A Guide to Talent Selection, Pt. 2 (Version 2, pt. 2)

To read part one, click here

How Do You Make Hiring More Effective?

There are a number of steps organizations can and should use to ensure the hiring process is as
job relevant, valid, and effective as possible.  These steps will help your organization to decrease
turnover, improve the metrics that are important to your business, and make the right decisions
about candidates.

• Job Analysis: A job analysis is a process of determining what competencies are important for success in specific roles, and it allows you to figure out the specific combination of skills, abilities, and personal characteristics needed for a candidate to fit and perform well in one job versus another.  A technical support role and a sales role may both require strong communication skills and the ability to speak to customers on the phone, but the technical support role also requires (among other things) troubleshooting capabilities and the ability to explain difficult technical concepts to customers who may not be technologically sophisticated, capabilities not necessarily required of telephone sales agents. A job analysis that identifies the relative importance of specific skills, abilities, personal characteristics, and interpersonal traits allows your hiring team to understand the unique competency profile that is likely to make a candidate a strong fit for a particular job.This will also help hiring teams write job descriptions and job ads that accurately describe the job so that recruiters and hiring managers can (1) accurately manage candidate expectations about the job, (2) attract the right types of candidates, and (3) proceed upon a shared understanding regarding what to look for in attempting to hire the best candidates for the job.

• Standard Evaluation: The use of standard evaluations allows organizations to measure, on a standard and consistent scale, the extent to which each candidate possesses the skills, abilities, and personal characteristics deemed most critical for success based on the job analysis. Standard evaluations such as structured interviews using behaviorally anchored rating scales can be used by the hiring team to rate candidates on a defined scale, measure those candidates against a pre-determined standard (e.g., only those rated 3 or higher on a 5-point scale will be considered), and thereby proceed with only the best applicants. Well developed, validated, and standardized pre-hire assessment tools can also be used to measure the extent to which candidates demonstrate each of the critical competencies.  Employee behavior and performance reflect many individual characteristics working together. Given the complex interactions among these personal qualities, it is generally good practice to try to measure as many of them as is practically feasible. If the measurement of individual differences is overly limited, your organization will overlook important characteristics needed to predict employee success, and will reap lower returns from any investment in the pre-hire assessment process. Pre-hire assessments of all types exist to help hiring teams identify those candidates who possess the proper mix of competencies required for on-the-job success.            Job simulations, for example, measure a candidate’s skill at performing the functions of a job, such as taking calls in a call center. Cognitive ability tests may examine the candidate’s aptitude for learning, critical thinking, verbal, numerical, and logical reasoning. Personality tools can help determine whether the applicant’s personality, motivational, or typical behavioral tendencies are well suited for success on the job. There are many people who have the right skills and abilities to perform a particular job, such as customer service or retail, but who are a poor fit because their personal characteristics do not match up with the job’s requirements, such as a desire to help customers or solve problems.

• Continuous Analytics:  It’s important to understand how the selection process adds value to your business. Regular and continuous analysis of the pre-hire process should be conducted to ensure the hiring recommendations remain aligned with your business. It would be nice to implement a new talent selection process today and realize a 20% gain in performance or reduction in attrition overnight, but the reality is that it takes time to see the improvements. For most organizations, the best approach is to implement a process that will deliver initial gains in retention and performance while still enabling them to meet recruiting targets. In other words, the process should be used to identify the best candidates, but without being so selective that the organization cannot fill its open positions. As initial gains in performance and retention are realized – i.e., new hires begin to perform better and stay longer, and the organization then has fewer seats to fill - the hiring team can gradually raise the bar and develop an increasingly more stringent, and therefore even more accurate, selection process.         The key to ensuring that the selection process remains inextricably linked to the business is to quantitatively compare pre-hire assessments and evaluation tools to key performance indicators (performance metrics, absenteeism, and attrition) to ensure the process is resulting in the right hiring decisions. Continuous monitoring is critical to fully realizing the value of any selection process.

What can you do if you hired the wrong person?

