Powering better people decisions across the Gulf.
From the evidence to the decision — research summarised and sourced, for the people who build organisations.
Latest Decision Briefs
Personality tests are sold for hiring and for team workshops. Do they predict how people will perform at work, and should we use MBTI or DISC?
Personality measures carry some real information about job performance, less than the headline figures suggest, and applicants can shift the rankings by faking. A structured interview added prediction beyond a questionnaire, and a short job-related history form did about as well as most traits. We found no openly licensed study showing that MBTI or DISC predict job performance, so they should not decide who gets hired unless a provider can show that evidence.
Read→Someone you trust puts forward a candidate: a relative, a friend's son, a request from a senior colleague. Should you hire people you know, and where does a referral become wasta?
Our recommendation, from limited and mostly qualitative evidence: let a connection bring you a candidate, never decide the hire. Interview studies from Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia describe one pattern: the connected person usually gains, the organisation sometimes gains speed or a favour returned, and the cost falls on people outside the network, in hiring, development and appraisals. None of the studies measures how people hired through connections perform.
Read→A senior role is open. You can promote someone you know, or bring in an experienced outsider. Which is the better bet?
Decide by what the role has to change, not by where the candidate comes from. Insiders are easier to judge and easier to over-rate; outsiders brought change when they brought experience of that change; and growing leaders from within depends on a pipeline that the Saudi universities studied did not have.
Read→What we don’t do
We don’t sell software, run certifications, or publish anything we can’t source. When the evidence is thin the brief says so, and when a study sits behind a paywall we cite it rather than reprint it.
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