DDI’s Talent Management Intelligence

Turning Doctors into Managers

Healthcare’s new physician leader calls for someone who, figuratively, holds a dual-major in medicine and leadership.

By Debra Walker

Doctors become doctors because they’re interested in the art of healing, so promoting doctors into leadership roles needs to balance the hands-on practice of medicine with the demands of a leadership role.

So how can talent management professionals successfully transition doctors into managers? Define the role, diagnose a physician’s leadership readiness, and develop them to be the leaders your organization needs.

Define: What you are looking for in your physician leaders?

You must first define what to look for scientifically by clarifying the role of a physician leader. This includes the combination of knowledge, experience, competencies, and personal traits that is required for a leader in your organization to be successful.

Diagnose: What is needed for a physician to make the leadership leap?

Next, you have to measure physicians against the profile to determine their readiness to step into a leadership role, whether they have the personal attributes to be a leader, and if they have demonstrated solid performance in their role.

Develop: How can a physician acquire or improve their leadership skills?

Now determine those areas that can easily be developed—specifically areas like communication, coaching, delegating, and managing others, versus those more personal attributes that are more difficult to develop. Physician development has to be relevant to them for them to justify spending the time on it.

Debra Walker is a member of DDI’s Healthcare Practice.
 
Read the full article, Developing Physician Leaders, for more on how you can define, diagnose, and develop with your physician leadership audience.

2013 Selection Trends: Managing Uncertainty for Success

By: Scott Erker, Ph.D.

Black and white is out. Uncertainty remains with us this season, but will inspire, rather than depress, creativity in selection design. This uncertain environment has been described as VUCA – a business environment characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.  In this sneak-peek preview, we’ll reveal HR must-haves and look at how top-performers are dressing for success.

Without question, smart will remain on trend. The companies to watch will sew up the knowledge gaps as workforce analytics will no longer be a high-tech accessory, but rather a complement to future growth. Inadequate or out of date success profiles and competency models will be counterproductive. More, not less, will be the rallying cry around selection tools, as U.S. organizations draw inspiration from their peers overseas. And, candidates that demonstrate innovative and adaptive capabilities will be in short supply and great demand.

Are you suited-up for success? Read on as we reveal this season’s selection forecast.

Eliminate the guesswork.

In recent years, organizations have done a bang-up job of mining talent analytics—"Big Data"— for insights on employee engagement and retention. There has been, however, a missed opportunity to apply a treasure trove of information to hiring and promotion processes. Many who dig into the data limit their inquiry to time-to-hire and cost-to-fill analyses. Others look to improve the source and/or quality of their hires. Surprisingly, only a few put it all together and maximize the data’s true potential: leverage talent acquisition data as a critical component for strategic workforce planning and overall business strategy.

Why are workforce analytics so important in times of uncertainty? Planning-by-the-numbers affords organizations added flexibility to respond to economic and staffing demand shifts. In a world of unknowns, the hiring stakes are higher. HR needs to ensure that it is identifying the best candidates: future high performers who will contribute directly to growth.

For big data to fulfill its promise, information must flow freely between talent acquisition and leadership. Currently, there is little sharing between the two groups. Hiring managers aren't doing their organizations any favors when they don't capture and exchange experiential data on high performers. These leaders fail to recognize the value of the information that allows HR to match the characteristics of successful hires to those of prospective candidates.

A fully functioning feedback system will generate the data necessary to illuminate hidden patterns, throw out irrelevant, non-predictive factors, and update job profiles to meet current and future needs. Trendsetting HR operations will have the ongoing ability to measure and refine their hiring tools, and anticipate future skill needs.

Hire the whole person.

A smile may be worth a thousand words, but it is unlikely to predict or ensure on-the-job performance. After decades of research, the solution remains the same: complete a comprehensive success profile analysis to avoid hiring mistakes. First and foremost, determine the ideal mix of knowledge, experience, competencies and personal attributes required for the position. Next, decide how you will measure each of the components. With this type of checklist, you can exercise due diligence and ensure you get what you need—without personal prejudices polluting the process. 

Best-in-class selection systems that evaluate the whole person utilize a multi-method approach. They not only measure the same behaviors in many different ways, they also allow the capture of behaviors essential in times of uncertainty: adaptability, creativity, initiative and judgment.