         Performance improvement plans, which document what areas under-performing employees need to improve and lay out a timeline for improvement, allow managers to give employees a second chance and document the steps they take the improve. The process usually stops here and hiring managers do not find out why they are hiring people who are not a good fit for the role or the company. This process can repeat until you burn through the local labor pool or until the hiring managers is held accountable. Sometimes an employee who is the wrong fit leaves voluntarily, either because they were using the job to fill a gap in their employment history until they found something better, or because they discovered they did not like or were not good at the job and looked for work elsewhere. Since many unhappy employees are also poor performers, hiring managers and HR representatives are often relieved, but they do not often examine their hiring process to figure out how they hired someone whose personality and interests made them a poor fit.
      Hiring teams should look at what competencies these employees lack and change their hiring processes accordingly. If you hired a call center agent who has low first call resolution and is not improving, look at the part in your hiring process that assesses this skill. Is this a necessary skill, and are you treating it as such? If first call resolution is an important metric, you should be hiring only people who demonstrate that they have high first call resolution. If you are hiring people who demonstrate low first call resolution, you may be thinking you can train employees to improve their scores on the job – in which case, you should look at your organization’s ability to train employees.
      On the other hand, you may be rejecting applicants who do not display competencies they can be trained for, and in the process miss out on applicants who are ultimately the better fit for the job. Some competencies are easier to teach than others. If you must choose between hiring candidates
who lack skills and hiring candidates who lack the right behaviors and personality traits, pick the former provided your trainers are prepared to help employees develop these skills. Multitasking is a skill many employees can learn or improve upon on the job, but many personality traits such as patience and customer service orientation cannot be taught. Seeing what candidates can do and how they react in real-life job situations is more accurate than asking candidates to describe a particular skill. Test for specific personality traits like customer service focus by asking candidates how they would handle a situation where they have to demonstrate that trait. This would be more accurate than asking them whether they are customer-service focused.
    
       If companies want to get hiring right, they also need to hire the right supervisors. People typically leave jobs either because they do not like the work or they do not like their boss. Bosses who cannot handle multiple demands or monitor call center agents can also affect attrition because agents who may otherwise have stayed leave for a better environment. Call centers can use assessments to find people who score highly on the traits necessary for good management, and can use simulations specific to supervisors.
     Your recruiting team should also be large enough to handle the workload of reading applications and resumes and making the initial selections for first interviews. This depends a lot on what types of positions you are hiring for and whether recruiters will have to conduct in-person interviews or whether they are comfortable relying mostly on testing to make decisions for them.
    Use an online recruiting process. An online recruiting process is more cost-effective, easier to manage, and leads to better quality candidates than using employee referrals, job fairs and paper advertisements. In addition to reducing paper, it also allows you to keep track of what employees have applied, their scores on each type of assessment, and where they are in the hiring process. Using an online recruiting process also increases the likelihood of finding applicants who are familiar with basic computer programs because they must know enough to conduct a job search online and write and submit a resume. This way, you can automatically screen out applicants who do not meet a minimum level of skill with a computer.
    Although much of the advice here is geared toward businesses hiring a large number of standardized positions, it is also applicable to hiring candidates in lower volume or for more specialized positions, since no job type is immune to attrition and poor performance. You can still relate your hiring process to your overall business goals by testing candidates for the skills that are necessary for performing well, and by administering assessments that measure their personality traits.
We hope you have found this post helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at xxxx@example.com. Happy hiring!

A Guide to Talent Selection, Pt. 1 (Version 2, pt. 1)

Today's post is about talent selection-- what it is, why it's important, and how to do it well.

What is talent selection?

Talent selection is the process of hiring employees based on their fit with a particular position and
organization. When done well, talent selection begins by identifying the most critical skills, abilities, and experience a candidate must bring to the position to be successful. In other words, what is the “success profile” for the targeted role?
     Then, well developed and validated pre-hire assessment  tools should be used to assess how well the candidate “fits” or how closely he/she matches the success profile.
       Talent selection is important because companies want to hire strong performers and avoid problems in the future.  Hiring is expensive, time-consuming and has important consequences for the business. Companies that engage in high volume hiring for front-line positions, such as in a call center or retail store, want to  reduce the amount of “person hours” spent reviewing and comparing candidates using processes such as interviews.  The use of well developed, standardized, valid, objective, and automated selection tools  is an excellent way to let technology and science do the “heavy lifting”, accurately and reliably predict a
candidate’s likelihood of on-the-job success, and focus the company’s time and resources on only those
candidates who have been “pre-qualified” via the use of such tools..
          Getting hiring right the first time is crucial because the quality of your new employee affects your organization’s performance. Employee performance, particularly in customer facing roles, affects sales and customer  satisfaction, which in turn affect revenue and customer retention. The absence of a well developed, job relevant, and data driven hiring process can cost your organization money by leading you to reject the
right candidates and hire the wrong ones.
         The research and data required to develop a thorough understanding of the job and a quality
talent selection process can also help to create critical alignment among your hiring managers, HR
representatives, and recruiters.  If all parties involved have  agreed on the skills, abilities, and characteristics candidates need in order to succeed in the targeted role, it reduces the likelihood that recruiters/HR will pass on candidates to the hiring manager who do not meet the requirements or that your hiring team will struggle to fill positions because candidates with the desired combination of skills and experience do not exist or are not interested in the job.

