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Here’s a link to a Forbes magazine article that was pushed to me last month (January 27, 2012) by LinkedIn Today, highlighting why 46% of all new hires fail. The point of the article was to introduce a “radical” new approach to selection based on Mark Murphy’s new book Hiring for Attitude. The key point of the book and the article is that lack of proper attitude, not skills, is the primary contributor to weak performance. The author is only partially right.

For one thing the idea proposed is far from radical. There have been many other books over the past 10-15 years including the Amazon best-sellers Hire With Your Head (for full disclosure — this is mine) and Top Grading that espouse similar themes. For another, and far more important reason, he mistook cause for effect.

I absolutely agree that a bad attitude is an extremely common hiring problem, but the bad attitude was caused by a lack of job fit, not the other way around. Bad fit is a multi-headed monster, including a bad fit with the manager, the team, the job itself, the company’s culture, the company’s growth rate, and the underlying business environment. There are probably a few more “lack of …” factors that could have been cited, but these represent the 80/20 rule and the primary cause of a bad attitude.

Consider this: even highly motivated people with a track record of success can develop bad attitudes and become disruptive workers when they don’t work well with their boss, when the job promised is different than the one taken, or the resources needed to do the job right are not provided. In most cases, the person got the bad attitude as a result of these underlying root cause issues. So to solve this problem make sure the person you hire fits the situation from top to bottom. Now that’s radical. keep reading…

An old Gary Larsen cartoon once showed a kindly old lady hand-feeding birds in her back yard. Off to the side was a sack labeled with words that read something like: “Fake birdseed. Great fun! Birds just can’t figure it out!”

Fake bird seed represents many vendors’ test claims … and, what users don’t know about birdseed and test validity can cost them a fortune. Test validity does not mean people like the test; or, the test has zero adverse impact; or, the EEOC approves; or, the test looks sexy. Validity means test scores consistently predict some specific aspect of job performance. For example, if high scores predict more mistakes, then low scores should predict fewer. Validity predicts on-the-job performance … both ways.

Reputable test vendors (i.e., those who follow professional test development standards) eagerly show controlled studies of test results … and, welcome questions about them. Bird seed vendors enthusiastically produce client testimonials … andget defensive when questioned. How can testimonials be unacceptable? For the same reason you cannot trust political ads. They have an agenda and are seldom supported by facts. Here is an example using a sales job: keep reading…

In this webcast, Dr. Charles Handler, president and founder of Rocket-Hire, a vendor neutral assessment consulting firm, shares his proven methodology for developing an assessment strategy and choosing the best vendor to help you execute it.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

In this webcast, we will show what the most important components of fit really are – the factors that matter in a person’s on-the-job performance. We will demonstrate how these factors impact performance. We will show what can be done and is being done to increase the likelihood that everyone in every job – not just new hires – has a high degree of fit with the position. We will describe specific steps to take, including time commitment, budgets and resources, to achieve the objective of high quality, high performing employees more likely to remain in the organization where they fit best.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

I’ve never felt better about the evolution of pre-employment assessment. In this coming year we’ll see some real progress toward new levels of assessment adoption that will be based more on results then on hype. But there are some significant challenges to be faced.

As we enter this exciting new year, here are the trends that I feel are going to define the future of pre-employment assessment. keep reading…

We began 2011 talking about new “matchmaker” job sites starting up. As 2011 progressed, as Jeff Dickey-Chasins said, such sites, some more art than science, “proliferated.”

A year later, we’re not done yet. At least one new site is hoping to join the bunch. Called “Better Weekdays,” it is being built behind the scenes, with one major player in the company, who’d rather we not use his name, telling us it’s about five months off from launch. keep reading…

Throughout the year I get many questions from readers, recruiters, HR, and vendors. In this end-of-the-year article, I’ll list a few of the most frequent ones. keep reading…

I owe the term “Riduculist” to Anderson Cooper. Every so often he discusses something so silly it defies explanation. This article deals with an email solicitation I received recently that was so ridiculous, I laughed out loud.

