Do you have a rigorous process for selecting the very best?  Do you still rely on the tired old triumvirate of interviews, CV’s and references?  If you do, it is likely that you will be passing up a competitive advantage to organisations that recruit scientifically.  Further, are you prepared for the “war for talent” that will commence when the recovery is in full swing?

You might be forgiven for presuming that in the depths of a worldwide financial crisis that recruitment strategies and practices could not be any less important.  However, many organisations are using the recession as an opportunity to examine selection and assessment procedures.  What is more, some companies realise that now is the time where careful employee selection is of paramount importance.

• If you are only going to recruit a handful of employees this year – better make sure they are as good as they can be.  Does your selection procedure ensure that you select the cream of the crop?  Do you know why you use the methods of selection that you do or are you simply following old habits?

• If the need for recruitment in many industries has fallen.  It makes it the ideal time to examine how, why and when you recruit.  This will make your business better prepared to take advantage of the upturn in economic fortunes.

• If you are recruiting, given the recent round of worldwide redundancies, it is likely that any position made available will be inundated with enquiries.  All the more important that there is a system in place for identifying the very best out of a long list of applicants.

• Many organisations are engaging in “internal recruitment” drives as they seek to build project teams from the people within the business to initiate change projects or lead on the innovation of new products, processes or services.  Such that… recruitment processes are as much about identifying key talent in the outside world as finding the best people who are already within your business.

In this blog I will briefly propose a model for employee selection that organisations can implement to ensure that they recruit the very best people, fairly, accurately, systematically and with a close eye on the strategic needs of the business. The model is intended as a guide – not a set of rules!

Figure 1: A process model for recruiting top talent

• Organisational Needs Analysis

How do the recruits fit into the strategic needs of the business?

Few organisations seek to align their strategy with their recruitment processes.  Therefore, the first stage in this process model for recruiting top talent is to identify where and why the business is heading and plan recruitment accordingly.  Do you have the right mix of people to achieve your strategic aims?  Will you need a specific set of technical skills or qualifications, industry experience or personality disposition to tackle the strategic goals?  Spend some time talking with key stakeholders within the firm to get an appreciation of how recruitment could help.

• Job Analysis

Do you really understand the job you are recruiting for?

The second stage in designing a quality recruitment process, is to ensure that you understand as much about the job as possible.  If the job already exists – interview current job holders and the people that the incoming person would work with.  Try to identify the key aspects of the job that can then be matched to the skills and competencies that would make for a high performing employee.  If the role is newly created – try to figure out the primary elements of the job role.  The key to this stage is effortful consideration of what the job entails so that the best people can be matched to the role.

• Identify Selection Criteria

What would a successful candidate look like?

In general, we try to identify what a high performing, top-talent recruit would be like.  What are the important characteristics for the person?  What skills, knowledge and abilities should they possess?

It is important to deduce the key criteria for selection before candidates are sought or interviewed.  Otherwise, there is a tendency to pick the best looking person from the people who present themselves for interview – rather than ensuring that all the key skills and attributes are covered.  Successful businesses are rarely satisfied merely hiring the best of the people they can find the first time round – they push to find the right person for the role.  That might mean keeping the job open for months at a time.

• Attracting Candidates

Where are you finding your candidates?

Having identified by job analysis the key elements of the job and then considered what the “right” person would look like, it is time to start advertising the position.  This can be an expensive process – so make sure you are looking for the right person in the right place.  Alongside an advert in the newspaper, would it make sense to advertise in a trade journal or within a university department?

• Choose Selection Method

Using the tired old trio of interviews, CV’s and references?  Do they work?  How well?  What else might we consider?

When considering the methods we might employ to select people there is one extremely key concept:  how good is the method at predicting real life performance on the job?  We all know people who would interview very well – but for whom we would not want to work with or for!  Consider the diagram in Figure 2.  This diagram lists in rank order the extent to which different methods are predictive of job performance.  What may be a surprise is how poor references and casual “unstructured” interviews are!

Figure 2.  The relationship between selection methods and job performance

Note: The figures in brackets refer to the correlation between each selection method and job performance – where 0 would indicates there to be no relation and 1 would indicate there to be a perfect relationship.

