Hiring a candidate is crucial as you need to ensure that the employee adds value to the organization, the employee understands the needs and values of the organization and abides by them and strives for progress. Hiring a new candidate is a tedious process and can be disheartening if the employee who was hired as potential ‘asset’ turned out to be performing below average. These experiences become an obstacle furthermore causing hindrance in the hiring process.
There are numerous ways that HR or the management can use to avoid mistakes while hiring.
Here are a few evaluation methods which will help predict the future performance of candidates.
Identify attributes critical to succeed
Identify competencies like knowledge, skills, abilities, and behavior that differentiate between high performers and their less successful peers. Understanding the characteristics that contribute to the team or organizational growth to develop a well-defined competency model. Once the competency model is identified as per organizational needs, it is easier to determine the quality of the candidate pool, exploring the attributes in an objective, fair, and structured manner. Ensure that you involve a subject matter expert who will not only customize the model to increase its relevance to the organization but also validate the accuracy of the model in helping to predict performance. Take note of subjective opinions and personal biases as they can lead to frustrating, time-consuming, and costly hiring mistakes.
Use high-quality assessment methods
There many forms of screening and evaluation method of hiring and one of the most commonly used technique is resume review. Practical and theoretical implications of research for 85 years conducted by Dr. Frank Schmidt and Dr. John Hunter, showed that the data included in a resume accounts for at most 4% of candidate’s future job performance; which means that 96% of the candidate’s potential is still left unknown. Hence, it is essential to design tests that will judge the cognitive abilities of an employee. Here are a few points to consider while planning additional methods:
- Choose assessment methods that will evaluate critical competencies and are designed explicitly for the purpose.
- Consider the job role and understand the level of skill with which a candidate should perform. In case an organization is using psychometric instruments, ensure that they are of a suitable type and difficulty level.
- Opt for assessment method that establishes quality standards and provides highly reliable and valid performance metrics consistently.
- Use various methods to evaluate candidates. Along with a structured interview, use another method like a cognitive ability test, General Mental Ability Test, and Integrity test to reduce the risk of making a hiring mistake.
Improve your current approach
Resume reviews, reference checks, and unstructured interviews are comparatively weak predictors of job performance, but organizations should adopt new methods of predicting performance. Few techniques that will help you increase the structure of your current interview approach:
- Build questions about critical competencies to ensure hiring of the right candidate for the right job role.
- Probe further when you identify any “red flags” and ensure candidates get equal opportunities to respond to interview questions.
- Record candidates’ response in a structured manner, starting with a description, situation, actions taken, and the result of their efforts making it easier to gather data for cross-reference.
- Evaluate candidates using an objective rating scale, which subject matter experts have agreed are appropriate for judging capability.
Remember 'R'
The alphabet “r” is the conventional symbol to represent validity in the scientific literature. HR professionals must validate the performance of any instrument and judge how good is the technology in selecting a high potential employee. This technique is known as predictive validity, and it measures the scores obtained in a test to predict future performance of a candidate. The score of “r” ranges between 0 and 1. Methods that score higher than 0.5 are considered reliable.
Most of the organization follow a hiring process that goes like 1) resume reviews, 2) phone interviews, 3) in-person interviews, 4) testing. An article by Harvard Business Reviews states that testing as a first screening mechanism can effectively weed out the least-suitable applicants, leaving a smaller, better-qualified pool to undergo costly personalized aspects of hiring.
It is impossible to judge the capabilities of an individual based on their experience and qualifications or how they have answered questions in an interview. The interviewer must keep in mind external factors like nervousness or too lengthy process of interview and form filling may lead to poor performance in an interview. One of the best methods is to judge on skill testing or work sample tests that resemble the tasks candidates would be assigned as per their job roles.