People represent unpredictable resources with a strong emotional charge. Their performances fluctuate sometimes conditioned by external and controllable factors, sometimes unconditioned, and their evaluation is strongly influenced by subjective aspects, no matter how well it is structured or organized.

Did you ask yourself, as bosses or recruitment specialists if you truly are honest when judging the ones that you would manage or select?

The most frequent judgment errors that we make are the following:

1. The employees that often do overtime are more efficient or more involved. Sometimes this myth can be true, sometimes can be false. Making overtime can underline both involvements, tendency to finish things, not letting them just started, but time management problems also. Some employees have reasons that are not related to work to stay over the working program: they want to play, want to talk with their friend from abroad, to take benefits from the technical resources that they don’t have at home etc. Other just respects unwritten habits: if all the other colleagues stay, maybe I should do it.

Therefore, try to find real motives as why your employees stay over time and remove the motives which determine them to make a habit out of it. The balance between work and rest, between job and personal life is very important in the individual performances.

2. Employees with children absent more from work than the ones without children or men. Where there are no instruments to quantize the days for sick leave, rest holiday or free days that do not count as the first two, there is a tendency to retain mothers, just for the reason that they always give the same motive.

Therefore, try to count the free days of all employees, women or man, with or without children. You most certainly are up for a surprise.

3. Attractive people have greater performances. This myth is followed closely especially in the recruiting process. As people, we have the perception illusion of other starting from obvious, easy to discover criteria. Nevertheless, good-looking employees can be, owing to the fact that they succeed easier, more superficial than the ones that have to prove through other methods that they are good professionals. However, there are no studies to sustain the fact that beauty or ugliness is related to working performances. There are studies proving that good-looking people have more success chances at interviews and in career.

4. Aged people are inefficient. It’s a myth both unfair and illogical. It’s obvious that it depends very much on the person, job and even organization. But it must be stated that time and experience determines employees to become more detail oriented and very thorough going. Also they are more responsible because they found out through different situations what the consequences of errors are.

Therefore employees must be analyzed in terms of performance and not of age or aspect. Indeed, the learning rhythm lowers with age, immobilize develops, even time perception modifies, but in every organization there are jobs in which value is added through life and professional experience, strictness and not only dynamism, enthusiasm, joining the new.

5. People who failed in the previous job will do it in the present one. No one wants a loser inside the organization, people who can’t manage to succeed. However, individual performances depend on human and professional nature of the employee, as well as on the organizational environment in which they activate. A rigorous man becomes frustrated in an unorganized working place; a creative man cannot perform when he is obliged to respect thousands of procedures etc.

When you ask for recommendations regarding a potential employee, try to analyze the whole context in which that person worked before you make a final decision.

6. Advanced studies make the difference. In any job, performance is determined by two sets of abilities: the social ones which are connected to the capacity of adapting to a group, to resonate with the ones around and the professional ones which are connected to the job itself. If the professional ones can be easily learned, through internal and external trainings, the social ones are hard to learn at mature ship. University and post university studies offer theoretical base, but they don’t form any of the abilities mentioned above.

The list can be continued by yourselfers. But there is only one conclusion: in the HR measures the subjectivity abundance. And as it is greater, the efficiency of processes and decisions is smaller.