On the Demise of Hunch-based Hiring

Posted on October 20, 2012 by Heather Haas

“Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.”

- Clifford Stoll, astronomer and pioneer of the Internet

While in general we applaud the current rise in the use of data in hiring, we are also prompted to repeat this caution: a fool with a tool is still a fool.

This was brought to our attention in a recent Wall Street Journal article, “Meet the New Boss: Big Data”, with the sub-headline: “Companies Trade in Hunch-based Hiring for Computer Modeling.” The article explored the rise in the use of assessments and algorithms in hiring.

We believe that using valid data to inform hiring is good; totally eliminating human judgment is not. In contrast to some hiring tools in the marketplace, Predictive Index^® hasn’t minimized human judgment. Predictive Index isn’t just “software;” it is a brain tool. In addition to software, we provide accurate data, PLUS a model of education and support that helps clients make better decisions. We don’t replace the need for people to make smart decisions based on the all the data available to them.

Here are three other key points to keep in mind about Predictive Index in the larger context of assessments.

PI^® is EEOC compliant because it only measures personality factors that are job related. Attitude, where you live and alcohol use (which are mentioned in the WSJ article) are not measured by PI. Thus, it’s safer from a risk perspective.
PI is job and company specific. That is, a Call Center Representative at one company isn’t necessarily exactly the same job as one with the same title at another company. Any assessment that takes a one-size-fits all approach to benchmarking success in a job is not as accurate as PI.
PI isn’t just about job fit. Indeed it’s important that we hire the right people into jobs. However, PI provides a window into team fit and organization/culture fit. Our ability to add value at all three of those levels sets PI apart from other tools.

What are your thoughts about the rise in the use of data in hiring? Contact me.

3 Ways to Be ‘Irreplaceable’ HR!

Posted on September 5, 2012 by Aszure Gray

In my role at ADVISA, I spend a lot of time with CEOs and Human Resource Directors – two potentially powerful leadership roles that contribute to an organization’s level of success. An article recently on MSN about being an “irreplaceable” employee prompted me to offer three tips specifically for HR Directors to become even more effective as leadership partners with CEOs:

1. Know what matters to your CEO.

Understanding what s/he considers to prime objectives for the year, and beyond, can put you in a position to support them. For example, in a conversation recently with a CEO of a large law firm, he told me that his goal is to grow the firm. He wants to hire people who will develop new business as well as bring a solution to him when they recognize an issue, not just bring him complaints. “I need to know that they are ‘go-getters and problem-solvers’ We can teach them aspects of the business we need them to know. But, we can’t make them proactive when they’re not,” he said. Being aware of these goals, and acting on them when it comes to talent acquisition, is what will make the difference for his HR department. (How can HR identify candidates who are more likely to problem-solve and develop business for the CEO? A behavioral assessment, like Predictive Index^®, can provide the data needed.)

2. It’s All About Productivity: Quantify It!

Measuring productivity or success in a role can appear difficult at first for non-sales positions. “Am I doing a good job?” is a question many ask and the answer is often left to subjectivity when it doesn’t have to be. For example: if you are responsible for acquiring talent in your organization, track the turnover or the productivity of the candidates you’ve brought into the company. Are there departments where the turnover is exceptionally high? Be proactive in looking into the problem and identifying a solution. And, tracking data gives you the opportunity to identify what is working well so that you can duplicate it in other areas. (Do you have a “turnover problem”? Whether it’s departmental or company-wide, consider talking to ADVISA about how Predictive Index can help you identify the reason AND create a solution.)

3. Be the Expert AND Be Open to Change

CEOs will often look to HR to help them understand personality assessments and what they can potentially bring to their business in terms of improving talent acquisition; developing management skills and improving communication. You can’t possibly know everything about every tool available! But you can become the expert about what’s important to your organization. Whether it be increasing sales; reducing turnover; improving communication or employee engagement, fully understanding the problem at hand positions HR to seek solutions. When looking at various solutions, you will know what is a reasonable option for your company and what isn’t. (If you are not comfortable presenting a new tool or solution, allow the solution provider to be the presenter instead. Do you have an issue that you need help resolving? Let’s talk about it!)