Job Failure and Job Success

My profession is studying jobs and designing tests/exercises/interviews that measure both skills and attitudes. Extensive job experience and exhaustive graduate studies have brought me into contact with hundreds of managers in large corporations. One of my first activities has always been to interview people, either in the job or supervising the job, and ask: “What are all the reasons employees succeed or fail in this job?” The following responses are typical:

Can’t manage time, Makes bad decisions, Can’t get along with people, Doesn’t seem to care, Can’t sell, Can’t lead others, Poor communicator, Not honest in dealing with people, Poor communication with customers, Poor planner, Doesn’t follow up, Can’t learn new information, Poor attitude, Doesn’t show initiative, Can’t see the forest for the trees, Doesn’t consider enough information, Never anticipates consequences, Has poor judgment, No tact, Not a “people person,” Ignores deadlines, Inflexible, Doesn’t like the work, Not a team player, Doesn’t support organizational goals, Can’t see the big picture, Can’t make a decision, Bad fit

Now that we know what people who supervise (and do) the job say, let’s look at how HR usually answers the same question: keep reading…

It is the best of times; it is the worst of times, for recruiters. Millions of high-quality potential candidates are out of work, actively seeking employment. Millions of high-quality potential candidates are employed and won’t budge for fear of LIFO.

Hiring managers can afford to thoroughly assess candidates, but they still need to proactively recruit.

Successful recruiters can manage this unique employment market by melding the initial assessment and sourcing through a dual-purpose recruitment tool: ideal profiles.

The ideal profile is not about elevating nice-to-haves to must-haves in your list of job requirements. It’s about using your knowledge of a top-performer KSAs and competencies to target your recruiting and do a more thorough, objective assessment of candidates.

What Is an Ideal Profile?

keep reading…

Politicians claim they never let a good crisis go to waste. Reacting to crises is how people take advantage of opportunities that might otherwise be overlooked. But, have you ever thought about how that applies to HR? Or, maybe you have not kept up with the trend to eliminate internal recruiters.

Professional recruiters are citing an increasing number of independent studies claiming there is no difference in employee quality between internal and external recruiters; so, they argue, why should organizations hire full-time internal recruiters when external ones deliver the same results … cheaper? If I were an executive looking for ways to reduce costs, that argument would resonate with me. keep reading…

The Canada division of KPMG is using a job-simulation tool to assess managerial candidates in its tax, audit, and advisory practice areas, and will soon use it in campus recruiting. As much as it is about finding the best person, the company says it’s about branding and trying to engage passive candidates, not bore with them with a long test that leaves them scratching their heads, wondering if they’re giving the right answer to a question they don’t know why they’re being asked.

“The line is now blurring between assessment and branding,” says Moses Bar-Yoseph, the national director, talent attraction, for KPMG in Canada.

The Canada division has 5,400 employees, 32 offices, and about 46 people working on recruiting and employment branding. About three years ago, Bar-Yoseph and others started to look at where recruiting was going: more social media, more LinkedIn, more tools, and just generally, he says, “change on the horizon.” Bar-Yoseph felt that recruiting was going to change, away from simple job listings to pipelines and passives and all the things you’ve been reading about in recent years. KPMG wanted to be more proactive in attracting passive candidates.

Meanwhile, it came to believe that the basic psychometric tests that candidates have come to know and in some cases not love were not the way he wanted to go. Bar-Yoseph didn’t want people to answer a question and think, “I like the color blue so I don’t fit. That wasn’t what we were after. We were after something there was an actual exchange of information so the passive candidate would go through this and look more at what the job would look like. The job posting was not enough.” keep reading…

After the HR tech show last year I wrote an article bemoaning the absence of pre-employment assessment from the radar screen. Assessment really didn’t seem to be an area of much interest to anyone. I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about the perceived value of assessment as it has been a continual struggle to get folks to buy into the value proposition it provides. Still, I am pretty perceptive, and last year there was almost no buzz about this important area of HR.

