4x better hiring - a how-to guide

Do you make great hires?  If you work in recruitment, an honest answer would have to be “sometimes”.  46% of new employees don’t last even a year and a half in the job, and each hiring failure costs the business anything from 30% to several multiples of salary. 

These numbers are crazy, but what is really nuts is that we know how to get hiring right, and by right I mean getting high performers in the right jobs reliably, consistently and cost-effectively.  Here’s how, in three easy steps…

1.     Use proven performance-predictors

Hiring is making a prediction.  Until astro-mathematicians show us how to jump between parallel universes, there is no way we can hire every job applicant, set them to work for a year, see who turns out best and keep that person as a permanent employee.  

In the real world, we have to predict performance at the hiring stage.  Too often, we decide based on our gut feeling or tools such as résumés which have been shown to be only weakly predictive of success in the job.  But in fact we know a ton about the factors that predict how someone is going to turn out in a job, and that knowledge is highly, highly reliable.

Our knowledge about performance predictors is based on almost a hundred years of research – and on meta-analysis of that research by super-smart people who want to understand how different studies fit together so they can identify the most reliable approaches – the ones that work best in getting the right people in the right jobs.  This meta-analysis has looked not just at which factors are the strongest individual predictors of success in work, but at which combinations of factors work best together. 

Say I discover that having brown eyes and having curly hair both predict success at work.  Should I look at just candidates’ eye color or just at their hair texture, or will I hire more high performers if I measure both?  If there is not a significant difference in the results I get from considering both factors compared to just one, there is no point forcing me and my job candidates through two examinations and I should just stick with whichever of the eyes or hair test leads me to the best-performing workers.  Meta-analysis of research into eyes and hair predicting performance can show me which approach is likely to get the best results.

Of course, that’s just an example.  Neither eyes nor hair have any actual bearing on performance at work (though they do, sadly, have an impact on how yourperformance may be perceived)  Here’s what does make a difference:

General Mental Ability – how you process information, make connections and solve problems.  This is the single strongest predictor of success at work.  The more complicated the job, the more General Mental Ability is a reliable predictive measure – it has been found to be about twice as reliable for professional jobs compared to clerks, for example. 

Personality or Competencies – the mix of behaviors, ways of thinking, knowledge, skills and personality traits that characterize how you go about your work.  This is another proven strong predictor, especially in jobs where success comes from interacting with others, dealing with stress and making and implementing decisions (er, which jobs does that not include?).   It is also one of the more variable predictors.  Every job draws in different ways on different combinations of competencies.  Luckily researchers have mapped the drivers of performance in just about every type of job, so we can draw on that research to match people accurately with the right careers.

Work Fit – how you get motivated and engaged at work.  The third gold-standard predictor of performance.  While the other two factors focus on what you can do, work fit measures what you are willing to do, what you want to do.  It includes things like your interest in the activities you’ll encounter in a job, and your engagement with the culture of the organization or work group.

Each of these three factors is a proven predictor of work performance, but the real benefits come when they are used together.  Hire on the basis of General Mental Ability alone and you get a strong correlation coefficient with performance, but add in measures of Competencies/Personality and Work Fit and the effect size leaps to one of the strongest correlations ever seen in any psychological research. 

That’s what we mean when we say we know what predicts work performance.  Next, how to make it work in practice:

2.     Be smart in measuring predictors

One of my son’s more irritating elementary school math problems concerned a girl called Lucy who wanted to buy a rug for her bedroom.  Lucy realized she had to know the dimensions of her room in order to buy the right size rug, but instead of doing what any normal person would do and stretching a tape measure wall-to-wall, Lucy worked out that her room was twice as long as her desk and three times as wide, then measured her desk.

At least Lucy measured the desk.  Too often in hiring, people talk about the right things – competency-based assessment, say – then implement them only in vague, inconsistent, over-complicated and unproven ways, kind of like Lucy wandering into the store and asking for a rug about twice as long as a desk. 

