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?
