I was recently invited to guest-lecture in an undergraduate Personnel Psychology class. I was quick to accept as this particular professor started me down the I/O path that I’m still enjoying today. I started thinking about what I could tell undergraduate students that would be valuable to them both in and out of the classroom, and I landed on the topic of employee selection. Hiring has become so much more complex since I sat in a BSU classroom, and it really hasn’t been that long.

In many companies employee selection is marked by a few common practices:

1. It begins with an Applicant Tracking System (ATS).
Large multinational corporations use Applicant Tracking Systems to efficiently gather information about large numbers of candidates, evaluate minimum qualifications, and screen out candidates who do not meet basic job requirements. This technology often dictates the kind of information that candidates provide as well as the order and format in which the information is submitted. This can lead to a lengthy application process, which may leave candidates feeling frustrated and poorly-represented by the information solicited. These feelings are likely exacerbated if the individual fails to meet the minimum qualifications and is immediately eliminated from the selection process.

2. It’s not what you know, it’s who you are.
A recent Hyper Island study found that 78% of 500 leaders and employees surveyed rated “personality” as the most desirable employee characteristic, followed by “cultural alignment” at 53%, and “skill set” at only 39%. It is no longer enough to have the right education or previous experience. Candidates must also be able to demonstrate critical individual attributes, such as drive, teamwork, and innovation.

3. You may not be applying for just one job.
When applying for a given position, candidates’ qualifications may be evaluated in terms of the job for which they are applying as well as more broadly. Organizations may apply candidate information to multiple job profiles to determine not only if the individual should be hired, but also where he/she should be placed. In addition, given the challenges associated with finding and retaining high-quality talent, employers are increasingly considering candidates’ long-term potential. Proctor & Gamble’s Careers site offers the tag line “We hire the person, not the position”. They state that they hire not just for a given position, but with the expectation that each candidate should have the potential to grow in the company.

4. Just like a good pair of jeans, it’s all about fit.
Organizations are largely defined by their unique values and culture. To ensure continued success it is critical that they hire employees who fit with that culture and can embody those values. Candidates who demonstrate a high level of aptitude for the job, and perhaps even show leadership potential, may not be hired due to a lack of fit. Employers know that employees who are not a good match for the organizational culture may perform well in the short-term but be difficult to retain.

What common selection practices have you seen in the past? What trends do you see building in talent acquisition?

Everyone has made a bad hire. In fact, research shows that more than half of new employees fail. In the third installment of our new video series “Drinks with Hogan”, Global Alliances Consultant Dustin Hunter briefly walks us through using personality assessments in a selection context.

Dr. Blaine Gaddis and Ashley Palmer will speak at the Academy of Human Resource Development in Arlington, Virginia, February 14-16. They will discuss the Development of a Competency Model for Entry-Level Selection.

Hogan uses personality to forecast performance in competencies critical for entry-level jobs. Using job analysis evidence and existing research, Blaine and Ashley identified competencies required for success in entry-level jobs and developed algorithms to predict performance. They will present meta-analysis results validating the utility of these competency algorithms for selection into entry-level jobs during their discussion.

While participating at the Human Resource People & Strategy conference in New York last month, I attended a session on generational differences in the workplace of the future. The presenter, Jeanne Meister, presented on the unique conditions that the workplace of the near future will create: Specifically, by 2020 there will be five generations working together in the U.S. economy. Due to the anticipated delayed retirement of our aging workforce, by 2020 the US will see Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y, and Generation Z attempting to peacefully coexist in the same workforce.

As a warm-up exercise, presenter Jeanne Meister asked a real-time poll question to see the generational spread of her audience. The poll question used audience response technology that prompted respondents to answer the question by texting their answers. A bar chart appeared up on the projector with a column for each of the five generations that updated audience responses in real time. We watched as the Generation Y bar spiked rapidly, towering over the rest. Within 15 seconds, Generation X had dwarfed Y on the chart and the Baby Boomers took the rightful lead soon after. Several minutes later, Jeanne was carrying on with her presentation as the Traditionalists bar was still slowly growing on the chart behind her as they figured out how to enter their responses via text.

This was a well-timed example of some of the differences that exist between the generations. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that Millennials will overtake the majority representation in the workforce by 2015. This statistic seemed to grip the room with intense fear of the hyper-connected, over-entitled twenty-somethings getting ready to take their offices and boardrooms by storm. The well-publicized stereotypes for Millennials include attention-seeking, impatience, and needing constant, immediate feedback.

