Look through almost any collection of job advertisements and you will find the phrase “attention to detail” appearing regularly, usually alongside other familiar requirements such as excellent communication skills, teamwork and problem solving.
Employers clearly value the skill, but how much effort do they put into assessing it during recruitment? We recognise that small mistakes can have serious consequences, yet we often accept a candidate's claim that they possess attention to detail without gathering much evidence to support it.
Attention to detail is easy to claim, but considerably harder to demonstrate, with small mistakes potentially having significant consequences. Consider an accounts employee who enters an incorrect payment amount, an administrator who overlooks an important contractual condition or a manager who fails to notice an inconsistency in a report before making a significant business decision.
None of these mistakes necessarily involves a lack of technical knowledge or experience, but the consequences can be expensive.
For a small business, where resources are often stretched and employees have considerable individual responsibility, such errors can be particularly disruptive. The cost is not always limited to correcting the original mistake. There may be lost productivity, dissatisfied customers, reputational damage and management time spent resolving problems that should never have occurred.
What Does a Candidate's Application Really Tell You?
A candidate's CV and written application provide an obvious starting point. Spelling mistakes, inconsistent formatting, incorrect dates and careless omissions may raise legitimate questions, particularly when the position requires accurate written communication or document preparation. A poorly worded application with errors does tell you something, however, a ‘perfect’ CV and application doesn’t tell you much as you cannot know who wrote it and how long it took.
Similarly, the problem arises during interviews. We might ask candidates whether they consider themselves detail oriented or invite them to describe a situation in which they identified an error. Their responses may be informative, but we are still relying heavily on what they tell us about themselves.
Behavioural interview questions can improve the evidence. Asking candidates to explain how they check their work, identify discrepancies or manage competing demands may reveal useful information about their approach. Nevertheless, describing an ability and demonstrating it are two different things.
Testing What Actually Matters
A more effective approach is to provide candidates with an opportunity to demonstrate their attention to detail through an assessment relevant to the position. For an administrative role, this might involve identifying errors in a document or checking the consistency of information across several records. For an accounts position, candidates could be asked to identify discrepancies in a set of figures, while a managerial applicant might be presented with a report containing inconsistencies that could influence an important decision.
These exercises can provide valuable evidence, particularly when the tasks reflect genuine job requirements and all candidates are assessed against the same criteria. And, as with any recruitment assessment, the results should be considered
alongside other information rather than treated as a definitive measure of suitability.
The objective is not to find a candidate who never makes mistakes, but to identify someone who has the ability and work habits to recognise, prevent and correct the mistakes that matter.
Attention to detail is an important requirement in many positions, but its value depends on how it relates to the actual work being performed. If employers consider it sufficiently important to include in a job advertisement, they should also give serious consideration to how they will assess it. After all, identifying an employee's lack of attention to detail during recruitment is considerably less expensive than discovering it after they have joined the business.
At Fermion, we help organisations make better recruitment decisions by using appropriate psychometric testing alongside other evidence from the selection process. If you would like to explore how testing could improve your recruitment decisions, please
contact us for a conversation.
