Text by Edward Van Houtte & Iulia Cioca Evidence-based HR (EBHR) is a way to make people decisions in organizations. It’s a day-to-day practice of using the best available evidence and looking at it with a critical eye, to inform HR decisions. By practicing EBHR, your decisions are more likely to achieve the results you expect from them. Questioning Your Evidence What about you and your last decision at work? Are you confident the process and the outcome were good? What if there’s a better way of making HR decisions that makes it more likely to actually get the results you expect? Let’s learn to expect the unexpected. You might be thinking: “So, what’s wrong with my decision-making methods? I’m pretty happy with how most of my decisions turn out.” You might be, but researchers have looked at how decisions are made in organizations, and their conclusions are not so optimistic, namely: decision-makers use whatever evidence they have at hand, without asking themselves where it comes from

A happy employee is a productive employee, right? While it sounds logical, scientific studies show that while job satisfaction is important for employee well-being and other outcomes, it is only weakly related to performance. This may come as a surprise, but it illustrates why scie ntific research is so valuable in HR decision-making. In this article, we’ll outline four straightforward steps to help you find and use scientific research in HR decisions, along with some useful, free resources to help you along the way. Obviously, science isn’t just lab rats and cool laser experiments. It’s a way of thinking that aims to collect information in a systematic way, so that we can explain and predict things that happen around us. Looking at science is relevant for your HR job Scientific research in fields like management, organizations, and psychology sheds light on HR topics such as: Recruitment methods that best predict the performance of a new hire Characteristics of training that make it m