What a difference a year makes! After this year’s show I am smiling from ear to ear as I was able to clearly tap into a great vibe of interest in assessment tools. I am still a bit disappointed that the majority of talent management vendors do not include assessment as a core part of their product offering. However, there were many talent management vendors who have begun to take steps down the right path. There were more vendors than ever offering a variety of interesting and unique products that demonstrate a continued deeper integration of assessment products designed to do more than just sling tests at job applicants.

What is the reason for the difference between this year and last? There are several, including: keep reading…

Recruiting technology vendors have been sprouting in Silicon Valley at rapid pace over the last few months; some catch on, many don’t, and some are just worth checking in on. In the latter category is CodeEval, which I wrote about earlier.

In short, employers are using the site to offer “challenges” to job candidates. CodeEval’s community — the “ecosystem” I mentioned earlier this year — now has more than 5,000 developers in it. If an employer wants to hire an engineer, they can use CodeEval to have them solve a puzzle, and interview them if they like their answer. The company’s still trying to fully settle on a pricing model, but right now it only charges if you make a hire. Six people have been hired thus far using the site, including at Milo (part of eBay) and Lolapps.

About 20% of companies choose to make their own challenges on CodeEval, rather than use one the company has off the shelf for them. About 19,000 challenges have been done by techies on the site — some just for fun or learning, more as passive candidates than active.

The above is essentially sourcing: the challenges are a way of engaging some of these 5,000 folks, and hopefully, for employers, getting candidates to solve a challenge to take a look at candidates’ thought processes. CodeEval also has a screening tool, and that’s what’s now free. So if you’ve got your own folks ready for a challenge — say, five people you’re looking at for a job — you can run them through a challenge on CodeEval at no charge.

What happens when your manager — who goes out regularly after work with a group of employees to scarf down chicken wings — has a hard-core vegan show up in the lobby for an interview?

That’s where “fit” comes in. You’ve heard it at conferences and read it here and most everywhere else people talk about hiring: you should look not just for hard skills, but hire for fit.

But, then again, you’ve heard the opposite: that you should seek out diversity, diversity of thought, people who bring different ideas, experiences, and perspectives to your organization.

Carol Schultz and I talk about this these two ideas, and whether they are contradictory, in the approximately 13-minute video below.

keep reading…

Every year I attend the annual Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology conference to learn and make sure I am in touch with the latest goings-on in my field. This past year I was very excited to walk away with an unpublished research paper titled Legal Risk in Selection: An analysis of processes and tools, by Kate Williams, a doctoral candidate at Clemson University. This article has direct and practical value for the members of the ERE community. If you are in any way involved in shaping the staffing strategy of you organization or if you really want to know the practical requirements for ensuring the EEOC and OFCCP stay out of your kitchen, you need to read this paper, or at least the short summary of its major points that I provide below. keep reading…

“‘Niceness’ — in the form of the trait of agreeableness –does not appear to pay.”

Not at all. In fact, it costs to be agreeable, especially if you’re a man. How much? On average, $9,772 annually, says a study presented today to the Academy of Management, meeting in Texas.

Three researchers analyzed 20 years of data collected in three different surveys of some 10,000 workers to find that men, and to a lesser extent, women rated as agreeable earned less than their more disagreeable colleagues.

A fourth survey, conducted by the researchers themselves using students acting as HR managers, found that, with the only difference among candidates for an entry-level, fast-track position into management being their agreeableness, “agreeable candidates were less likely to be recommended for advancement.”

Gender plays a role in this, note the researchers in their aptly titled paper, Do Nice Guys – and Gals – Really Finish Last? The Joint Effects of Sex and Agreeableness on Income. However, the income gap between agreeable and disagreeable women, at $1,828, is far less than it is for men. keep reading…

The web sure is an interesting place. Where else can people you have never met find you and reach out for highly specific advice, providing real world stories that help us keep in touch with the end-user perspective?