Another enormous benefit of expanding the traditionally narrow selection focus is that the hiring manager can evaluate the gaps, if any, between the ideal candidate and the prospective one(s). They can then assess whether the missing skills are trainable or not. Rather than disqualify a good candidate that hasn’t used a software suite, for example, the manager can consider post-hire training and development to complete an otherwise perfect profile. On the other hand, a seemingly attractive applicant with low cognitive ability scores can be an unlikely candidate for development (and employment).

Import confidence.

Staffing directors outside the U.S. are enjoying greater certainty than their counterparts in our 50 states. In a recent study, they gave their selection systems noticeably higher marks for efficiency, flexibility, and ability to identify the best candidate.

Additionally, these talent acquisition professionals tend to use a greater number of selection tools including knowledge tests, personality inventories and job simulations—and they plan to add more in the future. Comparative study results indicate a difference of 10 percentage points (or greater) in the frequency of current and intended use of tools by non-U.S. vs. U.S. organizations.

Clearly, our partners abroad know more and guess less. Given that most selection errors are attributable to an overreliance on hiring manager judgments, U.S. companies would do well to follow the lead from overseas. Let’s utilize more information-gathering tools and build in certainty to our selection systems.

Celebrate the candidate.

Make a good first impression—great advice for the candidate as well as the organization. Despite the sluggish economy, perfect candidates are hard to find … yet easy to turn off. It's true: there are more good jobs than qualified candidates, so the competition is fierce. There are only so many Harvard MBAs to go around, and like the rest-of-the-best, they are harder to retain.

The stakes have never been higher; employees and job seekers share copious quantities of information. From social media, prospective candidates can learn much of what they need to know about corporate cultures, interviewing processes, benefits, etc. In reality, the first impression is gathered well in advance of the first face-to-face with the hiring manager.

Still, the interview and other pre-employment processes are perfect places to lose qualified candidates—so take heed. First and foremost, portray the job accurately. Our selection survey reveals that only half of new hires are very confident in their decision to accept offers of employment. The data also shows that a realistic day-in-the-life preview greatly ups the confidence quotient, and goes a long way toward eliminating the revolving door.

A positive interview experience gets the “yes” when an offer is extended. But don’t stop there: work to continue engagement throughout the onboarding process and beyond. Remember, your pleased-with-the-process candidates, even the non-joiners, are potential best customers and/or real-life endorsements for your products or organization.

While many insights in this article stem from our industry knowledge, economic trends, and our expertise in selection systems, we also analyzed survey responses from over 250 staffing directors and over 2,000 new hires globally in 2012 to provide a deeper understanding of current and future trends in hiring. For the full report, including specific stats, graphs, and charts on hiring trends cited in this article, visit: www.ddiworld.com/gsf.

Executives Under the Microscope: What leaders CAN do is not always what they WILL do

By Matt Paese, Ph.D.

Excerpted from
Leadership Insights—How Executives React:  Behavior amid Challenges

When business leaders step into new assignments, or are suddenly presented with new challenges, what do they do, specifically? How do executives react? In Part 1 of our Leadership Insights series, we look into the data to answer the following question: 

“Which specific behaviors most frequently characterize the responses of executives as they take on new and challenging assignments?” 

With startling regularity, organizations give tremendous responsibility to leaders whose track records suggest that they can be successful making the jump to a more challenging assignment, only to learn (the hard way) that what a leader CAN do is often very different from what a leader actually WILL do on the job. 

If one thing characterizes the challenge of executive leadership, it is the ability to adapt.  Surprises occur almost constantly, requiring leaders to react instinctively without training or preparation.  The question so many organizations struggle to answer as they plan for the future is, “How will our leaders react when surprised by the business challenges we will soon face?” As we will see, that struggle may be due, in large part, to the fact that many aren’t looking closely enough at the specific behavior patterns that leaders display when responding to challenges.

The only true way of knowing what someone will do when presented with a new situation is of course to watch him or her do it.  But since we don’t have a low-risk way to watch leaders perform in jobs they haven’t yet assumed, we must find other ways of getting as close to what they will do as possible. Interviews that examine prior experiences and accomplishments are useful measures of what one did do in the past, and tests and inventories of personality, cognitive ability, or other stable internal attributes are helpful measures of one might or can do. But for complex assignments like executive leadership roles, these measures take us only part of the way to will do. 

Read all of Leadership Insights: Part One by visiting www.ddiworld.com/leadershipinsights, where you can also follow the series. Share your comments, questions and observations by posting a comment in this blog. 

