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.

The graphic provides a means to visualize this job fit problem. (Here’s a link to a short video for a more detailed explanation.) The key point: for every hire, you need to ensure alignment top to bottom with the company, the job, the hiring manager, and the person’s ability, motivation, personality, and management needs. Due to rapidly changing business conditions getting this vertical alignment correct is nearly impossible, so you need to select people who also have the ability to move laterally in a variety of different environments. It’s this lack of lateral ability that cause the fit problem and results in a bad attitude. Here’s why:

Company Culture and Rate of Change: This factor is largely dependent on the company’s rate of growth and where it is on the corporate life cycle, somewhere between a resource poor startup to a rule-bound bureaucracy, and both moving toward the center. Obviously few people can thrive in all of these types of environments; that’s why the person has to be assessed on this environmental and cultural measure.

Job Type and Degree of Structure: Jobs have a pace of their own that often collides with the needs of the company’s culture and pace. For example, creative jobs tend to be loose and free flowing, whereas operations and accounting tend to be highly structured. Marketing, sales, and design positions tend to fall somewhere between these extremes. Irrespective of the person in the role, there’s often a natural conflict between the company pace and culture and the job type itself. Adding the wrong person into the fray complicates matters even further. For examples, accountants don’t do too well in startups and independent salespeople fight process and detailed reporting.

Manager Style and Personality: While we’re at it, let’s throw the hiring manager’s style into the job fit mix. The graph shows the manager style extremes from controlling to hands-off and the in-betweens: supervising, training, delegating, and coaching. The best managers have the ability to flex across most of the styles based on the circumstances and the type of people they’re managing. Unfortunately, most managers have a narrower range of ability and get frustrated and prickly when dealing with staff members and issues that conflict with their natural style. Most people would agree that the manager-new hire relationship is the primary cause of employee dissatisfaction. That’s why getting this part of the fit equation right is essential.

Subordinate Style and Personality: Fitting the employee to the job, the manager, and the company is no easy matter, but it’s made worse when generic competency models and behavioral interviewing are used without considering these fit issues. The fit with the hiring manager can be determined by finding out what types of managers the person has worked best with to see if the person can work equally well with all types of managers or if the range is narrower. The best hires are those who can work in all types of environments and with all styles of managers. Few meet this standard, but you should know ahead of time where lack of job fit will become unmanageable. (Watch the video to see a great example of how to address this.)

Since many people, me included, have been writing about this problem for years, including a Fortune cover story in the ’90s on the “bad attitude” problem, “radical” is too strong a term for the importance of assessing it. Essential is a better name for the need to access job and cultural fit before you hire the person. Regardless of what you call it, measuring fit across all job dimensions needs to part of any assessment process. Of course, don’t be surprised when ensuring that you directly assess job satisfaction and employee performance, that most of your bad attitude problems disappear. This is what always happens when you solve root causes rather than their effects. Some might call this concept radical. I call it commonsense.

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:

Sales Manager Anecdote: We used XYZ test and our sales productivity increased.

OK. What is your definition of productivity? What else was happening at the time that could have affected the numbers? Did you land a big customer? Did the economy improve? Did lower and higher scores predict lower and higher sales? Are you using group results or individual data? Sales dollars are only one part of the job. What about satisfaction, service, returns, cross-selling? You see, anecdotes are rhetorical. They might sound good, but seldom tell the whole story. Anecdotes and validity are not equal. Birdseed vendors, because they don’t follow professional test-validation processes, don’t know they don’t know this.

Define Performance … or Else!

Let’s continue with our sales example. Nothing is more important than a highly productive sales staff. But wait. What does that mean? Are we discussing acquiring new customers? Farming or hunting? Cross-selling? Delivering great customer service? Customer retention? Solving service problems? Favorite golf buddies? Job turnover? Learning new products?

Get the picture? I have learned over time, especially with call centers, that many performance areas even conflict with one another. Problem Solving Quality and Calls Completed are often negatively related (i.e., it generally takes more time to better resolve problems). It drives employees crazy when an organization sets mutually conflicting objectives. So which one should they test for?

Performance is a loosey-goosey catch-all term that could actually mean something entirely different to different people. In my experience, few sales managers and even fewer HR departments ever take the time to think this through. So, before you decide on a test vendor, carefully define what you want to measure. If you think “performance” is a singular thing, then you are in a heap of trouble. If someone does not know what he/she wants to control, then any solution will be like bed wetting … warm and comfy at night, but cold and miserable in the morning.

Truth or Dare!

My bathroom scale is heartless. It tells me when I am overeating. It also tells me when I am at my healthy weight. Your hiring test should do the same thing. Good scores should have the same strong causal relationship with high performance; and, bad scores should have the same strong causal relationship with low performance. This is really important. Vendors who do not follow professional test development standards don’t seem to really understand that validation is a two-edged sword. Let’s look deeper a very common, and very wrong-headed practice.

Vendor A separates people into a good group and a bad group. The good group takes the test and the vendor averages their numbers. From that day forward, every applicant is benchmarked against the good-group average. Sound’s good? Sorry. It’s a clear sign the vendor is selling fake birdseed.

