Recruitment
Behavioral science for better hiring decisions.
Hiring is a decision problem before it is a sourcing problem. We combine behavioral science with hands-on recruitment to help you choose better people, and help the right people choose you.
The behavioral recruitment unit of the Center for Behavioral Decisions.
Sister unit to BeHR People & Organization. BeRecruit finds, assesses and secures talent using behavioral science.
Most recruitment is built on a hidden assumption: that interviewers can spot talent, and that candidates act rationally when they apply, negotiate and accept. Decades of research say otherwise. Hiring managers fall for first impressions, confident talkers and people who remind them of themselves. Candidates drop out of good processes because of friction, uncertainty or a clumsy offer.
BeRecruit starts where traditional recruiters stop. We still source, screen and close candidates. But we also redesign the decision itself: what you measure, how you measure it, who decides, in what order, and with what information. The result is a process that is harder to fool, fairer by design, and measured against one outcome that matters: whether the people you hire succeed and stay.
Fewer mis-hires, faster decisions, and evidence you can show your board.
A process that judges you on what predicts the job, and tells you where you stand.
Hiring is a decision. Decisions have biases.
A CV, a 45-minute conversation and a gut feeling. That is how most organizations make a decision worth one to two years of salary. The problem is rarely a lack of candidates. It is the way people judge them, and the way candidates respond to the process.
Problems we help solve
Design the decision, not just the search.
We apply the same logic CBD uses to change behavior anywhere: understand how people really decide, then redesign the environment around it. In recruitment, that means five principles.
We turn each role into 4 to 6 observable competencies, agreed and weighted before anyone sees a CV. This blocks the most common failure: deciding what matters after you have met someone you like.
We favor the tools with the strongest evidence for predicting job performance: structured interviews, work samples, job knowledge tests and validated psychometrics. Large meta-analyses (for example Sackett and colleagues, 2022) rank structured interviews roughly twice as predictive as unstructured ones. We use unstructured conversation for rapport, not for scoring.
Each assessor scores each competency separately, in writing, before the debrief. Scores are combined mechanically first; discussion adjusts them second. This cuts noise and stops the loudest voice from setting the anchor. It follows the “mediating assessments” logic from Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein’s work on noise.
We design job ads, application flows, communication and offers the way we design any nudge: remove friction, reduce uncertainty, use timely reminders, set clear defaults and frame the offer so the right candidate says yes.
We track what happens after the hire: 90-day retention, time to productivity, performance ratings and manager satisfaction. Then we feed that data back into what we assess. Most recruiters are paid on placement. We are accountable for prediction.
We do not ask you to trust your gut less. We build a process that tells you when it is right.
How we work with you
Senior and C-level hiring with structured assessment, independent panels and reference checks designed to surface evidence, not endorsements.
End-to-end hiring for professional roles or large intakes, with debiased screening and candidate journeys built to keep strong applicants in the process.
A diagnostic of your current hiring: where bias enters, where candidates drop out, how much your process varies between managers, and what it costs you.
We rebuild your process for you to run in-house: competency frameworks, interview guides, scorecards, work samples, decision rules and offer design.
Practical workshops that teach managers how bias shows up in their own judgments, and how to run a structured interview that is still human.
Areas of expertise
The specialist capabilities behind every engagement. We combine them for the role, the organization and the market.
Beyond traditional recruitment
Traditional recruiters optimize for speed to shortlist. We optimize for the quality of the decision at the end of it.
From decision design to a hire who stays
Every step answers one question: will this help you make a better decision?
What changes when hiring is designed well
Questions we hear
Does a structured process make interviews cold or robotic?+
No. Structure applies to what you assess and how you score it. The conversation stays human, and candidates often find it fairer and clearer.
Do you replace our recruiters or hiring managers?+
No. We can run hiring end to end, or build the system and train your team to run it.
Is this slower than a normal agency?+
Setup takes more thought at the start. Decisions afterward are usually faster, because the panel knows exactly what it is looking for and how to decide.
Do you use AI in selection?+
We use technology where it improves consistency and experience, and we test tools for bias before using them. People make the final decision.
How is BeRecruit different from BeHR?+
BeHR designs the organization, its culture and its people systems. BeRecruit focuses on bringing the right people into it. They work together when you need both.
Better hiring starts with better decisions.
Tell us about the role you are filling, or the hiring problem you keep running into. We will show you where the decision can be improved.