There’s no reason to be as dopey as a third-grade math problem when it comes to something as important to the business as hiring.  Here’s how to measure the three top predictors accurately, consistently and cost-effectively:

Use assessments.  Many of us still have nightmares about taking the SAT  but employment assessments are a whole different story.   The best ones are far more accurate as predictors of future performance (the SAT has an average validity of 0.34 compared to 0.71 for the best-in-class employment assessments – i.e. it’s about half as strong a predictor of performance).  Also, employment tests are much faster.  The SAT takes 3 ¾ hours, comprehensive employment testing can be completed well inside an hour.  Employment assessments can be done online, the results given instantly and at increasingly cost-effective prices. 

Focus on what matters for this job.  A star in one job can be a disaster in another job, even in a similar job in another company.   This is because different jobs have different success drivers – strong competence in Following Instructions, say, could be vital for a high-security job but irrelevant when it comes to a creative role.  Differences in work group can raise or lower an individual’s motivation, depending on the closeness of match between what engages that person and the reality of the company’s work culture.  

When you look at predictive data, make sure it’s predictive data for your particular job.  Either use recruitment software that not just assesses your candidates but matches their profiles against the specific combinations of predictors that drive success in each job (full disclosure: this is what we do at Matchpoint Careers) or make sure that everyone involved in the assessment and selection processes knows exactly what matters - and what does not - when it comes to predictive evidence.

Dig deeper at interview.  Most candidates are going to be prepared for standard interview questions, including behavioral interview questions (“tell me about a time when…”).  To really find out what they can contribute, focus your questions on the strengths or questions about their capability revealed by the assessments.  

You may find, for instance, that someone who did not show a great inherent capacity for strong presentations has really worked on developing that competency and has evidence to prove their progress.  Using behavioral interviewing techniques, but focused very tightly on what drives performance in the job, you can get an extremely accurate picture of how someone is going to perform at work.

3.     Stop doing the dumb stuff

Don’t share your favorite management truism.  Don’t ask if someone is a team player, or what their coworkers say about them.  Don’t automatically go for the candidate who has Google on his or her résumé or who has gamed all the keywords. 

The more you use unreliable, unproven methods, the less accurate your selection of future employees will be.  Only include methods, such as those above, which have been proven to predict performance accurately.  If you don’t know the predictive value of a tool or method, ask the vendor.  If the vendor doesn’t know, fobs you off with a single research study or dodges the question, go elsewhere.

Why you should act now

Getting the right people in the right jobs is the fastest and best way to transform your business results.  Companies who have used assessments have cut hiring costs by 75%, cut turnover by 50%, and more than doubled profitability per employee.

We may still not have figured out how to cure the common cold, but we do know how to get the right people in the right jobs accurately, easily and cost-effectively.   

If you’re currently following all the steps above in your hiring, congratulations.  If not, what is stopping you from starting now?

Are Amabots the future of work?

There was something missing from last weekend’s NewYork Times hatchet job on Amazon.  Within the 5,400 word piece were many accounts of 24/7 performance monitoring, celebration of conflict, encouragement of backstabbing and employment practices that if not discriminatory were certainly highly biased and near unbearable.  But nowhere did the piece answer the questions I kept asking myself:  are these kind of Hunger Games working conditions necessary to drive business results in the 21^st century?  Are the Amabots the future of work? 

Greedy time-travelers: buy Amazon shares back then!

Certainly, Amazon is stunningly successful and relentlessly innovative.  In the past month alone Amazon launched or expanded three new services, piloted two shows and launched another, created 1,000 jobs at a new fulfillment center, exceeded Black Friday sales with their first Prime Day and announced second quarter sales up 20% to $23.18 billion.  The Times’ slating did not have much if any financial impact.  In the first day of trading following publication, Amazon’s stock went up 124 basis points (which sounds impressive until you realize that the stock has risen 7,246 basis points this year – 75 basis points a day on average).