I received the e-mail below from a frustrated job applicant who must have found my website when searching for some straight talk about her pre-employment assessment experience.

Hello, My name is #####, and I am an insurance and financial services professional in (city, state). I work for a good company, but just this week I was contacted by large national competitor who was interested in hiring me. After speaking with a recruiter with that company, I was asked to complete a few questionnaires, sign and fax agreements to let this company research my credit and other very private information, and then was sent an email last night to complete an online assessment. I followed the directions, took the 139-question assessment (which took me about an hour) and was emailed this morning saying that I am not able to interview for the position.

I was blown away with surprise, as my credentials are outstanding and I have a clean, strong professional history. I asked for the results of the assessment, and I was denied any information as to why I was dismissed. The questionnaire asked me a few different times about my age, sex, and ethnicity, which I answered completely and honestly. My industry is typically dominated by white male professionals, but I haven’t had any problems with discrimination in the past. I am not assuming that this is discrimination, however, don’t I have a right to know what the results of my professional assessment is? How am I to know what the company views as weak or inadequate professional characteristics without answers or explanation? I want to be as professional and kind as possible with this matter, but I am not sure what to do. Any advice?

Thank you,

######

Here is my response: keep reading…

Is your hiring test leaky? I mean, does it pass too many unqualified candidates? I recently did a search for “hiring tests.” Google turned up 84 million listings, Yahoo about 70 million, and Ask … well, I stopped counting after 106 pages. By any standards, selling “hiring” tests is a big business. But, there is a big difference between a good hiring test and a leaky one.

photo by Harry Wood

Leaky tests pass-through marginal performers and, depending on the type of job (unskilled, semi-skilled, professional, managerial) they can cost organizations between 10% and 50% of annual payroll. In other words leaky hiring tests can be the single most expensive mistake organizations can make.

Here are some common-sense guidelines to dry-up leaky tests.

Self-Reported Data Leaks

A leaky hiring test often begins by asking employees to answer items describing him or herself. It might be given to your own employees or to people around the country with the same job title. Scores are collected, averaged, and used to screen job candidates. Sounds good, right? Wrong. keep reading…

Do the vast majority of people who pass your personality tests turn out to be exceptional performers? If you answered “no,” then your tests aren’t testing. Recruiters and hiring managers are led to believe people who pass their personality tests will be successful. Unfortunately, practical experience shows that about 50% of employees and 70-80% of managers still fail to meet expectations. It’s a hard concept to grasp, but don’t be fooled by statements like: “The XYZ is not a hiring test … but it can be used to help make hiring decisions.” That’s like saying, “Ignore the rattle … the snake’s harmless.”

Cause? What Cause?

Here is an example of traits often found in personality tests: dominance, compliance, extraversion, judgment, sensitivity, curiosity, conscientiousness, humility, and determination. First, we’ll show you a silly-science example: 1) divide producers into groups (e.g., high and low performers); 2) give both groups the same personality test; 3) see which scores differ; and finally, 4) use candidate scores to predict group membership.

After impressive number-crunching, suppose the A-list group had higher average dominance, compliance, and extraversion scores; the B-list group had higher average curiosity, conscientiousness, and determination; and, both had the same average judgment, humility, and sensitivity scores. Is this enough evidence to use the results for selection or promotion? Noooo.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Anyone can compare two sets of numbers and tell you whether they correlate; but, it takes careful study to know whether A actually leads to B. keep reading…

Have you ever hired that dream candidate who met every criteria of the position, was courted by the hiring manager, and who negotiated that huge sign-on bonus and then crashed and burned within a few months?

There are hundreds of stories like this. Candidates with great education, experience, and who have worked for all the right companies often fail miserably because they don’t fit into the culture of the company.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, believes his success has been in finding the right people — the ones who fit comfortably into the corporate culture. So do a growing number of recruiters, hiring managers, and CEOs. keep reading…