Let’s start by asking how the people were group-classified. What constitutes performance? Are good schmoozers in the same group as slow learners? How about group size? Are there enough people in a group (i.e., it takes at least 15 to 25 people before you can draw a decent conclusion). Is the bad group the same size as the good group? (Groups should always be about equal-sized.) Are the differences between groups strong or subtle? (If everyone is at least good enough to stay employed, you will probably be able to see only strong differences.)

What about the test itself? Can the vendor show proof every item in the test directly affects group performance? How strong is it? Research shows that virtually all self-reported motivation, personality, and attitude test scores have weak relationships with “hard” job skills like learning ability, problem solving, and so forth. If the test factor doesn’t strongly predict job performance, the test won’t make any difference in hiring quality … it will just make your job more difficult.

One more comment about group scores. They tell you about groups — nothing about individuals. Consider the following: people in the Top Group have scores of 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 70 (average = 45). The Bottom Group scores are 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 (average = 35).

So the person doing this analysis figures that producers score an average of 45 — so let’s go test people and hire the ones who score 45 or more. Whoops! If we used top-group averages as our standard, we would eliminate three top producers and hire two bottom ones. Fake birdseed alert!

Separating Pros from Pretenders

Setting hiring-test standards is an all or nothing game. There are no shortcuts. In my personal experience, wrong-headed vendors are seldom intentionally deceitful. They enthusiastically believe in their fake birdseed; after all, people who make things with their own hands seldom welcome criticism. So, they rely on client anecdotes, claiming that is sufficient proof of validity. Some will even claim that the EEOC has validated their test. Sorry. This is completely wrong-headed and foolish thinking.

If they rely on vendor claims, users will never know how many good candidates they turn away, nor how many bad ones they will hire. They always pay the price for this mistake later. You see, legal challenges seldom happen in the hiring phase. They happen on the job. Challenges begin when incompetent employees challenge termination or being overlooked for promotion. Forget the short term and six-month guarantees. Bad hiring decisions start showing themselves about a year later.

So how do you identify a pretender? Anyone who is:

• Producing client testimonials (not tightly controlled studies) claiming their test is valid;
• Getting defensive when questioned;
• Claiming their test doesn’t actually predict performance, but can be helpful;
• Claiming the EEOC has approved their test;
• Setting standards based on group or job averages;
• Focused primarily on training, not professional test development;
• Giving everyone a broad-based test (i.e., not based on performance requirements) and then measuring averages;
• Giving everyone a broad-based test (i.e., not based on performance requirements) and then measuring differences;
• Believing a self-descriptive test strongly and accurately predicts job skills;
• Not able to produce a technical manual documenting what the test measures and why that factor leads to job performance;
• Not clear on the definition of what the test actually predicts;

There are others, but this is a good start. Here is a quickie birdseed question users should ask every vendor: “Was your test specifically developed to predict job performance? If so, what part?” Any answer other than “Yes” means the test probably won’t work.

Birdseed or Not Birdseed!

As you might imagine, birdseed vendors complain the loudest. That’s really shameful. Validation principles are taught in major universities throughout the western world and religiously followed by every professional test development house. Just because a vendor does not know what they are is no excuse. It reminds me of Gary Larsen’s little fat boy trying to enter the School for the Gifted and Talented by pushing hard against a door that clearly say “pull.”

Here are some believe-it-or-not examples:

V1: Vendor (who sells a self-reported personality test) … All you care is about assessment. Don’t you care about performance?

A: Hello! Assessment is anything used to evaluate a candidate and predict performance. Besides, there is abundant literature showing self-reported tests are miserable predictors of skills like problem solving ability, planning, and teamwork. You want accuracy? Start selling tests that measure hard-to-fake applicant skills.

V2: Vendor (who sells a post-WWII NAZI atrocity test). Our test is validated. See our report. Wanna be a distributor?

A: No, thank you. I am not in the market for a concentration camp commandant. Besides, a technical report filled with anecdotes from unqualified people venturing their unsupported personal opinions about your test does not meet professional test standards.

V3: Vendor (who does group-level averaging). Group averaging is just another form of validation.

A: No. It’s not. Your test has no clear performance criteria; no proof a specific factor causes performance; group data is being used to make individual conclusions; and, your groups are so small, the numbers are either nonsense or chance.

U4: User … If I use a test, I’ll never place a candidate!

A: If there was ever a statement concerning the sad state of applicant screening, this was it!

U5: User … We like the DISC/MBTI/ACL/CPI/16PF/MMPI/Caliper test so much, we decided to use it for hiring.

A: That’s interesting. As far as I know, none of these publishers claim their test predicts job performance. Some even strongly recommend against it. Perhaps, you know something the publishers do not? Think about it. Just because a test measures a difference between people, does that mean it also predicts someone’s job performance?

U6: User … We use tests to match candidate personalities to managers.

A: That might be a good idea, unless company culture never changed; managers never changed jobs; people never changed departments; or, cloned personalities never lead to group-think.

U7: User … We interview. We don’t use tests.

A: If you ask questions and make hiring decisions based on applicant answers, how is that not a test?

V8: Vendor (after learning what it takes to meet professional test requirements) … I can’t do that!