"The Law of the Hammer" in Training - Part Two

By: Pete Weaver

Part Two

There are three general principles that should guide your plans to leverage social technology, particularly for leadership development and other “soft” skills:

1. Formal Learning is Still Important.

Our experience is that most interaction and leadership skills are actually best acquired and honed in a formal, intentional learning experience that includes lots of time for controlled practice and feedback.

Social media tools should never serve as a replacement to formal learning! Rather, they are ideal for surrounding and enriching the formal learning events. Social media technologies are best suited to:

• Setting the stage for learning.
• Helping extend the learning.
• Keeping learners focused on applying their skills.
• Enhancing networking opportunities within a cohort of learners.

It is our firm belief that while the social tools sometimes seem magical, the true magic remains in the optimal mix of learning experiences.

2. Test to Learn—Adapt to Perfect.

There are two major arenas to pilot and test before you take social learning technology wide and deep: 1) people and 2) technology. Don’t underestimate the challenges with either.

Use focus groups, test cohorts, feedback surveys, and anecdotal hearsay to test and refine your approach with your people. Seek help from technical partners (internal and/or external) to shake out the new technology in your environment, on your devices, in your software mix, and through your firewall.

3. Don't Cut Communication Corners.

When an organization chooses to use social media to drive learning and development, it should take care to devote the same communication and orientation resources that it would for any major change initiative. There are no smart shortcuts to introducing technology for something as personal as learning. Be sure to plan and execute a thoughtful approach to communication and implementation suited to your culture and objectives.

Sometimes Pliers Are a Better Option

While there are numerous social media types and platforms available, some are more appropriate than others for learning and development in “soft skill” areas like leadership. We need to match the tool to the need; some social learning tools are better pliers than hammers. Each technology provides a different array of benefits, but no technology will work across all organizations or implementations, nor will it suit every type of content or topic.

Remember to seek an effective and balanced mix rather than putting the full training burden on just one approach, to test for both people and technology compatibility, and finally to thoroughly communicate and execute the strategy.

My father taught me at an early age two important things about household and automotive tools—1) having the right tool for the job is one key to success, and 2) knowing how to use it is equally important. Our craft in learning and development is no different. Matching the right mix of solutions for each situation is more important than conjuring up as many ways to use our “hammer du jour” as we can contrive.  

To learn more about integrating development tools and activities before, during, and after formal learning events, register for DDI’s Accelerating Development Beyond the Classroom webinar on February 12, 2013 from to 1-1:45 pm.

Patterson S. (Pete) Weaver is DDI’s Senior Vice President, Leadership Solutions.

"The Law of the Hammer" in Training

By: Pete Weaver

Part One

In 1996, Abraham Maslow quipped that “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” What does this have to do with business and training? Recently, I have become concerned that the “hammer du jour” in our metaphoric trunk is high technology.

First, let me say that this post is not a Luddite rant against technology per se. This new millennium has brought to our training tool boxes a host of promising, wonderful technologies like web-based training, virtual instructor-led classrooms, simulations, gaming, and social media, to name a few. These technology-based tools make it easier to deliver training to more learners, less expensively, more consistently, and across broader geographies and time zones.

However, there is a tendency for people to use these technologies like the proverbial hammer. Some organizations have pushed forms of e-learning into cultures with little online learning interest and/or infrastructure. Others have insisted on taking an exclusively “high tech” approach to teaching “high touch” skills like coaching and conflict resolution.

More recently, the universal technology panacea in some quarters seems to be the application of new social media technologies to learning (a.k.a. “Learning 2.0”). The notion that most people learn better and enjoy it more in a social environment is inarguable. For that matter, the traditional classroom (when led by an interactive teacher or facilitator) can be a very social milieu within which to learn, particularly if the learning objectives are focused on human skills, such as leadership skills.

The Downside to Harnessing New Training Tools

The social media buzz, meanwhile, is about technology-based interactive experiences like blogs, chat rooms, and discussion forums, not to mention the wildly successful commercial social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Yammer. Clearly, these new tools could be harnessed within our organizations to make learning more interactive, involving, and spontaneous, while also spanning geography and generations and capitalizing on the collective wisdom of groups.

But, some of these platforms can be risky for organizations in terms of security and legal liability. Technology can sometimes be surprisingly difficult and inconsistent. Corporate firewalls can be fussy about what they let through. And technology is always changing, which is good for progress but frustrating for infrastructure investments.

In addition, corporate cultures differ, just like people do, and what is easily adopted in one organization may be ineffective in another. And finally, there are regional and international variances in uptake, technology, and governing laws and institutions. Thus, the promise of social media is tempered by the complexities and uncertainties experienced by organizations to varying degrees.

