Letting many people interview without coordination, asking the same superficial questions , or engaging in casual chat that does nothing to help you make a good decision.
• The Suitor: Focusing all the interview energy on selling the opportunity and not assessing the candidate's capabilities.
• The Tester (Psychological/Personality): Using generic, easily faked tests. These are "utterly useless as predictors of on-the-job performance" for executive selection.

All Voodoo methods share one fundamental flaw: they are based on how a person acts during the interview rather than their verifiable track record over years.

The Trap of the "All-Around Athlete"

The Voodoo process often leads you down another costly path: chasing the "all-around athlete". This is the talented generalist with a prestigious resume and broad skills.

However, "hiring all-around athletes rarely works" because job requirements demand narrow but deep competence—a specialist.

As Nick Chabraja, CEO of General Dynamics, illustrated, hiring a creative business developer (a generalist) when the business desperately needed an operations expert (a specialist) led to falling operating margins. You must find the specialist to solve the specific business problem that exists.

Moving Beyond the Mystery

If your current process contains one or more of these Voodoo elements, you are operating with an unreliable, random predictor of job performance. The solution is a clear and tested path that replaces opinion with data, replaces guessing with structure, and replaces wishful thinking with a repeatable process.

Your success as a manager is "simply the result of how good you are at hiring the people around you". It’s time to move beyond mysterious black arts and adopt a methodical approach that delivers the predictability and certainty needed for a 90% hiring success rate.

Key Takeaways

• Voodoo is the Problem: Unstructured hiring (The Art Critic, Prosecutor, Fortune-Teller) is subjective and leads to the average 50% hiring failure rate.
• Past Behavior Predicts Future Performance: Effective selection must pivot from assessing how someone acts in an interview to gathering data on their track record over time.
• Stop Chasing Generalists: An A Player is a specialist whose deep, narrow skills align perfectly with the job's unique needs, not an "all-around athlete".
• Structure Provides Truth: The solution is a methodology based on repeatable, rigorous structure that compels honesty and delivers data you can trust.