And, of course, customers love Amazon.  Has anyone reading this post never bought from Amazon, from their delivery services, their online media streaming, their Amazon Web Servers (AWS) or any other of their hundreds of product and service lines?   Amazon can accurately claim to be Earth’s most customer-centric company because it gives us what we want faster, sooner, now.   AWS is not just cost-effective, it’s an extremely high-quality, high-reliability business service.  We all know about the retail arm of the business.  One-click ordering and our wishes are on our doorstep.  An Amazon operations executive quoted in the Times piece was not wrong to use words like “futuristic”, “magical” and “solving a really practical need” to describe how she arranged for delivery of a sold-out Frozen doll within 23 minutes flat.  Manyof us may be intermittently appalled at some of the company’s management practices, but it doesn’t change our shopping and business sourcing.

So, Amazon is ruthless and Amazon is successful.  But is that combination necessary to achieve great results for shareholders and for customers?  Let’s look at two aspects of the Amazon way which attracted the most recent attention: continuous performance feedback and a pugnaciously up-or-out culture.

“It’s as if you’ve got the CEO of the company in bed with you at 3am”

Continuous performance feedback was dreamed of by the original time-and-motionproto-management consultants over a century ago, but it had to wait until the internet got onto portable devices to be fully realized.  Today arash of companies offer software that tracks employee activity, monitors progress against goals in real time.  Proponents claim that everyone wins: employees get increased clarity, engagement, meaning, even inspiration; the business gets to see who is really performing, and– let’s be honest – gets more work done with fewer people in a shorter time. 

There’s a lot that’s good about this kind of micro-alignment of strategy and execution, especially for product-based or remote-working companies where work consists of processing, programming, delivering on concrete objectives (it might not be so useful if you’re in a relationship-based business).  High clarity is close to a necessity for well-functioning work, and if used well these tools can help everyone know what’s expected of them, fix mistakes in good time, focus on what matters most.   If KPI’s worked well for you in the last century, chances are continuous performance feedback could help today.

But Amazon takes even this obsessive technology to new heights.  At Amazon there is a constant flow of feedback, metrics, ratings.  Some of it is just a ratcheting-up of standard practices – 60 page lists containing thousands of performance metric data points instead of a cozy Facebook-style goal progress interface.  Some of it, though is simply toxic.  The Anytime Feedback Tool differs from competitors’ products in allowing comments to be anonymized in practice (comments go directly to a manager who does not have to reveal the sources to the individual concerned).  In addition, it seems to have been designed without any boundaries to the kind of feedback that can be given – the user guidance allegedly includes sample comments such as “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks”.  

It’s one thing to encourage feedback on specific work activity (“I felt concerned when he greenlighted the next stage of the XYZ project, since the tech team had not yet completed debugging of the current build”).  It’s another to talk suggestively about “inflexibility” or “earning trust”.  Such a loosey-goosey system, especially when its outputs are often used directly as evidence for performance reviews, can result in discrimination, back-biting and politicking instead of reliable performance evidence.  Never mind the legal risks, this damages the quality of the inputs on which decisions are based, a critical blow for a company that prides itself on getting ahead by dominant use of data analytics.

Amholes, but only for a season

One big use of those data analytics is informing personnel decisions: who gets a raise or a promotion, who stays, who goes.  More people leave than stay or get a raise at Amazon – a surveyby PayScale ranks the company #464 out of the Fortune 500 in employee tenure, with the average Amazonian staying just one year.  The use of stack-ranking – listing employees in a division or work-group in order of performance then firing the bottom tranche – means that turnover is institutionalized and even stars fear constantly that they will lose their jobs, perhaps by falling victim to the politics playing out around the Organizational Level Review, when performance is debated and the losers are out the door.  One particularly nasty twist picked up by the Times was the practice of sabotaging a colleague in order to get his or her talented direct reports on your own team.    As one survivor put it, “You learn how to diplomatically throw people under the bus.”

Amazon officially is fine with this level of “Purposeful Darwinism” as a former top Amazon HR exec put it.  They appear to distrust innovations in data-driven predictive hiring and instead rely on a barrage of interviews to select candidates, then measure how they perform on the job and fire them if they don’t work out.  Ex-Amazonians don’t suffer too dreadfully in the marketplace, as evidenced by the long list of ex-Amazonentrepreneurs and the number of Amazonians riding thecommunal bicycles at Facebook and learningto Zumba at LinkedIn.  