Force-fitting Social Learning Tools

Unfortunately, some learning and development professionals have tried to force-fit social learning tools and platforms into topics and cultures whether or not they are necessarily well-suited. And regardless of the tools in our tool box, a few maxims about effective learning systems haven’t changed:

• What is the desired and necessary learning outcome? Is it awareness, knowledge, basic skill, or skill mastery?
• What is the nature of the content? Is the learning conceptual and/or kinetic in nature? Is the content sensitive or proprietary?
• What is the nature of the learner population? How do they best learn the type of content needed? What is their prior learning and technology experience? Are their learning styles homogeneous, or do learners come from different backgrounds, experiences, and generations?
• Is the environment around the learner conducive to the learning delivery modality being considered? Will the learners be able to be available, focused, and responsive?
• Will the learner’s managers and colleagues support the investment of time and money? Do they know how to reinforce—and do they value—learning in the workplace?

These tenets of learning system design apply regardless of the tools and technologies being used. In fact, the thoughtful application of these considerations can help any modality or approach shine when used in the situations for which they are best suited.

On the flip side, new technologies can suffer guilt by association when imposed improperly into circumstances ill-suited to their strengths. Let’s not kill promising young technologies with ill-conceived overuse and misuse.

To learn more about integrating development tools and activities before, during, and after formal learning events, register for DDI’s Accelerating Development Beyond the Classroom webinar on February 12, 2013 from to 1-1:45 pm.

Look for Pete Weaver’s follow-up post titled How to Leverage Social Technology in Training.

Patterson S. (Pete) Weaver is DDI’s Senior Vice President, Leadership Solutions.

Buyer's Remorse? Employers and New Hires Doubt Decisions

By: Scott Erker

Half of new employees are experiencing buyer’s remorse after taking a job offer this year. And they are not alone – many organizations also question whether they have made wise hiring decisions as one in eight new employees were failures in the last 12 months, according to DDI's latest global research on hiring trends. 

There is a great paradox in that both unemployment and the number of open positions hover at uncomfortably high levels—and simultaneously, organizations and candidates are shaky about the decisions they made in staffing and accepting roles this year.

DDI’s Global Selection Forecast 2012 research is the first forecast report completed post-recession and uncovers data about missed opportunities throughout the hiring process that impact confidence in newly-hired people and their fit to the job. The study includes responses from more than 250 staffing directors and 2,000 new hires from 28 countries and was conducted in partnership with Oracle.

The major findings include:

Where is the person we interviewed? When staffing directors were asked what the top reasons were for hiring mistakes, nearly one-third of responders blamed overreliance on hiring manager evaluations and 21 percent blamed candidates overselling their own skills. An unpleasant surprise after a candidate becomes an employee is that the new hire just is not cut out for the job. The shame of it all is that information about candidates goes undiscovered in the selection process. Hiring managers need to go farther below the surface to really get to the truth about an employee’s fit for the job.

The research reported that only half (48 percent) of all organizations rated the hiring process as highly effective. This is a very painful ‘look in the mirror’ for hiring managers and the staffing directors they support, especially considering that organizations said that 14 percent of their new hires were failures in last 12 months.
 
I didn’t apply for this job! The research also revealed that only 51 percent of new hires are confident in their decision to accept a new job.  Adding to this uncertainty is the failure of the hiring process to paint a realistic picture of the job, department and company. Not surprising, the research also found that organizations that do a better job of giving a candidates a realistic job preview, yielded hires that were more confident in their decision, highly engaged and less likely to get right back on the job boards.

One way to avoid quick quits is to be real in describing what it will be like on day 5, 50 and 150 for that candidate during the interviewing process. Painting a rosy picture or pulling a bait-and-switch once they’re on the job will just mean you’ll fill that position again in 6 to 12 months.

Bad interviews do more harm.  Interviews remain the hardest working selection tool to predict new-hire performance and resulting business impact, according to the research. The only catch – they have to be done correctly. Only one in three staffing directors said their hiring managers are skilled at conducting high quality interviews—probably due to the fact that the same number are satisfied with their interviewer-training program.

So what does a bad interview look like? Respondents included their top ‘bad’ questions from recent interviews are about race, age, religion, belief in ghosts, and even food preferences.

