Do You Trust Your Ni?

[redacted]

I would hire the person my gut told me to, no question about it. I wouldn't think twice.

But yeah, that's not necessarily Ni -- it's some combination of Sensing and Intuition, not really having anything to do with introversion or extroversion.

 

[onemoretime]

Damn thing has a tendency to give out on me since I cut the wrong way playing football a few years ago. The pain...

 

[JustHer]

I'd hire the one I have a good feeling about, although if this was an actual situation then I'm sure the contextual factors would affect that (like how critical are these credentials? What do their references say about them? Why do I get such a bad feeling about this candidate?)

 

[rav3n]

I fully trust my Ni in personal situations but when it comes to work, hear it but double check it. It also depends on how closely this employee works with me. The closer, the more I listen to Ni since not only talent and skill matter but the ability to work in a complementary way. Who needs employee stress?

 

[Such Irony]

"You've been interviewing candidates for a job.
One of them has all the credentials, and scored the highest on all the company-defined criteria for the job.
Another one of them was pretty good but not in the same league.
You have a sense about the high-scorer, though, that he's bad news, and that the "so-so" one will work out well.
You can't point to anything that's led you to this conclusion, you can't justify your belief, but you have this sense just the same."

1. Do you trust this unjustifiable idea?

Yes, I often have strong hunches about people that are hard to ignore.


2. Which one would you hire?

I'd be really tempted to hire the so-so candidate but I wouldn't feel comfortable just hiring until I have more solid evidence to back up the claim.
Besides what if candidate #1 asks why he or she wasn't hired, then what do you say? You could be in for a potential lawsuit.

What I'd do, is invite both candidates back for an additional interview, tailoring the questions in such a way as to see if my hunch about the first candidate was right. Reference checks before hiring can be very useful too. Then I might be better able to tell if my bad feeling about candidate #1 is just due to some personal quark of mine or if there is a good solid reason.

3. How certain are you of your decision?

I dunno, maybe about 80%? Certainty would most likely increase upon additional interviewing and reference checks but would never be 100%. Because I think its absolutely impossible to be 100% certain but you can get pretty close to that.

 

[highlander]

I fully trust my Ni in personal situations but when it comes to work, hear it but double check it. It also depends on how closely this employee works with me. The closer, the more I listen to Ni since not only talent and skill matter but the ability to work in a complementary way. Who needs employee stress?

Thinking about all of this raises a question in my mind. The thing is, I very much to trust my Ni. That being said, particularly in hiring situations, where you are forced to make judgments about people, that they and you are stuck with, I become very cautious. Hiring the wrong people causes pain - for me and for others.

So it causes me to wonder why this particular situation or scenario is different than any other scenario where you need to make a decision. Is because it is a decision about people? Is it because it is an important decision? Is it about particular risks with this specific type of situation? Is it something else? Or is it no different.

 

[rav3n]

Thinking about all of this raises a question in my mind. The thing is, I very much to trust my Ni. That being said, particularly in hiring situations, where you are forced to make judgments about people, that they and you are stuck with, I become very cautious. Hiring the wrong people causes pain - for me and for others.

I agree that it affects everyone but when it comes to hiring where you're not working closely with the other person, any personality conflicts between the two of you are less significant than other employees. Can't speak for other ENTJs but I'm murder on someone who doesn't perform to the level I need. They don't have to do it exactly my way but they'd better get to the end goal in the most efficient and productive way and be prepared to get the hell outta' my way when they're not up to the task.

So it causes me to wonder why this particular situation or scenario is different than any other scenario where you need to make a decision. Is because it is a decision about people? Is it because it is an important decision? Is it about particular risks with this specific type of situation? Is it something else? Or is it no different.

When it comes to personal, the only ramifications to making a mistake are solely mine. The buck stops at me.

When it comes to business, the company, division and myself, will all feel the effects of a bad hire hence the need for verification, as well as taking into consideration how difficult I can be to work closely with. Most of my previous staff were far more relaxed personality types than I am so if something didn't feel right as it relates to me, this doesn't mean this potential star couldn't be a good fit with the rest.

 

[Zarathustra]

Maybe I'm just crazy, but I believe in the listen, keep-an-open-mind, attempt-to-verify technique.

It goes something like this:

1. Listen to my intuition.
2. Keep an open mind about what it's saying.
3. Attempt to verify.

Hence, when I'm interviewing somebody, I generally take over an hour, and I generally vet them very thoroughly.

My intuition is a great scout, and I am extremely open-minded when it comes to listening to what it has to say, but I believe I'd be doing myself a great disservice if I were to listen to it without doing everything I could to verify its conclusions more concretely.

I quickly got a good reputation for my interviewing abilities, and, as a result, when I was 25, I was put in charge of recruiting for the research department at my company.

 

[highlander]

Maybe I'm just crazy, but I believe in the listen, keep-an-open-mind, attempt-to-verify technique.

It goes something like this:

1. Listen to my intuition.
2. Keep an open mind about what it's saying.
3. Attempt to verify.

Hence, when I'm interviewing somebody, I generally take over an hour, and I generally vet them very thoroughly.

