The purpose of this mini course is to encourage you to systemise your hiring process. The selection of new employees is about legal discrimination. First we start with a large group of applicants and through a process of "hurdles" based on the Knowledge, Skills, Attitudes, Mental ability and Experience (KSAMEs) needed for the job, we end up with what we hope is the right person for the job. From my experience, most hiring managers are doing just that, relying on "hope".
If selecting a new employee is about discrimination, then it is imperative that we discriminate fairly. The way to ensure this is to systemise the hiring process so that all applicants get treated the same way. For example, all applicants are subjected to the same interview questions, same interview panel and the same psychometric assessments. This leads to better hiring decisions because the process has been standardised; in other words we are always comparing "apples with apples".
A good analogy of the selection process is to visualize an iceberg. A third of the iceberg is visible above the waterline. This depicts the Knowledge, Skills and Experience (KSE's) that are observable of the candidate and whether or not they can do the job. This kind of information can be teased out through CV's, Resumes or application forms as well as interviews and referencing. KSE's are learned behaviours, thus they can be trained and coached.
The remaining two thirds that sit under the waterline is what most hiring managers will fail to assess - "will" or "how" they will do the job. This two thirds represents the applicants mental abilities, motives, personality traits and values; or in simpler terms - their attitude. It is really only through psychological profiling that this can be assessed. More information can be found at Tip #5.
A lot of hiring managers will hire based on KSE's, but end up terminating or having problems with employees further down the track because of their mental ability, personality and attitude.
Having the right mix of personality traits and mental ability applicable to the job will insure the candidate applies their knowledge, skills and experience in the most productive way to the benefit of both the organisation and themselves.
Just as a note of caution, there are various ways of systemising the selection process dependent on the job itself. The tips to follow in this mini-course are generalised and designed to make you think about what elements you require to develop your own peace-of-mind selection system.
So what problems are there with the traditional selection process?
1. No planning. Has a job analysis been done for this position? Do you have a written list of the Skills, personal Attributes and Knowledge required for this position?
2. A lot of HR Managers hire on emotion. They may be good at hiring people based on what they can do, but are poor at assessing who they really are. Emotional judgements and Gut feelings generally tend to rule. Thus, managers tend to hire people who are much like themselves.
3. Most managers hire based on experience instead of ability. For example, you could teach someone how to sell, how you can't teach optimism, motivation and resilience to persuade.
4. Interviews are nothing more than unstructured one-on-one chats.
5. The interviewer does the talking.
6. Interviewers are untrained.
7. The personal characteristics of the applicant are rarely tested through critical reasoning and personality tests.
8. Poor effort in terms of background checks and/or references.
There are many more; however, the above are some of the key areas we would like to cover in this report.