The company’s attrition rate is also not way out of line with the industry.  In the PayScale survey the 462^nd ranked company was Google, with scarcely a month’s longer average tenure, and the Fortune 500 leader in employee retention was that cutting-edge Wall Street darling Eastman Kodak.  In such a fast-moving business, tomorrow’s people may be very different from those you need today and aggression may drive people to work harder, smarter and longer.  As Jeff Bezos said in his 1997 letter to shareholders, “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three”.

Perhaps most people want that choice.  Amazon has its work cut out in hiring.  Sourcing for jobs is now country-wide and more than 4,500 jobs are open at head-office.  Issues in warehouse hiring have been eased by the introduction of 15,000 robots, but gaps remain and working in an Amazon warehouse is often seen as a job of last resort.  Even a generousinitiative to pay upfront 95% of tuition for a range of qualifications leading directly to in-demand jobs has failed to attract workers – in the 3 years during which the program has been running only 2,000 people have signed up worldwide and Amazon does not reveal completion rates beyond boasting of the first employee to finish and start working in her community as a nurse. 

Luckily, Amazon does not need that many people, or the same people for more than short bursts.  Its business is changing so rapidly, talents that are essential in 2015 may be irrelevant in 2020.  And a fraction of the workforce welcomes the competition and pressure.  If Amazon can automate and distill work down so it can be done by a few pugilists, their business model may be – and, let’s face it, has been – robust.

Is Amazon the future?

Of course, what concerns all of us is the usual WIFM – is Amazon showing the way in human resource practice?  Will I have to turn into an Amabot  or an Amhole in a few years simply to keep my job?

Sadly, the answer is “perhaps”.  With the globalshift of wealth and power from workers to owners, and the spread of workplace technology in terms of robots, continuous-management software, big data analytics and increasinglyintelligent cloud robotics and deep learning systems, even highly cognitively demanding, non-routine work and tricksy manual work may be vulnerable to being digitized or, at the very least, subject to the micro-controls Amazon has introduced.

There’s also the “gig economy” factor.  With Gen Y happy to work in bursts, with the rise of Uber and with businesses getting increasingly granular about their human capital needs, it is possible that the Amazon model of working in short, intense bursts will become the 21^st century equivalent of the 9 to 5.

But even if we become machines, we do not need to become monsters.  Human decency – empathy – is  a huge evolutionary advantage and it makes the world a better place to live and work in.  While we can’t expect the short-term-focused financial markets to recognize that, we can expect businesses who want to be around for the long term to take such a powerful factor into account in their strategic planning. 

To achieve that, we in HR need to show them the numbers: commission high-quality research that examines the impact of empathy in the workplace, get the right metrics in place to show the power of positive dissent and the increased productivity from engaged, supportive teams, state our case for compassion in numbers-driven and action-focused terms.  

We also need to recognize that these conditions may not apply everywhere.  In some business sectors or functions Amabots may be the right answer for everyone concerned, including the employees.   It isn't the only answer, unless we fail to investigate all the other options.  If we do, we may as well resign ourselves to a future as Ambots and invest now in a company that threatens to define workplace excellence as the ruthless exploitation of human lives.

Learn to love assessments

Admit it: when asked to take an assessment, your first impulse is to run for the hills.  No matter how well-prepared and confident you are, there’s something unsettling about being assessed.  Especially when the assessment concerns your future career.

In reality, assessments are things to love, not dread.  Let’s take a look at the facts behind five common assessment fears and see if we can learn to love that assessment.

FEAR 1: Assessments aren’t fair

FACT 1: They're the fairest part of recruitment 

When researchers compared the effectiveness of different recruitment methods, they found that comprehensive assessment results were over 5 times better than job experience at predicting future high performers, and at least twice as effective as other common recruitment approaches. 

Good assessments get these outstanding results because they have been validated.    In everyday English, that means they have serious, long-term research behind them to prove that they measure accurately and consistently, that they measure everyone in the same way, and that their results really do predict performance at work.  