How do the wrong people get hired?

Most hiring managers have hired people who performed poorly or left the job because they hired these candidates on the basis of a resume and/or an in-person interview. There are a few reasons hiring  managers make bad hiring decisions: 

• Not understanding the job: Organizations that fail to conduct a thorough analysis of the job and the competencies necessary to fit with and succeed in that job will often fail to attract the right candidates because they create job descriptions and job advertisements based on an incomplete or inaccurate understanding of the job itself. 

• Not evaluating the “whole person”: Hiring a candidate who has the right personal characteristics and motivations to fit with the job, but who lacks the knowledge, skills, or abilities to perform the job well leaves your organization in a position of deciding  whether you can train your new hires to develop the necessary skills, an endeavor that may prove less than cost effective. Hiring a candidate who has the right skills but lacks the personality/motivational fit with the role often leads to employees who dislike the job and view it only as a stop gap until something better comes along. Selection processes that address as many of the critical job competencies as possible will be the most effective in helping your organization to identify the right candidates for the role.  Unfortunately, assessing all aspects related to a candidate’s potential success in the role can be somewhat time consuming – there is no “magic test” than can measure all of the critical competencies for a given job in 10 minutes or less.  But if you are willing to invest a little extra time in the pre-hire process, the payoff will be higher quality employees who stay on the job and generate revenue for your organization.
•  Not evaluating whether the hiring process is effective: Many recruiters and hiring managers view the talent selection process as simply a “necessary evil” – merely a series of steps through which candidates must pass or boxes that must be checked off in order to eventually fill open positions. They often fail to review the effectiveness of the hiring process itself, and therefore ineffective talent selection systems can become embedded in an organization simply because “we've always done it this way.”  Organizations that truly understand talent selection, however, understand that the process should be an evolving one, constantly being reviewed and improved over times as jobs change, organizations change, candidates change, and cultures change.  Regular and continuous research should be conducted to analyze the quality of hire resulting from the selection process itself and to identify opportunities to improve the talent selection system.

Come back tomorrow for part 2, which will be about how you can make your talent selection and hiring process more effective. We hope you have found this post helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at xxxx@example.com. Happy hiring!

A Guide to Talent Selection (Version 1)

Today's post about talent selection-- what it is, why it's important, and how to do it well.

What is talent selection?

Talent selection is the process of hiring employees based on their fit with a particular position and
organization. When done well, talent selection begins by identifying the most critical skills, abilities, and experience a candidate must bring to the position to be successful. In other words, what is the “success profile” for the targeted role?
     Then, well developed and validated pre-hire assessment  tools should be used to assess how well the candidate “fits” or how closely he/she matches the success profile.
       Talent selection is important because companies want to hire strong performers and avoid problems in the future.  Hiring is expensive, time-consuming and has important consequences for the business. Companies that engage in high volume hiring for front-line positions, such as in a call center or retail store, want to  reduce the amount of “person hours” spent reviewing and comparing candidates using processes such as interviews.  The use of well developed, standardized, valid, objective, and automated selection tools  is an excellent way to let technology and science do the “heavy lifting”, accurately and reliably predict a
candidate’s likelihood of on-the-job success, and focus the company’s time and resources on only those
candidates who have been “pre-qualified” via the use of such tools..
          Getting hiring right the first time is crucial because the quality of your new employee affects your organization’s performance. Employee performance, particularly in customer facing roles, affects sales and customer  satisfaction, which in turn affect revenue and customer retention. The absence of a well developed, job relevant, and data driven hiring process can cost your organization money by leading you to reject the
right candidates and hire the wrong ones.
         The research and data required to develop a thorough understanding of the job and a quality
talent selection process can also help to create critical alignment among your hiring managers, HR
representatives, and recruiters.  If all parties involved have  agreed on the skills, abilities, and characteristics candidates need in order to succeed in the targeted role, it reduces the likelihood that recruiters/HR will pass on candidates to the hiring manager who do not meet the requirements or that your hiring team will struggle to fill positions because candidates with the desired combination of skills and experience do not exist or are not interested in the job.

How do the wrong people get hired?

