Last week I outlined three principles that can improve recruitment and selection decisions. None involved a revolutionary new technique. They were simply about introducing more discipline into a decision that organisations often make with surprisingly little structure.
Here are three more:
1. Screen Candidates Before You Invest Too Much Time
A short telephone screen should be one of the first stages of the selection process, apart from a well written job advertisement that asks candidates to ‘Please reply with your resume and a cover letter containing three or four sentences explaining what attracted you to this role and one thing from this advertisement that you think would be important for success in the position.’ That is the beginning of your data gathering about each candidate.
But that point aside, a short standardised telephone interview of 10 to 15 minutes should be your first step.
I prefer telephone screening rather than a Teams meeting because, at this stage, seeing the candidate adds information that may not be particularly useful. Appearance, age and mannerisms can influence our impressions before we have established whether the person meets the basic requirements of the role.
A telephone screen does not need to become another interview. Ten to fifteen minutes is often enough to establish whether there is a reasonable basis for progressing.
It can cover some of the fundamentals: relevant experience, qualifications, technical knowledge, work eligibility, salary expectations, communication requirements and other genuine requirements of the role.
It also provides an opportunity to explain some of the realities of the position. There is little value progressing someone through several stages of recruitment only to discover late in the process that their salary expectations are incompatible with the role, they cannot work the required hours, or some other basic condition makes the appointment impossible.
Good recruitment should progressively narrow the field so that management time is increasingly spent on candidates who could realistically be appointed.
2. Ask Candidates to Demonstrate Something
Testing does not necessarily mean psychometric testing, although well selected psychometric assessments can provide valuable information about cognitive ability, personality, behavioural tendencies and likely workplace preferences.
Depending on the role, testing might also involve a work sample, technical exercise, written task, presentation, simulation or practical demonstration.
The principle is simple. Where possible, ask candidates to demonstrate something relevant to the job rather than relying entirely on what they tell you they can do.
There is an important qualification here: whatever assessment you use needs to be fair and consistent. For example, consider asking candidates to prepare a presentation at home, where one candidate might spend an hour preparing theirs while another spends six hours refining every detail. Both presentations may be impressive, but are you really comparing the candidates on the same basis?
Good assessment design tries to control those differences. The objective is not to make recruitment harder for candidates. It is to create comparable evidence that helps you make a better decision.
3. Interview Last
This is probably the principle that challenges traditional recruitment practice the most.
For decades, the default process has been familiar: review the CVs, identify the people who look interesting and interview them.
The problem is that interviews are powerful social experiences. Once we meet someone we like, it becomes remarkably easy to interpret subsequent information in ways that support that initial impression. Confirmation bias can quietly influence the rest of the selection process.
A stronger approach is to collect useful evidence first: screen the candidates, assess relevant capabilities and use appropriate psychometric testing where it adds value. Then interview the people who have already demonstrated that they are credible possibilities for appointment.
This changes the purpose of the interview.
Rather than
interviewing a stranger who tells you what they think you want to hear, the interview becomes an opportunity to explore the evidence already collected, investigate areas of uncertainty, understand the candidate more deeply and allow both parties to decide whether the relationship is likely to work.
None of these principles are particularly revolutionary. Effective recruitment is not about finding one brilliant technique that predicts with certainty who will succeed because every source of candidate information has limitations.
The
better approach is to design a disciplined recruitment process in which several imperfect sources of information are combined intelligently. When the CV, screening process, testing, work samples and interview begin pointing in the
same direction, you can have greater confidence in the decision.
You will never completely eliminate uncertainty from hiring, but you can dramatically improve the odds.
Small Changes, Big Results: The Tiny Tweaks That Transform Recruitment:
The
small change that delivers dramatically better hiring decisions is simple:
- Screen candidates first
- Test second
- Interview last
Better hiring decisions come from better evidence. Psychometric assessment helps you understand how candidates are likely to perform, not just how they present.
The focus of Fermion is
"Psychometric Testing for Recruitment" and
“Recruitment to Retention: How to Select Good Staff & Keep Them”. If you would like to learn how to select good staff and keep them, please
contact us at Fermion.
“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”
Eleanor Roosevelt.
NB: I use ChatGPT as a writing and editing tool, but the ideas, judgement and final views in this article are my own.