If you are a future star – which of course you are – you should jump at the chance of taking an assessment as the most reliable way to show your true worth.

FEAR 2: I forget everything I know when I take tests

FACT 2: Assessments are panic-proof

Good assessments are not about what you know, so much as how you work.  Not only is that a far stronger predictor of how well you’ll do in the job, it also does not vary much with nerves.  Anxious people may forget where they put the car keys, but they rarely undergo a personality transformation, or radically change their core capabilities and preferences.  So long as you properly prepare yourself for the assessment, you’ll do just fine.

Also, remember that no single answer or test will ever totally determine your fate.  Good psychometric assessments use multiple approaches to assess each ability or preference.  Good recruiters look at the complete person, using multiple assessments and other reliable selection methods.  They look for strengths, for what you can bring to the job, for how you can contribute.  

Your best chance of success comes from answering assessments openly and honestly.  That way you will show your best and truest self, and dramatically increase your chances of being matched to a job where you will succeed and be fulfilled.

FEAR 3: Messing up could cost me my dream job

FACT 3: Assessments help you get the right job

The power of assessments to reveal the truth about you works both ways.  If you do well on the assessment, you can be confident that you will do well in the job.  But what happens if the assessment reveals you are not a great fit?  Will it wreck your chances of getting hired?

Yes, and that’s a good thing.  

Imagine you did not take the assessment, but managed to charm your way through the other selection stages anyway.  It might feel great to land a job, but the work would almost certainly not play to your strengths.  You would find yourself uncomfortably challenged, feel increasingly frustrated and despondent and most likely underperform.  Within a year, you would probably have left or been asked to leave.  Far better to hold out for the right job, the one that demands what you naturally do well, and where the work environment suits your preferences and needs.

Your assessment results can guide you to that right job.  You will learn what you do well, what kind of work most interests you, what to look for in a workplace and what to watch out for.  This self-knowledge gives you a blueprint for future success.  Use it to apply for jobs where you have what it takes to be a star.  Don’t waste your time and blunt your happiness trying to be something you are not.

FEAR 4: Assessments will pigeonhole me

FACT 4: Assessments show the best of you

Because they focus on what genuinely drives performance, assessments are all about what you can do, not what you can’t.  

The best assessments focus on a range of performance predictors: what you do well, what you like doing, how you solve problems, the kind of work environment that best motivates you.  Together, these form a rich and very reliable picture of how you get your best results at work – a blueprint you can apply to a wide range of jobs. 

Of course there are some things good assessments won’t show.  They can’t tell what color your hair is, or whether you prefer hot dogs to burgers, or your views on snowboarding or Game of Thrones or the ideal summer vacation.  That’s because these things have absolutely nothing to do with how well you will do a job.  

If recruiters knew them, these irrelevancies could (and, sadly, often do) end up influencing hiring decisions.  Not only would that create the conditions for illegal discrimination, it could mean you miss out on a great job or get put in a job that does not play to your strengths.  

Be reassured that assessments stick to what really matters, and that way they show the best, the most real you.

FEAR 5: I will feel a failure when I get the results

FACT 5: You will discover your unique path to success

Trade secret: there is no such thing as a perfect assessment result.  

Good assessments look instead at fit: how well your capabilities and preferences match the reality of a specific job.  Assessments mostly do not give you a score as such and, where they do, higher is not necessarily better.  If the job does not draw on a particular capability, it is irrelevant whether you are a star or a starter in that area.  Only the things proven to predict performance in that individual job matter.

It’s important to remember that the perfect candidate never exists.  Nobody demonstrates every capability and no set of needs or preferences is better than another.  

In addition, success in most jobs depends on only a handful of characteristics, and often moderate ability is enough to ensure success.  If your reasoning abilities are assessed around the average range, for instance, you may struggle as a rocket scientist but there is no reason why you could not be an excellent manager or sales executive.  

What matters is not your scores  but matching your profile to a job where those strengths lead to success.

Love that assessment!

The truth is, we all have our own talents and needs, and every job makes its own demands.  Assessments can reveal our best-fit path, and help us avoid the wasted time, effort and heart-break that comes with going after and getting the wrong job or career. 

