Qu'est-ce que Overconfidence Bias ?

Definition

Overconfidence bias is the tendency for people to overestimate the accuracy of their own judgements, predictions and abilities. In recruitment, it manifests as excessive confidence in one's ability to read candidates accurately from an interview — the belief that "I know a good candidate when I see one" despite substantial evidence that unstructured human judgement is a poor predictor of job performance.

In practice

Research by psychologist Daniel Kahneman and others demonstrates that experienced recruiters are not significantly more accurate at predicting candidate success than novices — and that informal interviews have very low predictive validity (r ≈ 0.15-0.20 for unstructured interviews). Yet most recruiters rate their own judgement as excellent. Overconfidence leads to underutilising structured tools (psychometric tests, work samples, structured scoring) that significantly improve prediction accuracy. It also drives post-hoc rationalisation of intuitive decisions. Building humility into the process — requiring documented behavioural evidence for all hiring decisions, tracking predictive accuracy of past hires, and using decision aids — is the most effective counter.

Key takeaway

Trust the process more than the gut: structured assessment methods consistently outperform even experienced recruiters' unstructured intuition in predicting who will succeed.