Additional findings include:

• Staffing directors outside of the U.S. were 10 percent more likely to rate their selection system as effective when it came to the ability to identify the right people (U.S.: 46 percent; Other geographies: 56percent).  One reason for this difference may be that non-U.S. companies report using more pre-employment assessment tools to make their hiring decisions.
• Only half (48percent) of staffing directors rated ‘retaining new hires’ as a top priority—it was actually the third highest priority when asked to pick their top choice.
• Less than two-thirds of staffing directors reported that their interview guides are based on an identified set of competencies for the role they’re hiring. 
• Less than 30 percent of staffing directors are satisfied with their interviewer training program.

Click here to access the full 2012 Global Selection Forecast.

Scott Erker, Ph.D., is the Senior Vice President of Selection Solutions for DDI and the study's co-author.

Volkswagen Chattanooga's Innovative Plant Start-up

By: Elizabeth Kabus

Eighty percent of the success of the people you hire is determined by the selection process, according to Volkswagon's staffing experts. So when the world’s third largest auto manufacturer needed to staff a new plant in Chattanooga, Tenn. to build the new Passat, selecting the right talent was crucial to their success.

That undertaking was especially challenging as there were more than 80,000 applications for the 2,000 production, maintenance, managerial, and professional positions.

DDI partnered with Volkswagen Chattanooga to design a multistep selection process for each of the four job families to include sourcing, screening, assessment, and interviewing. Jobs were posted with a number of outlets to reach the most people and “fill the funnel” with a diverse pool of candidates. Volkswagen Chattanooga’s HR team incorporated DDI’s career batteries to narrow the pool of candidates to those who were well-qualified and also appropriately motivated. In addition, DDI’s Targeted Selection behavioral interviewing system was used to check for the knowledge, skills, and motivations related to the critical competencies for each job family.

The four selection processes were defined by the best-practice use of simulation and assessment, with different tools employed for each job family. Among these was a state-of-the-art production simulation, in which applicants progress through three hands-on, experiential exercises. Volkswagen Chattanooga evaluates each individual’s quality orientation, safety orientation, and ability to maintain an appropriate pace of work over time. This simulation provided a realistic preview of the kind of work performed on the production line.

Since hiring began in November 2009, over 85,000 applicants have applied for all positions, and over 13,000 have been tested. Two thousand applicants have accepted offers, enabling Volkswagen Chattanooga to meet its staffing goals with high-quality workers. Candidates rated the process a 4 or higher, with 5 being the most positive, on multiple aspects of the selection process.

Among the comments candidates share on the evaluation forms: “I felt it gave us a clear view on what to expect. I appreciate the opportunity and if given the chance I would make a great employee at Volkswagen. Thank you,” said one. “This was a very unique approach to measuring a person’s capabilities…I enjoyed it!” said another. And someone else said a lot with just a few words: “Ready to start today!”

Click here to view the full Volkswagon Chattanooga story.

Missing Out: Five Ways to Misuse Online Screening Tools

Note: For e-mail subscribers, please click on the title to access the full article

By: Evan Sinar, Ph.D

Part Four

Misuse #4: Generating Legal Risk via Haphazard Screening

The flexibility of online screening systems to enable idiosyncratic filtering of large candidate pools, if not carefully monitored and managed, can be an unrecognized source of legal risk in at least two ways. First, it can increase the potential for differential treatment of candidates with similar backgrounds. If one such candidate is a member of a legally-protected candidate group and is screened-out while another non-protected group candidate is progressed, this can be considered a form of discrimination. Second, using an online screening tool to search or prioritize candidates may automatically classify all individuals searched against as formal applicants. This can substantially impact the necessity to document the job-relatedness of each requirement or search term. Although these legal risks can be managed through careful planning, if left ignored they can quickly threaten the defensibility of the entire selection system.

 

Misuse #5: Neglecting the Untrainables

A final common misuse is factoring a candidate’s past skills, experiences, knowledges, and other “trainables” too prominently into the selection process in general, and within online screening tools in particular. New hire ramp-up time is a critical concern for many employers given lean staffing levels and low budgets available to support extensive training and on-boarding. Hiring an individual who already possesses many of the perceived prerequisites to effective performance is one way to counteract these restrictions.

However, this approach also brings some important caveats. Taken too far it can lead to a situation where “untrainables” – attributes that are difficult or impossible to develop someone in after they have been hired – play, at best, a minor role in progressing candidates to a final interview. These attributes include vital building blocks such as adaptability, integrity, learning adeptness, and innovation, which can be the foundation for an employee expanding his or her role within and beyond the original job description. Hiring processes that fail to early and adequately capture information about these characteristics, using tools designed specifically for this purpose such as cognitive tests and personality inventories, waste the opportunity to understand the “hows” behind a candidate’s background for the sake of knowing only “what” was achieved.

