Finding the right people for an organization is tricky because selections involve processes that are created by people. People have personalities, histories, and idiosyncrasies that can be unacknowledged but influential. The process of selecting new people to become part of the organization gets extremely complicated when those powerful intangibles go unrecognized.
Identifying the key requirements that are necessary for success in the position is essential to select the right applicant. Unfortunately, the subjective selection systems that are in common use today do little to pick the candidate who will be efficient and productive in the role. Relying on interpersonal chemistry is a very poor way to find the right person for the position.
How Not to Pick Employees
Back in June Google announced Google’s peculiar interview process did not predict the success of their candidates. As a result, Google has gone back to using more structured behavioral interviews.
A close friend of mine recently applied for a technical position transfer within a Fortune 100 computer software corporation. Interested in shifting from supporting one product to another, he was first screened by a knowledge assessment and then invited to interview with representatives of the new team. Rather than giving him exemplary problems to solve or questions about his experiences with aspects of the new role, during that interview he was asked to provide obscure definitions of terms and textbook-like process descriptions. As a problem-solver, critical thinking is his forte and he justifiably wondered what memorization had to do with predicting his performance in this role.
The goal of the selection process is to find employees who have a high probability for success in their role. Skills, motivation, and work ethic are usually far more important than personality or personal interests that are shared with the hiring manager. Unfortunately a candidate’s charm tends to overwhelm an interviewer’s objectivity in most selection processes.
Selection Processes must be Standardized but Adaptable
When the selection practices are systematized they increase the probability of providing reliable and valid assessments. The goal should be to find applicants who match the qualities commonly exhibited by the best examples of that role and the culture of the organization. But, because organizations, positions, and people are all unique, there must be room within the structure that also allows for customization. Having a variety of progressive steps with standardized scoring for each one will help to provide consistency and neutrality. That will result in better selections which will then improve the overall performance of the department and the company. For most jobs, the review of the candidate should include a look at the applicant’s past, present and forecasts of the future.
Most Employment Evaluations are Too Subjective
“The best predictor of future is past behavior.” That is the rationale for collecting and evaluating resumes as the first step in the selection process. The brief account of work experience and qualifications in the resume has become obligatory initial criterion for selection. Unfortunately, too often, inflexible algorithms are applied without human judgment and that can result in uninspired personnel selections. Absolute reliance on keywords rather than essential meanings means that creative, atypical, visionary candidates are often overlooked. We all need to be aware of the algorithms that are applied by ATS (Applicant Tracking System) software and find a balance between content and scanner rules. Employers and candidates should both be aware of the limits of these systems.
Along with the resume, many companies also ask applicants for examples of prior work. In my experience, they don’t have any criteria to evaluate the candidate’s portfolio and I wonder if it is more about quantity of work than it is about quality. Without knowing the purpose of the sample and the instructions from the client, the effectiveness of each piece is impossible to assess.
Adding Balance to the Selection Process
The biggest problem with hiring assessments is that decisions are most often very subjective. Evaluations of candidates are colored by the hiring manager’s preconceptions, assumptions, and personal compatibility with the applicant rather than matching criteria that are based on a detached analysis of the job requirements.
Traditional interviews are the most common way to look at the candidate. Most people consider themselves to be “great judges of character” and trust their own subjective assessments so there is a lot of reliance on this method of evaluating applicants for a job. Unfortunately, studies consistently show that no one is very good at understanding other people, especially under such artificial and brief circumstances. As a supplementary assessment tool, interviews can be helpful, but they are relatively poor at predicting future worker performance, especially when they are used along with a resume alone. First impressions are almost always very unreliable.
Behavioral Interviews are also designed as a review the candidate’s history. It is assumed that, by asking about incidents that the applicant has handled in the past, the employer can make predictions about how they will perform in the future. The downside to this approach is that it tends to be highly subjective as well and will be impacted by the biases of the interviewer and the comfort and communication skills of the applicant. To be most helpful in assessing candidates, the questions in the behavioral interview must be scored with objective criteria and the questions must be tied to specific information but are flexible enough that there can be follow up and clarification. Without some standardization they are prone to the same subjectivity of traditional interviews.
My best example of standardization incorporated into an interpersonal evaluation is the oral assessment process at the US State Department for a Foreign Service Officer position. Some time ago I took the assessment in three successive years. The State Department says that their scoring is well defined and the consistency of my own results from year to year seems to support that claim.
When they are well-designed and aligned with the needs of the position, assessment tests can help overcome the tendencies of other methods to be terribly subjective. There are several types of useful pre-employment tests:
Personality Tests
To be helpful, a personality test must be designed so that candidates cannot influence the outcome of the test. For a personality test to have any value in the selection process, it must be standardized and have validity in the job context. It must also be reliable so that the results are consistent across contexts.
An objective personality test is useful in creating a candidate profile that can be compared with top performers in the job role because it is intuitively obvious that, in general, salespeople tend to have similar personalities as a group and so do accountants. Candidates whose personalities are similar to successful occupants of the profession have a higher probability of being successful themselves. A relevant personality test also provides a great focus for the interview conversation with the applicant.
Knowledge Assessments
Especially when the job requirements are quite technical, a knowledge assessment may contribute powerfully to the assessment of a candidate. Great examples are when the employee must be fluent in a language or have specific foundational job skills in order to be trained on the job. It is common for engineering and computer specialties to administer baseline exams as qualifications for employment.
Cognitive Ability Measurements
For jobs that require high levels of intelligence or the ability to quickly master complicated information, cognitive ability tests can be very helpful. These tests are designed to measure the degree to which the applicant can solve new problems and apply reasoning to make efficient decisions. When the job includes judgments involving complicated information, it may be helpful to include a cognitive ability test in addition to looking at the applicant’s experience and personality.
Creating a Useful Selection Matrix
Assessments based on a single criterion are far less effective than processes that include several well-defined elements and each of these are related to the requirements of the role and will help to predict performance. The goal is to quickly and efficiently find an employee who will be “good enough” to meet the needs of the organization. Gather enough information to make a good decision but avoid spending fruitless time re-interviewing or asking applicants for unnecessary materials. Hiring is time and resource intensive—a well-defined and valid process helps.
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