Human Resources serves a unique and often unappreciated role in many organizations by being responsible for its lifeblood – its people. As an HR professional, you can take your organization to new heights and new levels of profitability. What company and CEO doesn’t want that? It’s just a matter of considering what’s important from their perspective, in addition to yours, and taking action. Sometimes that can be a bit overwhelming. Where do you begin? ADVISA is here to help.

Taking a fresh look at your screening process

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Dana Harrison

We’re in the middle of a project with a large company who has engaged us to help reduce first-year turnover through improving their applicant screening process. The company has many complexities to it and our work is focused on discoveries and recommendations that are specific to them. However, the general structure of this project is applicable for any review of a screening process. Consider the following 3 questions when thinking about the strength of your process:

1) Are we clearly and comprehensively capturing the expectations of a position? Are all relevant parties in agreement about what is expected of an employee in a position? Are the expectations documented? Are we clear about the overall expectations as well as the “dealbreakers” that must be explored during hiring? HINT: Oftentimes, what is expected of employees is scattered across many documents (job description, values statement, Key Performance Requirements, competencies, evaluations, etc.) as well as in the minds of stakeholders. In order to effectively screen candidates, it’s critical that the bottom-line expectations be determined and explored.

2) Does our screening process explore the critical expectations in a way that gives us meaningful information about the candidate? Are we asking questions that get to the heart of critical information, or are we just gathering interesting information? Do those involved in the process know what they’re looking for? Do we know what to listen for after we ask a question? Do our hiring assessments provide meaningful insights, or just interesting information? HINT: The questions we ask (or other means of collecting information) directly relate to the expectations for the position…you can’t have meaningful probing without clear expectations.

3) Does our applicant screening process connect us with top candidates and provide a positive candidate experience? Do our job postings speak to the people we want to apply? How early in the process do candidates get an accurate picture of the position and what it means to be a part of our company? Does our candidate screening process turn off top candidates? Do our communications (including our website) accurately portray our culture? HINT: Go through your own hiring process sometime and see what you notice (or ask a friend to).

Try not to be intimidated by asking these questions. Many times we find that our clients don’t need a massive overhaul of their hiring process, just a few tweaks in the right places. If you’re at the place where you’d like an outside party to review your process, make recommendations and help you implement possible changes, let me know – we’d love to help out.

Dealing with candidate photos and other sticky situations

Posted on April 13, 2011 by Dana Harrison

I really appreciated the 10-minute podcast via ERE.net on What’s Worrying Recruiters About Social Media. Keith Watts, an employment law attorney with Ogletree Deakins, discusses what it means to “do the right thing” when it comes to using Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

To sum it up, he repeatedly emphasizes the importance of:

Consistency in the hiring process across the company;
Making hiring decisions based on job-related factors.

Here at ADVISA, we work with clients on both of these fronts. We ask: “Are best hiring practices in place and consistently used across the company?” Right now I’m working on projects with two major clients where we are helping them improve their process for the purpose of increasing efficiency and effectiveness with screening, but we’ll also help train people across each company so that the established processes are consistent. After all, a great process is meaningless if it’s not put into practice well!

As part of the needs analysis we do to determine if work on hiring processes is merited, here are some questions we ask:

What is the role of HR in hiring? The role of the hiring manager?
At what stage is the hiring manager involved in selection?
What is the typical time-to-fill?
What is the candidate experience?
Where is there frustration? Inefficiency?
What is the turnover rate? How does the company feel about that rate?

These kinds of questions can lead to the identification of areas where consistency can be improved.

When it comes to defining the needs of the position, here are some of the signs we see that indicate that positions are not as clearly defined and they need to be. These are signs that there is ambiguity about the job-related factors on which selection decisions are made during candidate screening:

Feedback on candidates is vague. (“She didn’t seem like a fit for us.”)
Feedback on candidates is inconsistent.
The company can offer no description of how this person will have to interact with the team/supervisor in order to be successful.
Descriptions of multiple positions sound virtually the same.

Did you ask yourself the process-related questions above? Did you squirm as you thought about the answers? If so, contact me and we’ll work through some more exploration with you and take a look at how we can help. And if you have signs of ambiguity about what a position requires, beware…those situations are the ones that get companies into trouble because they open the door for decisions to be made on factors such as race, age and gender, which (among other categories) are not permissible. We’d be happy to help you gain clarity into what is required for given positions at your company, as well as how to screen for these traits.

