Most hiring decisions come down to a gut decision.

According to Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, however, this process is extremely flawed and there's a much better way.

Kahneman learned in his days as a psychological evaluator for the Israeli Army how hard it is to judge people by intuition. The army's interview procedure was "almost useless for predicting the future success of recruits," he writes in his book Thinking, Fast And Slow.

So the young officer designed a better evaluation system, working from the insights of psychologist Paul Meehl, who argued that simple statistical rules are superior to intuitive judgments.

What he came up with was so controversial it almost caused a mutiny. Kahneman asked interviewers to put aside personal judgments and limit interviews to a series of factual questions meant to generate a score on six separate personality traits.

A few months later, it became clear that Kahneman's systematic approach was a vast improvement over gut decisions. It was so effective that the army would use his exact method for decades to come.

Why you should care is because this superior method can be copied by any organization — and really, by anyone facing a hard decision.

Kahneman says as much in Thinking, Fast And Slow:



Kahneman's book also discusses the cognitive failings of financial advisorsamateur investorspundits, and pretty much everyone

DON'T MISS: The 25 Hardest Companies For Job Interviews >