Simple is not easy.

If anything, simple is often much more difficult than complex.

This is especially true when designing and executing important business systems in your organization.  We tend to make things complex when we believe something is essential or critical, but simple tends to work the best.

Great thinkers have always known and operated by this principle.  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the famous French writer once said, “You know you’ve achieved perfection not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.”

Is your recruiting process simple?  If not, find out why this should become one of your top priorities if you want it to be effective.

The Case for Simplicity

I’m starting to become a big fan of Crew.  Not the type requiring a lot of physical exertion, but the freelance design company based in Montreal.  I’m not even a designer, but I love their ideas.  And there seems to be an endless supply of them on their CrewBlog.

In a recent article written by Jory Mackay, the case for simple is laid out like this:

We love simple things because they’re easy on our brain—it doesn’t have to work as hard to understand them….

Humans are genetically hardwired to make snap decisions. What developed as part of our fight or flight response…continues to have a major influence on our first impressions of new stimuli.

To help make these quick decisions our brain creates shortcuts based on expectations or prototypical elements.

[In turn, our decisions combine over time to form judgments, and these] judgments  happen so quickly they often feel instinctual or emotional rather than part of a structured mental process.

Notice what Jory said in that last sentence:  What we often believe to be an emotional decision is actually connected to a brain process that is very predictable.

Our brains love simplicity, and we’ll always be drawn to it.

Making a Business Process Simple

If a business process (like recruiting) seems simple, then candidates will be drawn to it more reliably.  Also, they’ll engage the process with more energy and depth because they will not experience the resistance a complex system naturally contains.

How does one make something feel simple?  One way is to identify the common “prototypes” (i.e. reference points people would expect to see) of those using the system.   Jory puts it this way,

Psychologists call our brain’s preference for prototypes cognitive fluency and it’s a huge part of what makes something seem ‘simple’.

Cognitive fluency is how we feel about taking in new information. It’s the subjective experience of the ease or difficulty of completing a mental task.

If something feels easy, we assume that it is simple….

Let’s use a website as an example. When you first visit a site there are certain prototypical elements you expect to see: things like a navigation bar at the top or side for getting around, or a check-out in the top right corner for an e-commerce site. Every ‘type’ of site, from an online magazine to a fashion blog, has these prototypical elements.

When a site doesn’t conform to these expectations it’s harder for our brains to decode and we almost automatically judge it as either too complex or poorly designed.

In our next WorkPuzzle, we’ll discuss how this applies to the recruiting system of a real estate company.

In the mean time, think through a few questions.

Does your recruiting process seem simple or complex to candidates?

What are the “prototypes” candidates would expect to see in a typical hiring process?

Are your customers (consumers) experiencing “cognitive fluency” when they interact with your website?

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