Hiring for resilience: The science and evidence based practice

Resilience is a uniquely important trait to consider when making selection decisions, as organizations have an almost moral obligation to evaluate it. Hiring candidates who lack resilience and placing them into high-stress roles puts them at substantial risk of psychological distress, burnout, and stress-related physical illnesses, which can be potentially life-threatening. When it comes to physically demanding roles, organizations don’t hesitate to include strength, endurance, or coordination tests in selection, lest they put new employees at serious risk. But few organizations are as rigorous when it comes to resilience, placing new employees in harm's way.

In this article, I will outline the research and evidence-based practice when it comes to hiring for resilience, helping organizations to make better hiring decisions.

Resilience and Stress in the Workplace

The research shows that stress has serious negative consequences in the workplace, both for performance and retention. Employees who are highly stressed are likely to underperform in their roles, finding it harder to concentrate, maintain effort, and see things through to completion. Moreover, they are less likely to actually show up to work, showing greater levels of absenteeism while requiring long-term sick leave. Moreover, when they do show up, they are more likely to display presenteeism, failing to do anything productive while at work, but showing up as a token effort.

As an extension of this, many of these negative outcomes can be predicted by one's vulnerability to stress. For example, research shows that people with high levels of negative affect and neuroticism show lower levels of performance in the workplace, along with a heightened risk of attrition. Naturally, when presented with stressful stimuli, people who are especially vulnerable to stress are impacted by its effects to a greater degree than most people, experiencing exaggerated or longer-lasting effects, hampering performance.

Resilience, however, has the opposite effect, acting as a buffer against stress and pressure. Highly resilient people are simply less likely to experience negative health effects from stress or perceive stimuli as stressful in the first place. This means that highly resilient individuals can tolerate higher levels of stress and pressure without succumbing to the negative effects of stress, keeping them safe for longer. This relationship is effectively linear, and the more stressful the role, the more resilience is needed to maintain well-being.

How to Measure Resilience

Although definitions vary between experts, I believe the best way of thinking about resilience is as a group of personality traits that allow someone to deal with stress more efficiently and negate the negative impact of stress more effectively. As a result, it isn’t something that can be learned, and it is distinct from finding ways to cope with stress. For example, taking up yoga does not enhance one's resilience, but it can help alleviate one's level of stress and/or make life seem less stressful. Many things in life can help people cope with stress and/or modulate the relationship between stress and performance, but they are inherently distinct from resilience, which is innate. This matters from a recruitment perspective, as resilience simply cannot be improved, so hiring candidates with resilience from the outset is of paramount importance.

The best and perhaps only way to hire for resilience is using personality questionnaires. Personality questionnaires allow you to measure specific personality traits that act as a buffer against stress, collectively comprising one's resilience. Personality traits such as locus of control, self-efficacy, positive affect, and emotional stability are all closely aligned to resilience and can be effectively measured using personality questionnaires. These constructs have been thoroughly researched over many decades, all showing statistically significant associations with performance, retention, and well-being.

The worst way to capture resilience is via a traditional employment interview. Interviews are a deeply flawed way to measure resilience, as it isn’t something that can be effectively communicated verbally. Consequently, charismatic candidates could convince you that they are highly resilient, irrespective of their actual resilience. Similarly, highly resilient candidates could underperform in the interview if they fail to communicate effectively. That isn’t to say that interviews aren’t useful tools for recruitment, but they aren’t effective at measuring resilience specifically; for that, we need personality questionnaires.

Conclusions and Recommendations

In occupational psychology, resilience is a relatively unique construct that has far-reaching effects on the workplace. When placing low resilience individuals into high-stress roles, you are putting those employees at risk of burnout, stress-related illness, and the myriad other negative effects of stress and should be avoided at all costs. Moreover, since resilience is effectively a behavioral characteristic underpinned by immutable personality traits, hiring specifically for resilience from the outset is strongly recommended, as no intervention exists to increase it.

In practice, I recommend using personality questionnaires to screen for resilience relatively early in the recruitment process, typically after the initial application. Organizations need to decide roughly how much resilience is needed for the role, and this can vary considerably. For high-stakes, high-pressure sales roles, higher levels of resilience will be needed for optimal performance. For low-stakes, low-pressure roles, a lower level will be needed, and less emphasis can be placed on it. Ultimately, organizations just need to match the capability with the demands of the role, setting candidates up for success.