My intuition is a great scout, and I am extremely open-minded when it comes to listening to what it has to say, but I believe I'd be doing myself a great disservice if I were to listen to it without doing everything I could to verify its conclusions more concretely.

I quickly got a good reputation for my interviewing abilities, and, as a result, when I was 25, I was put in charge of recruiting for the research department at my company.

Same here with thoroughness. Recruiting knows not to schedule 30 or 45 minutes for me (the standard). They schedule an hour because they know these things. I guess I've hired a lot of people over the years. Track record is pretty good. The times I've made mistakes are when I was not thorough enough (and thought someone else was) or I let my personal enthusiasm for a particular candidate override feedback from others that possess good judgment.

 

[twinkiesmom]

I am high Ni, would listen to my Ni, hire the other candidate, and stand by my decision 100%.

This just happened to me in real life. I sat in a roomful of people and gave the lone negative opinion against an amiable candidate that they all liked.

My Ni is an excellent truth detector....Now they realize they should have listened to me.

(Note: I would not have been able to make this call as a 20- or even a 30-year old...This confidence in my Ni has only come with middle age.)

 

[King sns]

"You've been interviewing candidates for a job.
One of them has all the credentials, and scored the highest on all the company-defined criteria for the job.
Another one of them was pretty good but not in the same league.
You have a sense about the high-scorer, though, that he's bad news, and that the "so-so" one will work out well.
You can't point to anything that's led you to this conclusion, you can't justify your belief, but you have this sense just the same."


My answers:
1. Yes
2. The one I sensed would work out.
3. 100%

1. Do you trust this unjustifiable idea? No!
2. Which one would you hire? After much ado, probably the one that I sensed would work out.
3. How certain are you of your decision? 5%

And for the record, the one I sensed would work out would probably not work out.

 

[Arclight]

Sometimes..

I certainly trust what comes out of perspective shifting.
I mostly trust my unexplainable insight into others.
But Ni can't do it alone. I have trust what is also logical, what is evident and what is comparable both physically and metaphysically.
Patterns emerge. Ni helps with the X factor.

 

[miss fortune]

I'm going to agree with ShortnSweet there

My Ni isn't just untrustworthy, it's frequently misleading and EVIL I'd have to go through a long list of reasons for and against each candidate and talk to others for evaluating purposes before deciding though... I'm not going to trust my Ni there

 

[Walking Tourist]

My Ni is something that I look upon warily. I don't think that I trust it all that much. It is frequently right, however. I have to learn how to embrace my (tertiary) Ni...


My Ni isn't just untrustworthy, it's frequently misleading and EVIL I'd have to go through a long list of reasons for and against each candidate and talk to others for evaluating purposes before deciding though... I'm not going to trust my Ni there [/QUOTE]

 

[esfpmary]

In this case of hiring when I get a bad/good vibe about someone I will do research to verify my gut feeling before I make final conclusions. I cannot go by my gut feel (Ni) alone, I need to back it up with more concrete information. I know this because Ni (tertiary) can go over the top and needs to be held in check and stay real.

For the most part my just knowing doesn't let me down often.

 

[animenagai]

I'm starting to doubt if my Ni is as strong as I say it is now, this seems fairly alien to me. I have hunches and gut feelings, but there was never one I couldn't explain. I can at least tell you why I have a bad feeling about this guy. I can at least say he looked insincere or uncomfortable etc. Does this ring true to Ni's, or am I explaining something quite different here? How often do you guys get there unexplainable instincts? Maybe I'm describing Ni just in a less developed way?

 

[mmhmm]

in the work environment i trust it 100%.
personal life---i don't know the percentage, it's not 100% though...

 

[KDude]

^ I'd say I have a similar process.....to me it's FiNe....I'm not entirely sure how Ni would work with me because I don't think it's a top function in my brain. Generally, credentials and criteria is used to justify the FiNe vibes, so I start with the whole impression & then break it down (I don't "score" people)....inferior Te, you know.

Same here. I'd also draw upon the past, I guess (Si?). Although not in a static way. It'd be coupled with Fi, making some associations with their behavior/pattern recognition. If I had to justify it. I've been right with my impression with people that I've warned friends about before. So whatever function it is, it has worked. At least on my part. In one case, no one listened, and a friend got robbed for it. It's also funny how audacious I can be every once in awhile. I was visiting a friend's place once, and met some guy there, and it wasn't long before I started hinting to my friend to get him to leave somehow. My friend is more of a people person and just deals with stuff as it comes and kept him around. He finally did leave though.. and it turned out that the guy tried to get fresh with my friend's wife in private (and she just wanted to tell me.. she was scared to tell her husband. He might have killed him). The audacious part though is I'll tell someone who they should have at their own house before anything happens. That's very rare though.

 

[Random Ness]

There's no way I'd choose the less qualified one over the more qualified one just because I feel like it. I'd probably think that feeling was just paranoia and subtle biases so I'd ignore it and hire the the obviously better candidate.

 

[OrangeAppled]

I'm starting to think this is why I don't get jobs easily....I look fine on paper, but I give off bad first impressions (too.....odd). My ESFP sister is the opposite - her job history reveals a flaky nature, but her personal charm secures her the job.