A: That said it all.

V9: Vendor … We keep adjusting top group scores until we get the maximum individuals in the group to pass. The results become our hiring standard.

A: Fine-tuning junk science yields finely-tuned junk science.

V10: Vendor … We compare every applicant against a country-wide manager/salesperson/driver/XZY job norm.

A: So, you are assuming all jobs/companies/industries with the same title are alike; everyone in the group norm performs just like your people are expected to perform; every individual in the group norm matches the group average; jobholder answers are identical to applicant answers; applicants never try to make themselves look good on tests; and, every factor in the norm affects performance? Sure.

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

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

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

Hot!

The dawn of big data, business intelligence, and analytics. This is by far the most important thing going on in assessment today. It is not just assessment that is being impacted by the increasing power of big data as a decision-making tool. All areas of society are benefiting from our increased ability to use data to identify trends and make predictions to increase efficiency and effectiveness. One of the biggest obstacles for assessment has been the difficulty experienced in proving its value proposition in real terms.

This past decade has been marked by the movement of testing online. The product of this investment has been a significant amount of data and a much more complete understanding of what content predicts specific outcomes. We are now entering a decade in which new advances will be marked less by radical new types of content and more by the ability to view assessment from a business-intelligence mindset in which data supports hiring as a business process.

As I reported in a recent article, this movement is being led by the leading vendors in the assessment world who have begun to create a new generation of tools to help their customers understand complex relationships in their data as well as the relationship between their local data and more general, bigger picture data. While it may take some time to really gain traction, increased analytics will make it much easier to clearly demonstrate the bottom-line impact of assessment on all kinds of valued outcomes. The inability to clearly link assessment to results has been holding us back for decades. As this blockage continues to erode, the use of assessment will continue to grow.

Assessment and matchmaking. The use of assessment to match people with jobs to which they are best suited is proliferating. To understand the basic model for the matching I am talking about, think online dating site. In this model two parties are searching for a match based on a profile-creation process in which the same key pieces of data are collected and sophisticated algorithms are used to identify potential matches based on compatibility in the data. While these sites are far from perfect in their matching abilities, the model works much better than a blind search in which the matching parameters are not clearly defined or consistent.

When it comes to matching people with jobs, understand the value that a scientifically based assessment can provide. Assessment is essential to this process because it provides a standardized, objective way to reliably and accurately measure human traits in a manner that is not possible with simple fill-in-the-blank questions. So, adding assessment to the matching parameters can offer serious value.

This concept is not new. These sites have also exploded because of a continued lack of ability for big job boards to deliver results; the increase in analytic ability (see trend #1); and an increased ability to understand how to measure human traits accurately and reliably.

Expect even more of these companies. Effective matching is an excellent way to highlight those who have more of what is desired and thus help provide better odds of making a good hire using the “official” hiring process.

There are many different takes on this basic model. Explaining them all is beyond the scope of this article (stay tuned though: my next article will be devoted to categorizing the various companies offering assessment-related matching). No matter what the model, the most important thing impacting the success of these sites will be directly related to their ability to build a database that will have value to both parties involved. The best matching process in the world has no value if the database of candidates to match to is empty. The best candidates in the world will not waste their time using a site that has no legitimate openings to offer.

Expect to see many try to jockey for dominance in this area. The winners in this arena will be those that are able to engage both candidates and companies and compel them to give their time and effort to provide the data required for effective matching. The winners will also be the ones who can make joining their sites a viral proposition (Hello LinkedIn and Facebook … are you listening?).

Warm

Assessment as a key part of talent management. Talent management is all the rage, and rightfully so. For decades there has been a need for a more strategic focus on how organizations use their people to have maximum impact.

While talent management is a concept that covers the entire lifecycle of the employee and is designed to support development and management of people, pre-employment assessment still seems to be something that few talent management vendors are including in their products and models for success. Talent management is an opportunity to truly impact results via its ability to define what is important for success, and then help ensure that companies are hiring, developing, and promoting people in ways that have a direct impact. Until the talent management concept includes pre-employment assessment, it is incomplete. Vendors will come around to this viewpoint, but they are doing so more slowly then I expected. As pre-employment assessment continues to prove its value and get more traction, expect to see it added to the talent-management equation.

Continued (but slow) movement from test to experience. Those who read my articles regularly and know and have worked with me are well aware of my passion for simulations and engaging assessments that provide an experience rather then a boring and frustrating testing session. These types of assessments are the future. I am not backing down from this stance; however, this is not happening as fast as I had expected. While we have seen some cool new simulations and branded experiences over the past few years, we have yet to see the technology needed to really move this area to the next level. This will come with time.

For now it is exciting to see new products and solutions that represent a step in the right direction. I am encouraged to see vendors continuing to invest in making their assessments more engaging, but the bulk of assessments are the same as they always have been in terms of their content. We are still living in an age where most pre-employment tests are simply web-enabled versions of their former paper-and-pencil selves. Luckily we have been able to make the testing experience much shorter while also making it more accurate. The next steps forward are happening, but the revolution in this area will take time.

