If I was responsible for an organisation’s recruitment, there are some principles I would build into every selection process.
None of them on their own guarantees that you will hire the right person. Recruitment simply does not work that way. Every source of information about a candidate contains some degree of error, whether it is a CV, an application, a reference, an interview or a psychometric test. The objective is not to find the perfect selection technique, but to build a process that progressively reduces uncertainty.
These principles are not complicated but consistently applying them can substantially improve both the quality of recruitment decisions and the experience of the person who eventually joins the organisation.
These principles are in no particular order, and all are equally important.
Standardisation:
Candidates applying for the same role should, as far as reasonably possible, go through the same process, be assessed against the same criteria and be asked the same core questions, apart from ones that are unique to the candidate based on their CV. This sounds obvious, but recruitment frequently becomes surprisingly informal once managers become involved.
Standardisation does not remove judgement from recruitment, instead it creates a framework within which judgement can be exercised. It also makes decisions easier to explain and defend because candidates have been assessed using comparable evidence.
Standardisation also makes it easier to compare candidates, and when it is done well, it can sometimes yield interesting data about the candidate.
For example, at Fermion we send the candidates a text requesting a time to chat with them about the
testing. This stops candidates from being ambushed by an unknown call and gives them control over the timing of the chat, which usually takes about 5 minutes. Most candidates respond within an hour or two and a time is arranged, a straightforward five minute, albeit standardised chat, follows and the candidate is then set up for the testing.
However, sometimes you get a candidate who takes 24 hours to respond, or doesn’t, and we need to follow up with a phone call. Sometimes the 5-minute chat turns out to be a 10-minute chat because they talk too much or ask irrelevant questions. None of these preclude the candidate from progressing, but our client may have had a similar experience and then a pattern is emerging, and hypotheses are generated which can be tested through the next steps. All of this data is easy to collect and comes from a good, standardised process; standardisation allows meaningful comparisons.
Someone taking 24 hours to reply does not mean they are unresponsive. Someone talking too much in one telephone conversation does not mean they have poor interpersonal judgement. But if similar observations emerge during screening, testing, reference checking and interview, the pattern starts to matter.
Two-Way Process:
Organisations understandably spend considerable effort trying to understand candidates, but candidates are also trying to understand the organisation. Good recruitment therefore involves providing realistic information about the role, the workplace, expectations, culture and leadership styles.
There is little value in persuading someone to accept a role that they subsequently discover is different from what they expected. A successful recruitment process is not simply one where the preferred candidate accepts the job. It is one where both parties have enough information to make a sensible decision.
This is also where recruitment begins to overlap with employee engagement. Expectations established during recruitment become the psychological starting point for the employment relationship and some
research suggests it can help reduce staff turnover.
Interestingly, research suggests that realistic information about a role may also signal organisational honesty, which appears to be one mechanism through which realistic job previews influence later turnover.
Plus, the new employee is going to find out the true nature of the role, so why not be upfront in the first instance?
Quality of Evidence:
Recruitment decisions are predictions. We are trying to predict how someone who does not yet work for the organisation will perform once they do. To determine this, we rely on evidence and, unsurprisingly, some evidence is better than other evidence.
A polished CV may tell us something, but it is carefully constructed by the candidate, a professional writer or AI, and includes only what the author thinks will enhance the candidate’s appeal to the prospective employer.
An interview provides useful information, but interview performance is not the same thing as job performance. But also like the CV, the candidate is trying to read the panel and answer in a way they think the panel wants to hear. Hardly ironclad evidence.
References provide another perspective, although they have their own limitations and are a poor predictor of future performance. Take a movie as an example. Two people can watch the same movie, and one can love it and the other find it boring. Same data, but two completely different interpretations and they are both correct. References are similar in that the same behaviour can be interpreted very differently depending on who is providing the reference.
The strongest decisions usually emerge when several different sources of evidence begin pointing in the same direction. I tend to think of this as a “convergence of data”. If the application, screening process, testing, behavioural evidence, technical assessment and interview are all telling a broadly consistent story, confidence in the hiring decision increases considerably.
Summary:
Effective recruitment is not about finding one perfect selection technique. Every source of candidate information contains some degree of error, so stronger hiring decisions come from progressively reducing uncertainty. Standardising the process, giving candidates realistic information about the role and combining several sources of quality evidence creates a more reliable basis for deciding who to appoint.
If your recruitment process still relies heavily on CVs and interviews, there may be opportunities to collect better evidence before making the final decision. Fermion helps organisations build psychometric testing and structured assessment into their recruitment process so hiring decisions are based on more than instinct.
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.