Most hiring managers have hired people who performed poorly or left the job because they hired these candidates on the basis of a resume and/or an in-person interview. There are a few reasons hiring  managers make bad hiring decisions: 

• Not understanding the job: Organizations that fail to conduct a thorough analysis of the job and the competencies necessary to fit with and succeed in that job will often fail to attract the right candidates because they create job descriptions and job advertisements based on an incomplete or inaccurate understanding of the job itself. 

• Not evaluating the “whole person”: Hiring a candidate who has the right personal characteristics and motivations to fit with the job, but who lacks the knowledge, skills, or abilities to perform the job well leaves your organization in a position of deciding  whether you can train your new hires to develop the necessary skills, an endeavor that may prove less than cost effective. Hiring a candidate who has the right skills but lacks the personality/motivational fit with the role often leads to employees who dislike the job and view it only as a stop gap until something better comes along. Selection processes that address as many of the critical job competencies as possible will be the most effective in helping your organization to identify the right candidates for the role.  Unfortunately, assessing all aspects related to a candidate’s potential success in the role can be somewhat time consuming – there is no “magic test” than can measure all of the critical competencies for a given job in 10 minutes or less.  But if you are willing to invest a little extra time in the pre-hire process, the payoff will be higher quality employees who stay on the job and generate revenue for your organization.
•  Not evaluating whether the hiring process is effective: Many recruiters and hiring managers view the talent selection process as simply a “necessary evil” – merely a series of steps through which candidates must pass or boxes that must be checked off in order to eventually fill open positions. They often fail to review the effectiveness of the hiring process itself, and therefore ineffective talent selection systems can become embedded in an organization simply because “we've always done it this way.”  Organizations that truly understand talent selection, however, understand that the process should be an evolving one, constantly being reviewed and improved over times as jobs change, organizations change, candidates change, and cultures change.  Regular and continuous research should be conducted to analyze the quality of hire resulting from the selection process itself and to identify opportunities to improve the talent selection system.

How Do You Make Hiring More Effective?

There are a number of steps organizations can and should use to ensure the hiring process is as
job relevant, valid, and effective as possible.  These steps will help your organization to decrease
turnover, improve the metrics that are important to your business, and make the right decisions
about candidates.

• Job Analysis: A job analysis is a process of determining what competencies are important for success in specific roles, and it allows you to figure out the specific combination of skills, abilities, and personal characteristics needed for a candidate to fit and perform well in one job versus another.  A technical support role and a sales role may both require strong communication skills and the ability to speak to customers on the phone, but the technical support role also requires (among other things) troubleshooting capabilities and the ability to explain difficult technical concepts to customers who may not be technologically sophisticated, capabilities not necessarily required of telephone sales agents. A job analysis that identifies the relative importance of specific skills, abilities, personal characteristics, and interpersonal traits allows your hiring team to understand the unique competency profile that is likely to make a candidate a strong fit for a particular job.This will also help hiring teams write job descriptions and job ads that accurately describe the job so that recruiters and hiring managers can (1) accurately manage candidate expectations about the job, (2) attract the right types of candidates, and (3) proceed upon a shared understanding regarding what to look for in attempting to hire the best candidates for the job.

• Standard Evaluation: The use of standard evaluations allows organizations to measure, on a standard and consistent scale, the extent to which each candidate possesses the skills, abilities, and personal characteristics deemed most critical for success based on the job analysis. Standard evaluations such as structured interviews using behaviorally anchored rating scales can be used by the hiring team to rate candidates on a defined scale, measure those candidates against a pre-determined standard (e.g., only those rated 3 or higher on a 5-point scale will be considered), and thereby proceed with only the best applicants. Well developed, validated, and standardized pre-hire assessment tools can also be used to measure the extent to which candidates demonstrate each of the critical competencies.  Employee behavior and performance reflect many individual characteristics working together. Given the complex interactions among these personal qualities, it is generally good practice to try to measure as many of them as is practically feasible. If the measurement of individual differences is overly limited, your organization will overlook important characteristics needed to predict employee success, and will reap lower returns from any investment in the pre-hire assessment process. Pre-hire assessments of all types exist to help hiring teams identify those candidates who possess the proper mix of competencies required for on-the-job success.            Job simulations, for example, measure a candidate’s skill at performing the functions of a job, such as taking calls in a call center. Cognitive ability tests may examine the candidate’s aptitude for learning, critical thinking, verbal, numerical, and logical reasoning. Personality tools can help determine whether the applicant’s personality, motivational, or typical behavioral tendencies are well suited for success on the job. There are many people who have the right skills and abilities to perform a particular job, such as customer service or retail, but who are a poor fit because their personal characteristics do not match up with the job’s requirements, such as a desire to help customers or solve problems.