What a candidate brings to the job on day one may indeed help him or her ramp up quickly, but without pairing this knowledge with insights about untrainables, an employer risks bringing on board an employee with a severely restricted ceiling for future growth. Exercise caution to ensure that online screening tools do not overweight trainable characteristics merely because they are more easily searched and screened upon.

 

Summary 

Making the perfect the enemy of the good is a critical misstep when online screening tools are used to target the mythical ideal candidate. But it’s far from the only caution to keep in mind, and other consequences of squandering the potential of these tools can be equally damaging or even more so. Online screening is here to stay and can add immense value and efficiency when deployed appropriately. However, if the recent negative attention directed toward online screening systems is causing you to re-evaluate and seek to improve the way you use these tools – and it should – consider this broader set of potential concerns while redesigning your processes and approaches, and when you’re determining the influence online screening tools will have within your broader hiring process.

How is the role of technology changing your processes for large-scale, geographically-dispersed candidate screening and selection? What do you see as the next evolution of technology-driven hiring
tools?

This article was originally published by Recruiting Trends and is reprinted here with permission.

 

Missing Out: Five Ways to Misuse Online Screening Tools

Note: For e-mail subscribers, please click on the title to access the full article

By: Evan Sinar, Ph.D

Part Three

Misuse #3: Codifying a Narrow Route to Job Success

Problems also emerge when online screening criteria are based solely on conventional or “typical” qualifications. Such qualifications may include a minimum number of years performing a similar job, a particular college major, or demonstrated knowledge of a specific industry. When these are used as hard, uncompromising limits to narrow the candidate pool from the outset, a company loses any chance to consider non-traditional backgrounds. Veterans of the military, in particular, often have highly-relevant skills that aren’t spotted and credited accordingly if a conventional search approach is used – meaning that these valuable individuals can slip through the process entirely unnoticed. If “required” skills and experiences don’t fully account for variations in the experiential opportunities available to those from other cultures and countries, they too can be inadvertently overlooked. Even “cloning” current employees to identify screening factors can be problematic – if a company’s talent status quo is no longer sufficient, modeling new employees after existing ones may only perpetuate current workforce challenges.

The long-term impact of this type of misuse can be wide-ranging given the consequences of narrow employee perspectives for many key talent management issues, including poor global acumen, stifled innovativeness, and proces inefficiency stemming from long-unchallenged “standard operating procedures”. Instead, screening factors should accommodate alternative routes to success whenever possible. This could involve broadening the scope of “acceptable” backgrounds to encompass adjacent fields, industries, and skillsets, appropriately recognizing military service as a valuable source of experience, crediting candidates for their interest in and active learning about emerging areas where extensive formal work experience may not yet be possible, and carefully vetting all criteria to ensure that candidates from different cultures are not mistakenly excluded.

This article was originally published by Recruiting Trends and is reprinted here with
permission.

Missing Out: Five Ways to Misuse Online Screening Tools

Note: For e-mail subscribers, please click on the title to access the full article

By: Evan Sinar, Ph.D

Part Two

Misuse #2: Using the Least Accurate Tools to Eliminate the Most Candidates 

Online tools used for initial candidate screening frequently capture three types of information: years of experience, education, and accomplishments indicating skills, knowledge, and training. While this information can aid in prioritizing candidates at the earliest stages of a funnel-based selection process, their relatively low level of predictive accuracy simply does not justify their use as primary screening methods – that is, using these factors alone to exclude a majority of the candidate pool from further consideration.

When ranked against all major selection tools in their ability to predict job effectiveness, measures of training and experience and those of years of education fall near the bottom, and far below other methods such as cognitive tests, personality tests, and structured interviews. The maximum proportion of candidates to screen out with a single selection tool should roughly match the accuracy with which the tool can gauge job success. In the case of skill and experience requirements often used for automated candidate screening, their accuracy generally supports screening out a relatively small proportion of candidates, in most cases no more than 20-30%.  Be wary about using these factors to screen candidates at substantially higher rates. Rather, supplement and sequence them with other, more predictive, selection tools to strike the right balance between the need to rapidly prioritize a large candidate pool, and the cumulative accuracy for gauging job success of the tools used to reach this goal.

 

This article was originally published by Recruiting Trends and is reprinted here with permission.