As the years go by I am continually encouraged by the new and creative solutions that I am seeing. My workshop at the ERE Expo last spring provided me with enough examples of engaging assessments to fill up several hours of time. I encourage those who are creating assessment products to continue to place themselves in the candidates’ shoes and to understand the value-add to your brand from a branded experience or simulation.

Increased access to assessments for SMBs. The manner in which assessments are adopted remains a bit curious. My research shows that companies of all sizes tend to use assessments. While enterprise is likely the area where the most companies are using assessments, we all know that small and medium businesses actually have more total employees because there are so many of these companies out there. Most vendors are very focused on the big fish, enjoying the prestige of landing Fortune 500 companies who have the resources to do cool and interesting things with their hiring process. Bigger companies also provide healthy numbers that are conducive to validation work and program evaluation.

Small to mid size companies do have options. Many vendors do have the ability to serve these companies with the same types of products as the enterprise. However, smaller companies often don’t even have a dedicated staffing person and it is hard for them to think strategically. In most cases smaller businesses must rely more on guesswork when implementing assessments, as best practices used by enterprise are often beyond their means and understanding.

Vendors are realizing the opportunity to offer the SMB market something better. I am seeing new vendors who are creating solutions that are focused on helping SMBs. Many of these involve other trends I have already discussed in this article. Namely, we have so much data on hand now that we are able to understand the truth about what items are predictive in many general situations (such as customer service), and companies are creating new matching tools to make this knowledge accessible within software-based systems. So, SMBs are gaining access to the more accurate off-the-shelf assessments for a lower cost.

Expect slow but continued movement by vendors to serve the SMB space over the next few years.

Cold

Clarity around legal standards. New models for assessment that are continually being developed are subject to a set of legal standards (the EEOC’s Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures) that were developed in 1978. The core idea of these Guidelines — that to be legally compliant a test must be job related — is without question and will be relevant forever. However, for many reasons that I won’t go into in this venue, the Guidelines are sorely out of date.

Assessment has changed a good deal since 1978 and it would be nice if the legal standards for their use could directly relate to these changes.

The legal ins and outs of assessment are one of the more challenging aspects of selecting and implementing assessment programs. I continue to fall back on the silver lining here, that the prime directive of the Guidelines is that we must demonstrate that all assessments are job related. The good news is that job-relatedness is also the driving factor in determining ROI. So, doing it right provides both legal CYA and money in the bank.

Still, it continues to be frustrating to see so many new and exciting ways that assessment is being used to do good with no Kosher stamp provided by the powers that be. At the end of the day, the threat of investigation by the Feds is pretty low given the resources they have available, so most companies continue to play the odds rather then invest the time and money in ensuring compliance.

Sadly, I do not predict that there will be any changes to this in the coming year. It troubles me that there is silence around how the new sophisticated data modeling tools and matching products meet government standards. These tools are the future and as they evolve and proliferate, the gap between assessment models and the rulebook will continue to widen.

We have a lot to be excited about in 2012. Organizations of all sizes should take advantage of the many opportunities to make hiring a strategic asset.

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.

The site has an abbreviated website up, in addition to a LinkedIn page and Twitter feed. It’s looking to hire recruiters or other recruiting-industry insiders. Better Weekdays hopes to use a combination of tests already built and used in recruiting, along with some of its own “secret sauce,” as one of the site’s founders says. People’s skills and “personal culture” — what’s important to them — will be captured and matched with companies looking to fill jobs with MBA graduates.

Better Weekdays is working on its site and on spreading the word among potential customers. But, unlike the “Mystery Applicant” site we mentioned, it’s not focusing on applicant tracking systems right now. The company doesn’t want to deal with the issues involved in integrating an application with those systems. And, it sees its sweet spot to be mainly hot, growing, small and medium-size companies, not as much Fortune 500 firms.

Those small/medium companies, Better Weekdays figures, are less likely to have much of an HR department, and could use Better Weekdays to hire someone, probably with a pay-per-hire model, rather than a pay-per posting.

“Hasn’t this all been tried before?” I asked my contact there. “Yes,” he says, “but still no one’s cracked the code.”

Q: Recruiter … My system works best. I know, because most of my placements survive the guarantee period.

A: Good for you (or, for your business, at least). From my experience, only a really bad candidate will fail to survive a guarantee period, and most organizations will go to great lengths to avoid the pain of starting another search. Besides, it generally takes about 18-24 months before an employer can separate job-learning from job-performance. Measuring success by guarantees is not the same as measuring success based on whether someone can do a job.

Q: Vendor … My system works great. It matches each candidate to a job profile.

A: Oh really? Do all jobs in the target profile perform the same work? Is every profiled-person a fully skilled, high-performing employee? Does each factor in the profile carry equal weight or are some factors more critical than others? Do individuals making up the profile actually match their own group average? Suppose there are two job groups of 100 people with the same average score. However, in one group, individual scores range from 10 to 90 … in the other group, scores range from 45 to 60 …  are the two groups really the same?

Q: Employer … Our attorneys recommend against tests. We interview candidates.

A: Interesting. What do you call it when: 1) you have something you want to measure; 2) you ask a candidate questions; and 3) you score the answers? Tests/application blanks/sourcing venues/interview questions/resume reviews and so forth = tests. And, their accuracy varies widely. By the way, corporate attorneys tend to be trained as contract experts, and labor attorneys tend to be litigation experts; so, it is really up to HR to do the front-end prevention work (scary, yes?).