However Jeanne communicated a message of optimism rather than fear: she emphasized the need to understand each generation more fully to better attract, recruit, and retain multi-generational talent. Not just in terms of actively creating an organizational culture that will be attractive for younger generations, but also in terms of understanding what it will take to keep all five generations engaged and on board in tomorrow’s organizations. Although Millennials are currently in the spotlight, I agree with Jeanne that it will be crucial to fully understand differences between all of the generations in terms of how they think, what they want/value, and what skills gaps exist between them.

Although there is much debate and disagreement on what criteria delineates each generation, the loose definitions below will serve our purposes:

As we consider the impact of the future generational landscape, we often talk in terms of personality descriptors and other character-based labels, such as confident, entitled, and social. Research indicates that while personal values may differ based on age, culture, and other demographics, personality is partially genetic and is an individual-level phenomenon. Attempts to personify an entire generation based on behaviors from a small sampling are problematic for more than one reason. Characterizing generations based on defining events (i.e., the great depression), expectations (i.e., immediacy vs. delayed gratification), and environmental factors (i.e., technology/innovation) makes much more sense. It should not be surprising that the generation that suffered through the depression might have a different outlook than the generation that put the first man on the moon. Nor should it shock us that the generation that is currently being brought up on the Internet and technology consumes information differently than the generation brought up on books and newspapers.

It seems there would be more to learn about how these people can work effectively together, rather than focusing solely on the differences or making sweeping statements about how they are similar or distinct.

In his recent Wall Street Journal article, “Software Raises Bar for Hiring,” David Wessel raises some interesting talent acquisition questions: As candidate pools have grown exponentially in the struggling economy and screening processes have become more efficient and cost-effective through the use of various software solutions, have organizations become overly stringent in their job requirements? Are employers cutting training programs, and therefore costs, based on the idea that they will be able to find someone in the vast pool of available workers who have the skills they require?

It seems that many organizations make the mistake of setting forth myriad requirements in their job requisitions, which are then programmed into software solutions used to screen out candidates early in the selection process. As a result the organization fails to find anyone for the job. At the same time, unemployed workers apply to positions for which they believe they are well qualified only to find themselves dropped from the selection process based solely on an initial application or resume submission. In the end frustration abounds – organizations are frustrated by the lack of “qualified” talent, and job seekers are frustrated by organizations that eliminate them from the selection process based solely on an initial screen.

Individual organizations can take steps to increase the likelihood of finding the right person for the job, regardless of what that job might be.

1. Carefully define job requirements

If your organization is struggling to find qualified candidates, make sure you are evaluating the must-haves that an individual needs to be successful in the job. You might find that you have been focusing on nice-to-haves (additional years of experience, advanced degrees for jobs that don’t require them) that do not truly differentiate high and low performance on the job. 

2. Focus on competencies, not experience

It is also important to consider what the employee needs day one on the job. Instead of looking for someone who has performed the exact same type of work before, focus on finding a candidate with the core competencies (knowledge, skills, abilities, and traits) required to be successful and supplement that talent with organization or job-specific training and education.

3. Take a whole employee life cycle approach

Organizations would also be wise to take a whole employee life cycle approach that includes recruitment, selection, development and retention. In some fields, such as engineering and IT, numerous opportunities are available to experienced workers, and organizations may find it hard to hold onto strong talent. When recruiting and hiring employees, ensure that the candidates you select are a good fit not just for a particular job, but also for your overall culture and work environment. Once employees are on the job, take steps to contribute to their professional development and keep them engaged. Depending on your structure this may include identifying high potentials to include in succession planning efforts, but don’t overlook middle-of-the-road performers who are your organization’s backbone – make sure they have opportunities to grow and develop their skills.  

Talent acquisition and management are complex processes, but careful planning at each step will help your organization hire and retain the right talent. Using selection techniques that identify candidates with the potential for success and focusing on onboarding, development, and engagement post-hire will go a long way towards ending employers’ and job seekers’ frustration.

When discussing the topic of selection assessment with human resources professionals, it can be rather easy to overwhelm a non-technical audience by carrying on about job analysis, criterion validation, correlations, legal defensibility, etc. A former colleague of mine who worked as a sales representative used to say I was getting “I/O-ish” (as in Industrial/Organizational psychology) when I started using such terminology. Keep in mind that I’m the first person to advocate the merits of assessment validation for ensuring effective talent management solutions. However, my colleague made an important point that sometimes, in an effort to provide the details behind the psychometrics of implementing an assessment for candidate selection, we may inadvertently add complexity to the conversation. 

