Exercises in Hiring Practices

MOBILITY Magazine, June 2004

Determining if a candidate will fit into a certain position or company culture can be more difficult than a simple interview. Morse discusses the available testing and assessment tools that will assist in finding the right employee fit.

By Jon Morse

Having fit employees means better productivity. Making sure your employees are the right fit is even more important. Whether a corporate relocation department or a supplier of a broad range of relocation services, we are all faced with the challenge of how to identify and retain top performers.

Critical management of our ?bottom line? insists that we select and develop performers who are better at opening the door to that new client, maintaining existing client relationships, finding creative ways to streamline processes and manage expenses, and providing humor and esprit de corps during high-tension projects.

Unfortunately, we all know the stress we feel when the opposite occurs: trying to teach, motivate, and coach someone who just does not get it; or waking up in the middle of the night and dreading going to work each day because we have to deal with more people problems.

Peter Drucker, the well-known author and management consultant, has said that up to 66 percent of a company?s hiring decisions will prove to be mistakes within 12 months. He lists the top three reasons for this as incompetence, incompatibility, and dishonesty.

How to Increase the Odds of Success
The typical selection and promotion process examines the candidate?s history and current situation and tries to predict future capability.

History. We typically rely on the r?sum?, education, past employment, reference checks, and background checks to fill us in on the historical background of the candidate. We also can verify that information by contracting with third-party organizations that provide data search capability with personal investigation.

Current situation. We commonly rely on interview techniques that vary in effectiveness. Perhaps we were taught by a mentor or recall questions we have been asked ourselves. The interview process is not fool-proof.

We find more ?professional interviewees? who have been well coached to adapt to the interview process. We may fall victim to our gut feeling, their appearance, and even their personality style. Further, we are not always consistent in our approach to the hiring process. Yes, we ask the same questions of all candidates (hopefully), but we are human and that first impression often will be a lasting one.

A SHRM study reported in USA Today stated, ?63 percent of all hiring decisions are made during the first 4.3 minutes of an interview.? Is it not surprising that we can base our decision on how well a candidate can present a good first impression? I am sure that has happened to most of us at least once. ?He sure fooled me! I thought that he would be really good at financial sales because of the sharp way he dressed and his smooth style. Little did I know, he couldn?t balance a checkbook.?

Future capabilities. Our goal is to look into the crystal ball and figure out how we can assess the candidate?s thinking abilities, behavioral traits, and occupational interests. Testing and job match patterns allow us to see below the tip of the iceberg and drastically increase our chances of success.

We must learn to use all available resources to increase our selection success rate. Note how the following table illustrates the increased chances of a successful job fit when we apply affordable processes.

Enhancing the Process
Implementing and enhancing the selection process involves several tools we need to become more familiar with.

Background and integrity testing. Checks are necessary in order to determine if the candidate is providing accurate information. As relocation professionals, we have access to sensitive client and/or employee information that cannot be compromised. Affordable background checks are available and recommended prior to selection.

Reuters news service reports that, ?in an effort to put more credibility into embellishing their r?sum?, some candidates are paying hackers to plug their names into a class list data base of a university they claim to have attended.?

Personality/behavior testing. For years we have been able to determine components of personality through paper instruments, but now we have online tools that can provide immediate and quite sophisticated results.

I am a big fan of instruments that measure optimism. Martin Seligman made us aware of the direct correlation between optimism and increased sales, better relationships, career advancement, and many success-related measures. His work, Learned Optimism, is a great primer to attitude measurement.

In addition, other measures such as energy level, assertiveness, sociability, manageability, decisiveness, independence, and objective judgment are critical to determining job fit. A graphical representation of current and potential employees is a quick way of helping us determine who will perform best in any particular environment.

The best tools demonstrate high reliability. This means they measure what they say they will measure time and again. Sometimes you will see this expressed as a number, with greater than .70 indicating a generally acceptable level.

Yet, personality testing does not directly address ability to do the job.

Ability testing. Samples and/or observation of work product may reveal hidden issues. By providing a scenario and asking for written or verbal feedback, we are better able to see (or not see) the candidate?s ability to perform job-specific tasks. The more realistic the simulation, the more valid the observations may be. It is important to administer these tests in a consistent manner.

Interest testing. Measuring the candidate?s occupational interest provides a long-term perspective and can have a major effect on retention. It can be argued that the greater the degree of similarity between a person?s interests and the occupational interests of those who have demonstrated success in a job, the more likely it is that there will be a successful match, which means that the person will be more satisfied, remaining on the job longer, and be motivated to perform the job better.

Most candidates are excited about the opportunity of a new position. Over time, however, that energy can wear off and we are left wondering what happened to their motivation.

I recall hiring for two accounting positions with seemingly equally qualified individuals. One was helped to move in to client development because of his interests in working with people, becoming more enterprising, and cultivating creativity. The other, whose interests were in the areas of financial/administrative, technical, and mechanical matters, continued to excel in performance and satisfaction. Both were happy in their ultimate careers; however the first was initially very unproductive because of the mismatch.

Job matching. Advances in technology also allow us to map and match current top performers with new candidates. It is no surprise when we look at the many ways we are able to be more efficient in tracking relocation expenses, determining home value, and communicating within and outside of our company. What used to be a long and paper-intensive process of building a job match pattern has now become easier with Web-based tools that provide us the ability to quickly determine the patterns of our best and worst performers for any one job function.

Working with several industry telecounseling groups, I have noticed that abilities need not be equal. Customer contact representatives need to have excellent verbal skills; however, highly developed numerical skills are not required to provide great customer service. On the other hand, vendor and supplier managers who are responsible for accounting functions and perhaps inventory management are best matched with higher numerical reasoning skills. Can you tell the difference from the interview process?

The Right Fit
Do not forget that even within a seemingly homogeneous team of 10 counselors there might be three separate job functions. For example, one counselor may focus on mailing out relocation packets, another may focus on inventory property, and another manages vendor or supplier relationships.

We probably have observed situations where one counselor was great at his job and subsequently promoted to a manager?s position. The behavioral traits of a great manager are totally different than those of a great counselor. Job matching the characteristics in each position will reduce the hard dollar losses in replacement costs and the soft dollar pain and suffering that is seen in poor morale and wasted time trying to develop someone who is not the right fit.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that each position within an organization has its own DNA. We sense it, but we try to make it simple by categorizing functions across the industry in order to speed up our selection and promotion process. A customer service representative who does well working at one company is not necessarily going to fit in at another. Unfortunately, we lose when we do not take the time to carefully document and validate the characteristics of our top performers.

I often jokingly ask, ?Have you ever made a conscious decision to hire a non-performer?? Of course, we do not. We must find the best ways to promote job fit. Can the candidate do the job? Do they want to do it? Will they fit within the company culture?  The answer is to improve the quality of interviewing, background checks, and pre-employment assessment measures. These measures must zero in on providing information about the quality of customer service, account development, and account retention. Focusing on the characteristics of top performers, using sound assessment tools to enhance historical data, and conducting the right interview will give us a positive effect in our bottom line and an employee who is more fit.

Jon Morse, MBA, is managing director for The Center For Success: Employee Selection, Development, and Workplace Wellness.  He can be reached at 877/493-7132 or e-mail Jon@TheCenterForSuccess.com.

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