Q: Recruiter … Job-fit is more important than anything else.

A: Maybe. Let’s break apart the job into pieces, starting with the critical competencies used to get the job done; then we add manager-fit (may change), department-fit (may change), organizational-fit (usually stable until the next merger/sale/acquisition), and job-fit (probably constant) … now, which “fit” category are we speaking about, and why does fit trump everything else?

Q: Vendor … Our personality tests accurately predict on-the-job behavior.

A: Hmmm. While some of the better-developed tests include scales that identify inconsistent answers, does every personality factor make the difference between job-success and job-failure? Even if you can identify specific performance factor(s), can you actually be sure candidates don’t try to fake good, attempt to match a specific job profile, present an idealized image, or report their true self? In a controlled experiment, I once compared ratings from experienced professionals (e.g., experienced people trained to observe and classify behavior) with 266 candidate personality test reports. Guess what? There was almost no correlation between test scores and behavior.

Self-descriptive personality tests are poor measures of performance. If behavior is critically important in your job (i.e., managers, salespeople, customer service, and so forth) the best way to get a trustworthy reading is to put the candidate in a position where he or she must show you what they can do.

Q: Employer: We don’t have to worry about being sued by the EEOC.

A: Not right away. Consider this. Two companies each hire 100 people. The Great-Hire Company uses a combination of validated behavioral interviews, tests, and simulations. They screen-out everyone who cannot demonstrate (i.e., show) required skills. The Know-Em-When-We-See-Em Company uses traditional interviews. They screen-out people who cannot pass an interview. Which company has the better-skilled workforce? Which has a better career path and deeper promotion pool? Which is more productive per employee? Which company is less likely to get sued for wrongful termination or not promoting protected groups? Forget about the EEOC. Start worrying about organizational bench strength.

Q: Vendors and Recruiters: You are just trying to get people to use tests/assessments.

A: They already are…I’m just trying to get them to use better ones; that is, identify more and better skilled employees.

Q: Employer … We use tests, but don’t use the scores to make hiring decisions.

A: Then don’t give your test until after the candidate is hired.

Q: Employer … we’re satisfied with our present interview and test system.

A: That either means one of two things: 1) you know precisely the cost of low performance, have done formal job studies, validated all your tests, ignore personal anecdotes, and track adverse impact at every decision point; or 2) you never calculated the cost of a bad hire. Which group do you belong to? In case you belong to the second, you might like to know that traditional interviews and unvalidated tests produce enough poor employees and managers to cost your organization anywhere from 10% to 50% of base annual salary. This number comes from recruiting, lost opportunities, turnover, training, coaching, employee mistakes, over-staffing, litigation expenses, lost salary, and so forth.

Q: Recruiter/Employer … we ask our hiring managers to define job requirements.

A: That’s a big problem. Who knows more about what it takes to do your job: you or your manager? Managers might define overall performance, but job holders know the most about what the job takes moment to moment. And, senior managers know how your job will change in the future. You think you can get all that from a hiring manager?

Q: Recruiter/Employer … if we did all that, we would never hire anyone.

A: Are you saying that if you identified critical competencies by interviewing incumbents, managers, and visionary managers, and then used validated tools to screen-out everyone who did not meet the job requirements, no one would pass? Hmmm. Please tell me how you explain all those people already doing the job?

Q: Trainer … just hire the people. We’ll train them to competency.

A: You read a book on this, right? Have you forgotten the number of times you were asked to train an incompetent person into a competent one? Or cringed when asked to link training dollars to either behavioral change or personal effectiveness? Training might enhance skills, but it seldom, if ever, changes a job-incompetent person into a job-competent one. Training is a skills enhancer, not a magic wand.

Q: Vendor/Employer/Recruiter … we use a popular intelligence test to make hires.

A: You know, of course, intelligence tests are both good and bad? The good part is smarter employees (i.e., higher scoring candidates) tend to do better than their less-smart team members. The bad part is you run the risk of: 1) filling an organization with people who are too smart for the job; 2) adversely rejecting too many members of a protected demographic group; 3) hiring people who practiced the test multiple times on multiple job interviews; 4) or restricting the size of your candidate pool. Intelligence tests are great performance predictors, but only if they pass the Three-Bears-Test: too much, too little, or just right for the job.

Q: Vendor/Employer/Recruiter … why is the intelligence test so important?

A: It is not critically important in all jobs … only jobs where the person is required to learn, solve problems, analyze information, make sound decisions, and so forth. It’s common sense really. Put a team of one dozen dull employees alongside a team of one dozen smart employees, and who do you think will do better?

Q: Vendor/Employer/Recruiter … the DOL ‘Guidelines and ‘Standards don’t apply to me.

A: Actually, they apply to everybody with a role in recruiting, evaluating, placing, training, or promoting employees/managers. If you don’t follow the ‘Guidelines and ‘Standards, then hiring and promoting fully-skilled employees will never be more than a game of chance. Test liability? That is always responsibility of the test user. EEOC? That’s the least of your worries.

