I believe there are at least two assumptions operating here
1) (As Howard discussed) You need people to “fit” aka, “conform” to your culture.
As long as they do the work well and *aren’t too disruptive (in the old sense) of others doing THEIR work well, then I think this “ain’t necessarily so.
We may want to be surrounded by people just like us, but this isn’t always good thing in a work environment.

2) Your culture is nourishing and functional and not toxic and dysfunctional….This is a very dangerous assumption to make, and often false.

Cheers,

Keith “Not Fitting In for Over 50 Years” Halperin

*Another argument for tele-work.

I think most of your suggestions are a new and better way to get the answers interviewers have always been looking for. The old school standard of “what are your strengths and weaknesses” never allowed for much more than a list to be provided. Secondly, it was a rare candidate who used that as an opportunity to share an actual experience through which they could show their strengths in action. But by asking how they “coped” or “handled the worst job” an interviewer can clearly see how adaptable and innovative a person can be. These questions lend themselves to being great indicators of a candidate’s true behavior.
Ken Schmitt
http://www.turningpointsearch.net

My message was directed at personality tests, not you.

The “selection process”, as most practice it, is broken to the detriment of society, employers, recruiters and talent. It’s not even a ‘process’, by any stretch of the imagination.

The Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures do provide the best practice prescription. Yet, even though the Guidelines also establish the regulatory requirements to avoid allegations of discrimination, in the presence of adverse impact, few employers even try to comply. Most recruiters don’t care, either, because the Guidelines clearly make compliance (and associated fines and enforcement actions) the employer’s responsibility.

Independently of the Guidelines, we know (via meta-analysis, Schmidt and Hunter, 1998) how to best use the right type of assessments to boost predictive validity for job performance and job learning. Among other findings, “general mental ability” explains just over half of the variation in job performance and job learning. Integrity testing, structured interviews, work samples and job knowledge assessments all add more than “training and experience”, “years of education” and “reference checks”.

As noted above, “personality” assessments don’t add much at all and, in the absence of general mental ability assessment, leave most of the variation in job performance and job learning unexplained.

We can implement selection processes that work much better for employers and employees. The necessary tools and process knowledge are readily available. The ROIs for employers are huge. The differentiation opportunities and performance improvements for recruiters are likewise very large.

As Peter Drucker wrote: “What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it, that’s another matter”.

Employers and recruiters have had the recipe for success for more than three decades. Employers have had the compliance incentive, as well. Drucker also wrote about staffing and promotion decisions: “In no other area of management would we put up with such miserable performance. Indeed, we need not and should not. Managers making people decisions will never be perfect, of course, but they should come pretty close to batting 1,000—especially since in no other area of management do we know as much.”

It’s time to use the selection process knowledge that we have to advantage and stop playing the legacy game – i.e. using résumé reads, application reviews, unstructured interviews, and subjective judgments about this or that (including cultural fit), as if they mattered.

r.melrose@vision21.us

I appreciate your comments and the links provided but I think you misunderstood what I was trying to express and I’d like to clarify to see if it would modify your position. It is important to mention that I have no economic interest in Birkman/Hogan or any other big branded assessment tool, but am VERY curious to the value that a recruiter would place on a 3rd party assessment that measures not only one’s personality, but one’s values, motivations, and their skills (or one’s perception of his/her skills) so that recruiters make better hiring decisions. Having only played the role of a hiring manager, I’d like to know if one candidate was motivated by an entrepreneurial challenge versus theoretical discovery. I agree with you that looking at one’s personality has as much value as buying a computer because of its hardware alone; the operating system is equally if not more important (Mac vs PC). Anyone can see that the entire recruiting supply chain is broken, and perhaps the current selection process is what needs to change.

You mention “validated assessments” and cite Birkman and Hogan by name. Validated for what, by whom?

All personality tests have very low predictive validity for job performance and job learning according to, among others, the editors ( http://bit.ly/H2mKTZ ) of the leading journals who review such claim-making article submissions.

Peter Cappelli of The Wharton School wrote ( http://bit.ly/Hy9uJG ) “For practitioners, however, the conclusions from these editors are remarkably useful and unambiguous: “Don’t rely on personality to assess employees”.

The only validation that matters (ref: Schmidt and Hunter) is the statistically calculated predictive validity for job performance and job learning, of a particular selection process, referenced to a particular job and corresponding job analysis.

It’s very important to recruiters and their clients that unsubstantiated claims do not pass for predictive validity.

r.melrose@vision21.us.

I share more about culture fit and creating a dynamic company culture on my blog: http://www.pastfive.typepad.com if you want to check it out.

For example, instead of asking, “What was the worst company culture you worked in?” I’d suggest you ask something like:
*”Tell me about the most difficult culture you’ve had to work in and how you dealt with it?”
*”What worked and didn’t work with respect to the way you handled it?”
*”What would you have done differently to elicit a better result?”

This is a bit different than your question, “How did you cope in that culture?” How an individual copes is distinctly different than whether or not their coping was successful or not. Make sense?

Rather than interviewing for “cultural fit” I would recommend validly assessing for “job match” in three domains: cognitive, behavioral and interest. If the candidate matches sufficiently well (i.e. in the three domains and overall), then conduct structured interviews based on the assessment results, as well as the knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA) required in the job, based on Job Analysis.

Employers can validly assess an individual’s assertiveness, sociability, accommodating, decisiveness, manageability and independence. Employers can determine the range of cognitive, behavioral and occupational interest scores exhibited by top performers in any particular position. They can compare the two directly (i.e. without subjective biases) and use structured interviews to objectively probe for additional valid, job-related details.

If candidates can, as an exercise, readily provide work samples that demonstrate job-related content knowledge and process capability, ask for that, too.

Employers’ selection processes generally exhibit low predictive validity for job performance and job learning. They also exhibit low levels of regulatory compliance (Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures). Establishing the job-related validity of the interview process recommended here would be difficult, as would assuring that the process was uniformly applied to all job candidates.

r.melrose@vision21.us

Hiring those who fit a cultural profile does nothing for enhancing diversity of thought and approach to problem solving.

I maintain that hiring people do not fit the culture can at times be the very best thing you can do to enhance organizational bandwidth.

I believe that seeking individuals who share our values is what we really need to be doing.