In order to provide a simple structure to explain the process for implementing a selection assessment, I devised what I’ve coined the “which hunt.” That is not a typo. I’m not referring to a witch hunt as in the Salem witch trials of the late 1600s, nor does what I’m proposing resemble the McCarthyism of the 1950s. My concept of a which hunt is a series of discovery questions that an organization must answer to create a solid foundation for a high-quality assessment strategy that will support the identification of high potential candidates during the pre-employment screening process. An effective which hunt will help a company to identify:
• WHICH characteristics should we measure?
• WHICH assessment(s) should we use?
• WHICH cut-score will increase our hit rate for identifying good candidates?

WHICH characteristics should we measure?
You cannot hope to measure the potential for a candidate to be successful until you define which characteristics lead to success in a specific job. The Occupational Information Network (O*NET) is an online resource sponsored by the Department of Labor that reports profiles for over 800 occupations.  O*NET provides 277 data points for each occupation covering abilities, skills, knowledge, work styles, and other characteristics. Clearly, if O*NET is any indication, the process of defining a job profile of required characteristics can be a daunting proposition to an organization looking to implement an assessment program to measure such characteristics.
 
Rather than immediately getting into the details of job analysis or competency modeling, I find that a simple description of “can-do aptitudes” and “will-do attitudes” helps communicate the likely outcomes of this first step in the which hunt process. Can-do aptitudes refer to the mental horsepower of candidates such as cognitive abilities, demonstrated capability for job-specific skills, and mastery of specific areas of job knowledge. Put simply, having these aptitudes indicates that you can do the job, but we all know that not everyone lives up to their potential.

The will-do attitudes are often those characteristics that allow employees to meet their potential and can even lead an employee with less raw ability to actually succeed beyond those seemingly more talented colleagues. These work styles include conscientiousness, interpersonal savvy, stress tolerance, and achievement orientation, among others. Very smart, very talented employees often fall short of their full potential or fail because they do not work hard, do not play well with others (customers and/or teammates), and do not effectively manage pressures at work. 

Taken all together the required can-do and will-do characteristics form the success profile for that specific job.

WHICH assessment should I use?
The next step is to identify an assessment that measures these characteristics in candidates. As we do with most ventures in life, we might begin the search for an assessment provider by using our good friend Google. When you type “candidate selection assessment” into Google, the result includes over 1.5 million hits! Which one should you choose?

My message to human resource professionals is that the best assessment is one that measures the critical components of the success profile you identified in the first step of the which hunt. Your assessment strategy doesn’t have to measure the entire success profile (that’s why we conduct interviews, administer basic qualification questions, collect resumes, etc.), but there should be significant overlap. This may require the implementation of multiple assessments. For example at Hogan, we offer the Hogan Business Reasoning Inventory to measure can-do characteristics, the Hogan Personality Inventory and Hogan Development Survey to measure will-do characteristics, and the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory to assess “will-fit” characteristics in terms of how a candidate might fit into the organization’s culture.

WHICH cut-score will increase our hit rate for identifying good candidates?
Now for the last leg of the which hunt – interpreting the assessment results. While this task seems easy enough – low scores fail and high scores pass –   the truth is that this can actually be quite challenging for multiple reasons. What do you do with scores in the middle? Is a 40 a good enough score or should I look for 50s and higher? If I have multiple scores for multiple characteristics, how do I know what scores are more important indicators of success? What if the candidate has high scores on some characteristics and low scores on others? It is a delicate process to draw the line in the sand and make appropriate sense of all the good information that assessments provide. 

This part of the which hunt gets a bit complicated despite my best efforts. The bottom line is that we must clearly understand the relationship between assessment scores and job performance. I find it helpful during this part of the conversation to use an analogy for the way a financial institution uses a credit score. If a bank is going to give someone a loan to purchase a house, they don’t just want to get a high level summary of age, income, salary, credit card debt, etc., and shoot from the hip on how to combine all of those data points into an estimation of investment risk for that person. Such an approach would be inconsistent, inaccurate, and not scalable. To make sound lending decisions over time, the bank leverages a proven, weighted equation to combine these data points into an easily interpretable credit score that is backed by research to increase the hit-rate for making profitable lending decisions (the recent housing market collapse aside). Standards have been set to categorize bad credit scores, good credit scores, and great credit scores. This is essentially how a validation study is used when implementing an assessment for candidate selection. We conduct research to give you overall low, moderate, or high evaluations of candidate potential that if used consistently will increase hit rates for selecting successful employees.

The which hunt guidelines break up the concepts of assessment implementation into concepts that are hopefully simple to grasp:  
• Before we can measure anything we must define a benchmark (i.e., success profile).
• We must use that benchmark to guide us to pick the right tool for the job (i.e., assessment).
• We have to know how to read the measurements the tool is giving us and do regular checkups to make sure the measurements are accurate (i.e., cut-scores).