Q: Vendor … my tests are approved by the EEOC and validated for all jobs.

A: And pigs can fly. The EEOC does not approve vendors. Tests have to be validated job by job, unless, after doing a job analysis, one a test user can transport (e.g., borrow) another user’s validation work.

Conclusion

This is by no means a complete list. But the logic is clear: if you don’t follow best practices, your employees and managers will range from good to bad; and, bad employees means higher turnover, more training expense, excessive recruiting costs, increased legal exposure, more people to do the same work, and wasted payroll.

If you don’t do it right, you will do it wrong. There is no alternative.

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:

No one helped them, Not given direction, Bad management, Never trained, Bad fit, De-motivated, Not really sure, Personality conflict …

(Yes, it’s usually a very short list.)

Notice the difference? Managers and job-holders cite about 80% skills-related items and 20% attitude-related ones. HR, on the other hand, almost always attributes performance to victimization. I think this is a pretty significant finding, don’t you? Now consider the following claims from the email vendor:

The vendor says:

• Our research shows 89% of bad hires are due to attitude such as coachability, emotional intelligence, and temperament.
• Source credibility for this data is attributed to articles in Fortune, IndustryWeek, and other newsstand magazines.
• Almost everything about job attitudes can be discovered from an interview.
• You can learn all your need to know by attending a 60-minute webinar.

On what planet?

Obviously the vendor’s body of research has been kept completely secret from the hiring-science community. Sure, if an employee arrives on the job with a full complement of skills, attitude can have a big effect. But, by completely ignoring ability, do you think this vendor is appealing to people who supervise the position, or the HR community? More to the point, if this product ignores 80% of job experts’ data, do you think their product can possibly be as good as they claim?

I’ve been on the end of many of interviews and can say with certainty most magazine authors are less-than-expert in the subject matter. In fact, they work hard to find simple sound-bite answers to complex questions, seldom caring about hard research because it makes for dry and uninteresting reading. In short, articles published in mainstream media are a better indicator of clever PR than expert peer-reviewed research. If you want opinions, visit the newsstand or bookstore. If you want facts, read unbiased hiring research studies.

Measure attitude using only an interview? Sure. For one thing, everyone knows a smart candidate can dance rings around a typical interviewer. For another, interviewers neither have the training nor the experience to be personality psychologists. Anyway, abundant literature (I know… booooring!) shows clinical evaluations (e.g. trained psychological experts) are inaccurate predictors of job success. You won’t find this information in the WSJ or HBR because it is not “catchy.”

Hard Facts

In my experience, there are thousands of training-program vendors, thousands of junk-science test vendors, and a few hundred professional selection tool vendors. Seldom will you find both training and professional selection technology coexisting — the technology and philosophy is totally different.

If a vendor’s website talks all about training, it’s a good idea to pass. You see, developing a professional hiring test takes more than drafting a few questions. It takes months of editing and statistical analysis to demonstrate it actually predicts some aspect of job performance. BTW: This would be a good time to revisit the manager’s succeed-or-fail list.

If you are responsible for making hiring decisions, be careful of self-promoting vendors entering the hiring and selection marketplace. Professionally, I never found one sufficiently qualified in the science of test development to develop a product that will eliminate dead-wood candidates. And believe me, if you use junk-science tests, you will learn the hard way they don’t work as advertised. Furthermore, all that dead-wood will be on your payroll.

This warning is true for all products that suggest they can teach you to analyze a candidate’s motivations, use self-reported personality surveys to match performance with a data base of job titles, predict job performance without actually measuring skills, or use any other method that is less than comprehensive or validated. From a legal perspective, the user, not the vendor, is always responsible for test use.

I have been accused by some of promoting “assessments?” Get real. It’s semantics: Interviews, resume reviews, application blanks, surveys, tests, sourcing, and so forth, all all assessments. Assessment is just another word for test, and, valid tests are useful tools for evaluating qualifications. If you don’t have proof your test/interview/assessment predicts job performance for your job in your organization, then you will assuredly turn away good people and hire useless ones.

Why should you worry? Experts estimate poor employment decisions cost about six month’s salary, not to mention perpetuating HR’s professional reputation for quick, ineffective solutions to complex problems. Forget vendor hype. Simple, one-step hiring solutions are nonsense. They don’t deliver.

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?

An ideal profile is 4-6 easily observable characteristics (items) that top performers in a given job share. You should be able to observe them from a candidate’s resume, application, or screening interview. They need to be logically (not just statistically) connected to success on the job.

Each characteristic is written in a format similar to SMART objectives.

Here’s an example of an ideal profile characteristic for an outside sales job:

“Active in 3 community groups for over 1 year.”

It’s specific, measurable, and time-related, but how do we know it’s achievable and realistic?

These last two factors are determined by an analysis of the top-performing incumbents in the job. This analysis can be very formal: thorough job analysis, or statistical analysis of bio data information. Or, less formal: reviewing top performers’ resumes and applications, and interviewing top performers. One quick note: if you are interviewing a top performer, he/she has to frame their answers to reflect their situation before they were hired, not 5 or 10 years into the job.

