5 Things Talent Acquisition Professionals Should Stop Doing

Great People Decisions are not hard to make and have huge cost and productivity dividends. According to an article in HBR, “Even a medium sized U. S Company could increase its value by $ 1 billion through better people decisions at the top”. You can make significantly better People Decisions while hiring. Here are 5 things to reduce the subjectivity in the hiring process and bring Science to People Decisions:

1. Stop Hiring without creating Success Profiles:

Job Descriptions stops at identifying the qualifications, experience, personality and behavior traits required for the role. Naturally, you don't want to stop your thought process at the JD.

Success profile defines the mission of the job and describes the major outcomes needed to achieve the mission. It also identifies the leadership and workplace competencies needed for this. Make that small time investment in an activity, which has far reaching impact. (Remember ‘the cost of a bad hire is 1.5-2 times of his/her salary’).

2. Stop asking Inexperienced Managers to screen for Senior Leadership Positions:

In the past decade or so, in some sectors, HR Career graphs have been modeled in a way that Talent Acquisition takes the lowest rung in the ladder. Combine that with a sense of power that an individual gets through interviewing and supposedly ‘deciding’ the fate of other individuals and we have a lethal combination.

So, if you ‘have to’ have inexperienced managers screen for Senior leadership positions, augment interviews with work samples, personality questionnaires, Emotional Intelligence Questionnaires, changing interviews to structured interviews and rigorous reference and background check.

3. Eliminate Unstructured Interviews conducted without clear objectives:

Imagine an inexperienced resource sitting down for an interview with a candidate for a senior Leadership position. He/She starts with the interview like an everyday conversation – typically this tends to be informal, open ended, flexible and free flowing. Questions are not pre-set. Unstructured interviews allow for great social interaction but have a potential for bias. This type of interview is highly dependent on the interviewer’s skill and therefore can be conducted for one person at a time, thus making it expensive. The variety in the type of questions across interviewers can create inconsistency in the outcome and therefore less reliability.

On the other hand, Structured interviews ensure candidates have equal opportunities to provide information and are assessed accurately and consistently. All candidates are asked the same predetermined questions in the same order and the responses are evaluated using the same rating scale and standards for acceptable answers. Research has corroborated the high Reliability of these. They are a powerful means of both obtaining information and gaining insights. Do you still believe in the power of ‘Tell me something about yourself’ and that you wouldn’t get ‘prepared’ answers?

4. Avoid hiring without Competency based Assessment:

Conducting a series of Personal Interviews in which each interviewer is looking for different sets of information, different personality and behavior traits and this information can be extracted solely on the basis of the social interaction between the interviewer and interviewee will at best give you various personal points of view basis the interviewer’s own knowledge and experience.

Research has shown that Competency Based Assessment is an objective and effective method of selection interviews, outperforming less structured interviewing in their predictive power. Furthermore, competency based interviewing has been shown to compliment personality based questionnaires thus increasing the overall validity of the selection process when used in combination.

5. Never hire without a thorough and complete Background Verification:

You're just about to offer a key management position to the seemingly perfect candidate sitting in front of you In this situation, how often do you look just at the person's resume, call a few references, and run the name past a few friends? Do you ever take the time to dig deeper? After performing traditional due diligence, it's understandable for a busy manager to think that's all that can be done. But this thinking can backfire, sometimes with serious consequences – it can lead to legal, financial and PR risks that could cause monetary and non-monetary losses.

Background Verification ensures that the Talent you hire is trust worthy, compliant and does not come with any legal, criminal history or links – this ought to be the minimum requirement in an organization. Collaborate with reliable and leading background check service providers to ensure a safe and compliant workplace.