Quality, Cost or Compliance – What drives your recruiting?

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Dana Harrison

What’s your answer? Quality of the hire? Cost to make the hire? Compliance with all laws and policies?

The article “What Drives Your Company’s Hiring Process: Quality, Cost, or Compliance?” captured my attention today for the initial question it asks. But I’m compelled to write about this as well because the article so accurately captures the philosophy we take on best hiring practices, including how we counsel our consulting clients and how we manage searches in our RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) service.

If you’re interested in changing your hiring practices in order to better balance these factors, or you want to hand off hiring to someone who will take care of searches for you in this model, I’d love to chat with you. In the meantime, I hope you find the article to be thought-provoking.

Driving to Better Sales – 4 – Matching People to Work (B) Assess Individuals

Posted on December 15, 2009 by Paul Dumouchelle

The “Driving to Better Sales” video series focuses on improving sales performance through systematic sales manager training through construction and use of a Sales Performance Dashboard. The Dashboard contains the critical information necessary for sales training coaching.

This fourth video describes using personality assessments to identify individuals’ behavioral characteristics and the initial steps of comparing this to an “ideal” personality for a sales job. This summarizes the HR best practices for this phase of the program, particularly applicant screening and where this fits in a behavioral interviewing process.

Stop! Don’t put that job description online!

Posted on December 11, 2009 by Dana Harrison

You have masterfully planned your next hire. You even pulled together your key folks for a strategic planning retreat where you created the perfect job description with comprehensive information about the role, responsibilities, requirements and so forth. And now you’re going to cut and paste that three pages of information onto an online job board or your company’s career’s page so as to attract the perfect candidate, right? NO! STOP THE MADNESS!

Candidates cruising your career site or the job boards don’t want to read massive job descriptions that go into minute detail about the role. Too much info too early. They want to see:

What are the opportunities for me?
How will this advance my career?
How can I grow and be challenged?
How will this meet my needs?

Take a minute and look at a sample job description and then its corresponding job posting.

You’ll see from these examples that the job posting is simply taken from the job description. So, with just a few more minutes of work, you can tweak that job description into a compelling job posting that will be much more effective in attracting the right candidates. Use your new job positing for ALL communications about the job, including sharing it with your current employees. Save the job description for later in your candidate screening process when you’re really talking details with a candidate.

Recruiting – The Art of Creating the Right Relationships

Posted on December 10, 2009 by Dana Harrison

Studies indicate there are four of these levels of fit between the employee and the job, the workgroup, the candidate’s vocation and the organization described below.

The concept of “employee fit” is truly a multi-level phenomenon, and will be maximized in instances in which a person’s personality matches both the objective characteristics of the organization and integrates well with the personalities of those that he or she interacts with most frequently. Keep both of these levels in mind when assessing candidates.

Only the best hiring practices coupled with a well-planned and executed on-boarding process will deliver the desired results.

Why use applicant screening tools?

Posted on December 7, 2009 by Dana Harrison

Is it possible to add depth to your applicant screening process through applicant screening tools, yet not increase costs? Consider the following two options that I recently presented a prospective client:

Finalist candidates would have to pass three levels of screening: resume, questionnaire and Predictive Index® survey, comprehensive phone screen.
We’d follow the client’s typical applicant review process and present finalist candidates after two levels of screening: resume, comprehensive phone screen.

And how did the two options compare in terms of dollars? By integrating the applicant screening tools, we cut the costs in half. The first option above with the additional screening cost was half what the second option would cost.

Now, you may think that this doesn’t make any sense. How can we expand the process (offering more screening) yet cut the costs?

The screenings are ultra-efficient in terms of the time it takes to conduct them and the level of meaningful information that is received. With this extra volume of information, candidate pools can be effectively whittled down so that valuable time conducting phone and face-to-face interviews is only spent on candidates who are strong fits. This saves our clients money in terms of our fees (we do fewer phone interviews), but our process also offers significant cost savings for the client internally, as their HR staff and hiring mangers do not need to invest their time conducting face-to-face interviews with candidates who are clearly not a match.

And so, here’s the rest of the story. We got the job. And the new client chose the first option with the additional level of screening. The bottom line was clear for her: integrating applicant screening tools in candidate assessment saves money.

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