Another important consideration is the availability of the characteristic in the job market vs. your needs. Remember we are serving two masters here: sourcing and assessment.

Why Build an Ideal Profile

The ideal profile can:

• target your sourcing initiatives to where you are most likely to find candidates who possess the ideal profile characteristics
• better predict job success than pet theories, or gut hunches, because it is based on proven top-performer characteristics or behaviors
• increase acceptability among hiring managers who can relate candidates’ backgrounds to proven job success factors
• set a common standard for all candidates making candidate reviews more effective and efficient while treating all candidates fairly
• increase your recruitment process’ defensibility because it rests on job related behaviors of top-performing incumbents
• enhance your overall recruitment process without adding to recruitment costs

Building Your Ideal Profile

Best practices require compliance. Find a champion early on who can and will motivate hiring managers to use the ideal profile.

Conduct preliminary research into possible items for the Ideal Profile, as described above.

Your next step is to assemble a team of hiring managers, SMEs, and your champion. Based on my experience facilitating these meetings, you should be able to create a working ideal profile for one job in a single 2-hour meeting:

• Kick off the meeting with the champion, discussing: a statement of the business/staffing challenge; what an ideal profile is; and how it will address the staffing challenge. Set the meeting objective: to create an ideal profile for such and such a job.
• Come prepared to present your findings from preliminary research into likely items to include in the ideal profile. This will be your conversation-starter.
• Once the individual ideal profile items are established, the formula for rating/ranking candidates needs to be established. For example, will you require all ideal profile items to be met? Or, four of five?

How to Maximize the Impact of the Ideal Profile

As a recruiter, I have always believed in an all-hands-on-deck, everybody-recruits approach. Given this, here are some ways to use the ideal profile:

• Post the Ideal Profile in your office for co-workers to see
• Hold meetings with management to explain the process
• Incorporate the ideal profile into your referral program initiatives
• Hand out wallet-sized, laminated copies of the ideal profile of target jobs to all employees
• Discuss the ideal profile with your Centers of Influence in the community and with external recruiters
• Place a copy of the ideal profile in new-hire-orientation packets next to the description of your referral program
• Establish networks with community and business groups that are aligned with your ideal profile characteristics
• Build your resume/application review around the ideal profile and structure your initial interview to determine if the candidate meets the profile items

Important Considerations

The ideal profile’s primary use is to focus recruiters’ and hiring managers’ attention on high-potential candidates. It is a starting point. The ideal profile can help you target your candidate search and more quickly and objectively review a mountain of resumes. It is not a replacement for a multi-hurdle assessment process; it is the beginning of one.

As with any assessment tool, fairness is key to avoiding adverse impact and third party interventions. Keep your metrics up to date and be prepared to make adjustments as needed to be in compliance.

Even if you’ve done an in-depth analysis to create your ideal profile, things change: organization culture and goals, products, consumer markets, the job market. Track your results. See which ideal profile items or grouping of items work best in finding high-potential candidates and predicting success on the job. Plan on refining your profiles annually or sooner in a high-volume recruiting situation.

Avoid the use of personality attributes in building your ideal profile. Focus on observable behaviors. With the exception of “extroversion,” research tells us that most of us aren’t very good at correctly identifying personality characteristics from an interview, much less by reviewing a resume or application. Remember the old saw from Psych 101, “People do the same thing for different reasons and different things for the same reason.” Stick with proven top-performer behavior on your ideal profiles.

Many applicant tracking systems give you the ability to ask candidates questions and “pass” or “reject “ them based on how the questions are answered. Your ideal profile items may be used in your ATS. However, at least initially, I’d avoid rejecting candidates based on their answers to the ideal profile questions. Where your ATS allows, a better strategy is to score the answers and start your applicant reviews with the highest-scoring candidates and then work your way down the list.

The ideal profile is a productive sourcing and assessment tool for our times. It is a cost effective way to target high-potential candidates in a fair, defensible manner. Give it a try. It may just be a far better tactic than you have ever done before.

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. So, if you have anything to do with recruiting in your organization, how you react to this crisis could make a big difference to your career.

Same Old Same Old

Recruiters (both inside and outside) are like frogs swimming in a pot of cold water. Experiencing slowly rising temperatures, they are totally unaware they are about to be cooked. (Actually, I never boiled a frog, so I’m taking this story at face value). In fact, the last recruiting conference I attended was utterly packed with sourcing candidates and noticeably shy on evaluating them. When I buttonholed both recruiters and sourcers about the importance of qualifying candidates, their eyes would literally glaze over. They either knew it all … or cared less. I emphasize this story because I have not yet met a line manager who thinks recruiting is doing a good job qualifying candidates. And, guess who controls the money?

Aside from sourcing, the traditional method of hiring is to screen a pile of resumes, run applicants through interviews, and do background checks. We all know it’s easy to fake interviews, and results are mostly personal opinion. Furthermore, you don’t need research to know about half of new hires fail to meet expectations. Just look around. Is it any wonder HR outsourcing is a growing industry?