When it comes to assessments, what’s not to love?

Prepping for no-prep assessments

I am sure you have heard of Six Sigma, 6S.  You probably also know the Six Prep Points, 6P: Proper preparation prevents pitifully poor performance.

Good tongue-twister, and an even better idea.  But how should you react when you are told there is no preparation necessary for an assessment?  Is it a trick?  An idiot-filter?  Surely there is something you can do?

Er, no…

Most test-setters are telling the truth when they say you do not need to prepare for an assessment.  The best assessments – the ones that predict job performance accurately and consistently – focus on the deep traits and abilities that define your identity.  Nobody knows for sure whether these characteristics are inherent or learned, but they are deep-seated, hard to change and cannot be crammed or prepped for at the last minute.

This is a good thing.  

You are most likely going to be in work for decades, so you deserve a job where you will be fulfilled, happy and successful.  Assessments get at the full truth about your capabilities, and match you with the full truth about what drives success in the job.  If there’s a good match between what you can do and what the job needs, great.  If not, better that you find out at the application stage and look elsewhere.  There's little worse than getting hired into the wrong job and flunking out before you have gotten your first annual performance review, as happens to anything from 12% to 48% of new hires.

Well, yes…

Having said that you cannot prepare for in-depth assessments, you can and should get take five common-sense steps to make sure the full truth about you comes out. 

• Make sure you will not be disturbed when you are taking an assessment.  Get comfortable, warn others not to interrupt you, turn off your phone and disable app notifications and any other distractions.  Do not even think about multi-tasking.  Take the necessary 20 minutes or so and focus entirely on the assessment.

• Get familiar with the type of assessment.  Find out what the assessment is about, how many questions there are, how long you have to answer each question, whether you need any special equipment (e.g. a calculator).  Take the practice questions, several times if necessary.   If you can, do this preparation a while before you actually take the assessment, so you know what to expect and feel relaxed and confident on the day.

• If the assessment is timed, manage the minutes.   Work out in advance how long you have to answer each question, and how many questions you should have answered halfway through and three quarters of the way through the total time allowed.  If you find yourself slipping behind, start making educated guesses (you can usually immediately discount one or even two possible answers).  If you only have a minute left, click through the remaining answers randomly.  You score nothing for blank responses, so at this last-minute stage you can only gain by guess-responses. 

• Be yourself.  Go with your instincts, not what you think you ought to say.  You want the assessment to reflect the best, the truest you, so answer in the ways that feel most natural.  If you are unsure how to respond to a question, your first thought is often the best one.  If you get really stuck, think about how someone who knows you well would describe you and your choices. 

• Stay relaxed.  Try to keep calm before, during and after the assessment.  Take a break between assessments, refresh yourself and stretch your legs.  Give yourself a small but satisfying reward once you are done.  Unless you are doing a timed assessment, do not worry about going too fast or too slow.  Once you have answered a question, do not give it another thought.  Remember, the assessment is there to show your strengths.  The more at ease and open you are, the more of your true self the results will reveal.

Don’t panic – and don’t worry if you do

Even the best prepared candidates get the jitters, but there’s no need to worry if it happens to you. 

Good assessments are anxiety-proof.  Nerves can make us forget the date of the Louisiana Purchase or whether we left the car keys on the desk or in a pocket, but even people in a state of all-out panic do not typically forget their core personality or how they go about solving problems, working with others or getting the job done.  

If you do start feeling nervous in an assessment, stop for ten seconds and take a slow, deep breath.  Remind yourself that the assessment is there to show your strengths, not to trip you up.  If you still cannot focus on the question, just choose an option and move on – a single fluffed or random answer is not going to make much difference in the context of even the shortest assessment. 

Remember, too, that assessments are all about finding your strengths, not your weaknesses.  Go in with an open attitude, make sure you are not going to be distracted or interrupted, and try to enjoy the process.  

How often, after all, do you get to spend half an hour completely focused on yourself?  Especially when the results could – and one day will – lead you to your dream job.