Assessment Centres – often used for senior positions.  Effectively these are extended selection processes that can take as long as two days, but would normally last for a few hours.  They usually combine multiple selection methods (e.g. cognitive ability test, personality measure, interviews and a team-working exercise).  The general rule when designing an assessment centre is that each key competency of a potential candidate is assessed by at least two different methods.  For example if we were to assess the interpersonal skills of a candidate we could use evidence from an interview as well as the results of personality measure.  Carefully designed Assessment Centres are amongst the most effective methods of identifying top talent.  Figure 3 provides an example of an Assessment Centre grid that looks at the relationship between the competency required for the job (the row across the top) in relation to the selection methods (the column to the left).  The “X’s” refer to how “good” each selection method is at predicting the competency.

Figure 3.  An example of an Assessment Centre Competency x Selection Method grid

Cognitive Ability – these tests measure the ability to think quickly and accurately as well as the ability to solve problems.  Essentially, these tests attempt to measure “intelligence”.  The studies suggest that the more mentally demanding a job role, the better suited a cognitive ability test will be for identifying talent.

Structured Interviews – are a form of interviewing where the intention is to ask each candidate exactly the same set of questions in the same conditions.  In some structured interviews, the interviewer will not even ask follow up questions.  Generally, the more strict the structure of an interview, the better the chances of predicting talent.

Personality Measures – are a method for finding out about the disposition and characteristics of the individual.  Is the candidate a calm, open-minded extravert?  Or perhaps an easily-stressed, stubborn introvert?

Unstructured Interviews – these are the classic “get to know you” interviews that 99% of organisations use to identify talent (despite the evidence that this method is not very accurate nor successful!)

References – Nowadays the references people provide contain so little information about the candidate, that they do not provide much benefit to the recruitment process.  Reference checking after selection procedure is essential – to check the account given by the candidate.

Years of Education – Does your company insist on recruiting people with a long educational history?  There is no doubt that a good education is never a waste.  However, have you discarded candidates on the basis of education, who with appropriate training could have been your top talent of the future?

Graphology – the analysis of handwriting to predict job performance is big business in some countries (and expensive too!) yet bears almost no relationship to how good someone is going to be in a job.

• Administer Tests and Selection Methods

Use selection methods to examine candidate suitability

Professionalism is the key – remember you are “advertising” yourself to the candidate as much as they are doing the same to you.  Make sure Assessment Centres are run to a high standard, that any testing conducted is administered professionally and that interviews are courteous and well-considered.  In searching for top talent, you will likely be competing for the services of good people with other organisations.  Does your recruitment process make a good impression?  The research suggests that organisations that use exhaustive selection methods are perceived by job candidates as more professional and better places to work.

• Interpreting Results

Now what?

You may have gone through the trouble of gathering a lot of information on candidates.  What do you do with all the data?  You might have information from a cognitive ability test, a personality measure, interview data and references.  How is it to be interpreted?  This is where good quality selection procedures often fall down.  The common causes of failure at this stage are 1) a rush to make a decision quickly, meaning that the data are not analysed thoughtfully, 2) the tendency to put too much emphasis on one source of data (e.g. the interview or cognitive ability test results) so that the decision taken has not drawn upon all the available evidence and 3) the tendency to have already decided on who the “best” candidate is and therefore hire them anyway whilst ignoring the recruitment process.  To avoid these failures, draw up a grid of the key attributes (what you decided upon when you considered the Identify Selection Criteria stage) and then systematically look at the evidence from all the selection methods against each candidate.  Try to avoid coming to a conclusion for as long as you can.

• Evaluation

Was it worth it?

It always amazes me how organisations can spend so much time, money and effort to select people and then never check to see if the recruitment system worked?  Hold a review session to look at how the new hire worked out.  IF you nare recruiting large volumes of people it is possible to statistically analyse the extent to which any new process works better than the existing recruitment procedures.

Conclusion…

The recession is in full swing and many organisations will not be recruiting to the extent they had been only a few years ago.  In this article I have argued that the crisis means that this is the perfect time to analyse how you recruit people.  Furthermore, the simple process model introduced in this article provides a template that organisations can employ to make more strategic their recruitment processes.  The questions being… does your recruitment process “Sell your business”, are you sure that you recruit only the very best from those available and have you prepared for the rush for top talent that will accompany the upturn in our economic fortunes?

Mark has helped organisations like Sony Music Entertainment, Johnson & Johnson and Anheuser-Busch InBev recruit top talent.  He is responsible for training MSc Psychologists in how to recruit effectively as part of the Organisational and Managerial Psychology Specialist Masters programme at Manchester Business School.

See you soon

Mark Batey MSc PhD CPsychol

Co-Director of the Psychometrics at Work Research Group

Manchester Business School, UK

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