• Continuous Analytics:  It’s important to understand how the selection process adds value to your business. Regular and continuous analysis of the pre-hire process should be conducted to ensure the hiring recommendations remain aligned with your business. It would be nice to implement a new talent selection process today and realize a 20% gain in performance or reduction in attrition overnight, but the reality is that it takes time to see the improvements. For most organizations, the best approach is to implement a process that will deliver initial gains in retention and performance while still enabling them to meet recruiting targets. In other words, the process should be used to identify the best candidates, but without being so selective that the organization cannot fill its open positions. As initial gains in performance and retention are realized – i.e., new hires begin to perform better and stay longer, and the organization then has fewer seats to fill - the hiring team can gradually raise the bar and develop an increasingly more stringent, and therefore even more accurate, selection process.         The key to ensuring that the selection process remains inextricably linked to the business is to quantitatively compare pre-hire assessments and evaluation tools to key performance indicators (performance metrics, absenteeism, and attrition) to ensure the process is resulting in the right hiring decisions. Continuous monitoring is critical to fully realizing the value of any selection process.

What can you do if you hired the wrong person?

         Performance improvement plans, which document what areas under-performing employees need to improve and lay out a timeline for improvement, allow managers to give employees a second chance and document the steps they take the improve. The process usually stops here and hiring managers do not find out why they are hiring people who are not a good fit for the role or the company. This process can repeat until you burn through the local labor pool or until the hiring managers is held accountable. Sometimes an employee who is the wrong fit leaves voluntarily, either because they were using the job to fill a gap in their employment history until they found something better, or because they discovered they did not like or were not good at the job and looked for work elsewhere. Since many unhappy employees are also poor performers, hiring managers and HR representatives are often relieved, but they do not often examine their hiring process to figure out how they hired someone whose personality and interests made them a poor fit.
      Hiring teams should look at what competencies these employees lack and change their hiring processes accordingly. If you hired a call center agent who has low first call resolution and is not improving, look at the part in your hiring process that assesses this skill. Is this a necessary skill, and are you treating it as such? If first call resolution is an important metric, you should be hiring only people who demonstrate that they have high first call resolution. If you are hiring people who demonstrate low first call resolution, you may be thinking you can train employees to improve their scores on the job – in which case, you should look at your organization’s ability to train employees.
      On the other hand, you may be rejecting applicants who do not display competencies they can be trained for, and in the process miss out on applicants who are ultimately the better fit for the job. Some competencies are easier to teach than others. If you must choose between hiring candidates
who lack skills and hiring candidates who lack the right behaviors and personality traits, pick the former provided your trainers are prepared to help employees develop these skills. Multitasking is a skill many employees can learn or improve upon on the job, but many personality traits such as patience and customer service orientation cannot be taught. Seeing what candidates can do and how they react in real-life job situations is more accurate than asking candidates to describe a particular skill. Test for specific personality traits like customer service focus by asking candidates how they would handle a situation where they have to demonstrate that trait. This would be more accurate than asking them whether they are customer-service focused.
   
       If companies want to get hiring right, they also need to hire the right supervisors. People typically leave jobs either because they do not like the work or they do not like their boss. Bosses who cannot handle multiple demands or monitor call center agents can also affect attrition because agents who may otherwise have stayed leave for a better environment. Call centers can use assessments to find people who score highly on the traits necessary for good management, and can use simulations specific to supervisors.
     Your recruiting team should also be large enough to handle the workload of reading applications and resumes and making the initial selections for first interviews. This depends a lot on what types of positions you are hiring for and whether recruiters will have to conduct in-person interviews or whether they are comfortable relying mostly on testing to make decisions for them.
    Use an online recruiting process. An online recruiting process is more cost-effective, easier to manage, and leads to better quality candidates than using employee referrals, job fairs and paper advertisements. In addition to reducing paper, it also allows you to keep track of what employees have applied, their scores on each type of assessment, and where they are in the hiring process. Using an online recruiting process also increases the likelihood of finding applicants who are familiar with basic computer programs because they must know enough to conduct a job search online and write and submit a resume. This way, you can automatically screen out applicants who do not meet a minimum level of skill with a computer.
    Although much of the advice here is geared toward businesses hiring a large number of standardized positions, it is also applicable to hiring candidates in lower volume or for more specialized positions, since no job type is immune to attrition and poor performance. You can still relate your hiring process to your overall business goals by testing candidates for the skills that are necessary for performing well, and by administering assessments that measure their personality traits.
We hope you have found this post helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at xxxx@example.com. Happy hiring!