Nuts and Bolts

I did not invent best-practice hiring tools. They evolved from many years of research that, in my experience at least, most recruiters blow off as being too much work. Best practice starts with knowing critical skills associated with each job, then measuring them with hard-to-fake behavioral interviews, tests, simulations, and exercises. Does this process ensure 100% perfect hires? That would be nice, but no. There are simply too many factors that affect the future. Best practices significantly reduce the number of hiring mistakes. However, one fewer hiring mistake means one additional highly productive employee. Put another way, we know in a typical organization that 20% of the people produce 80% of the results. So, imagine what it would be like if that number was reversed to where 80% of the people were top-notch.

The reasons for poor performance are seldom the employee’s problem. He or she was coached to say anything to get a job; job competencies were unclear; and interviews were easy to fake. Imagine that!

Best practice hiring tools are different: they are considerably more accurate than traditional interviews, highly focused, and hard to fake. If you want management to consider recruiting or HR an invaluable department, I suggest ignoring job titles, organizing jobs into families (i.e., jobs with similar competencies), studying each family to identify job-critical competencies (i.e., ones that can be measured), developing reliable and trustworthy measurement tools, setting professional cut-points, and training your people how to use them.

Still need to use a professional recruiter from time to time? Professional recruiters usually have access to impressive networks or are able to screen high volumes of candidates. Let them know, however, that you will require each submitted candidate to successfully pass your best-practice screen. Don’t be surprised of instead of the usual 2-3 candidates, you have to test about seven to find the right-skilled person. Will the recruiters complain? Probably. But they don’t have to live with the consequences of a bad hiring decision.

Piece of Cake…Not!

You might not have the expertise in-house to set up a best-practice system. In that case, consider hiring a psychometric expert to get you started. I’m not referring to freelance salespeople who market out-of-the-box tests. They are probably well-intentioned, but limited in their range of tools, and totally unaware of limitations (e.g., if the only tool you know how to use is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail). Professionals can be identified by career and academic credentials, professional memberships, time spent interviewing people doing the job, use of different tools, professional validation processes, documentation, knowledge of the DOL Uniform Guidelines, and use of tests specifically developed for predicting job performance.

The entire investment of a best-practice hiring system is often recovered in 60-90 days. Isn’t it worth it to cut-through the sales-pitch and get the employee you actually thought you were getting?

Dead or Alive?

Is HR dead? That depends. Keep up the same-old practices, and the answer is probably, “Yes.” Move into the 21st century and master best practices, and I predict you will become managements’ new BFF.

“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.”

It (with help from consultant Charles Handler) looked at vendors and settled in 2010 on Shaker Consulting Group, a company we once profiled in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership (ask me, at todd@ere.net, if you want me to send you that issue). KPMG and Shaker spent about a year building a simulation, including extensive work by Shaker in reviewing KPMG’s HR materials, shadowing employees, analyzing KPMG jobs, and more.

Bar-Yoseph said the assessment’s goal was to “approximate what it would look like” to work at the company, and to tell employees “what they need to know about us to make an informed decision … here’s what we value. Implicit in that was, do you value that to?”

The simulation went live in August 2011. It sets up real-life scenarios for candidates, and asks candidates how they’d handle the situations. The assessment asks questions such as whether they, the job candidate, would be more likely to delegate a task or do it themselves — a task such as dealing with an under-performing employee. Or, in other parts of the assessment, candidates are given 2 1/2 minutes to type in a response — not choose from a drop-down menu — to a question such as, “how would you improve morale on your team?”

The simulation, about an hour long, isn’t given to everyone. KPMG is having only those who make it through the initial screen take it — people who’ve been selected for a face-to-face interview. Hiring managers use it to know what areas to probe during the interview, what questions to ask candidates. Perhaps something like this: “you indicated in the assessment that you’d delegate x types of duties … can you tell me about an experience doing that, how you made it successful?”

There are also questions that are more bio-data-like, such as what publications people read. And, questions about what’s important to people, such as whether it’s more important for them to be an industry guru, or to train and mentor others.

A cross-section of current KPMG employees in Canada also took the simulation/assessment, so that candidates’ scores can be compared to top performers. It’s integrated into the Kenexa system that KPMG uses to manage the resumes that come in.

Bar-Yoseph said a few dozen candidates have taken it so far. Feedback from them is limited as of now, but, he says, feedback from current managers and employees is “glowing.” In the next couple of months, KPMG will roll out the test to campus hires, which, he says, will be an “exponentially larger” group of test-takers. I should watch my tongue: Bar-Yoseph emphasizes that in building this tool, “the last thing we wanted was for people to feel like this was a test.”

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:

• The economy is getting better
• There is a continued search for more value from hiring via quality of hire
• The talent management mindset is driving a competency-based vision of the employee lifecycle that requires continual measurement to determine competency levels
• Technology has made it increasingly easier to integrate assessment into other, related products

But the real reason lies beyond all of these factors (although it actually incorporates all of them). This reason is a newfound ability to clearly demonstrate value for programs of all sorts via rapidly increasing capabilities for data analytics and business intelligence.

In fact, powerful and easy-to-use data analytics have ushered in the dawn of an entirely new age of evolution for testing. The past decade saw the rise of test content being offered online. This created tremendous efficiencies for the use of testing, allowing it go mainstream. We spent a decade working out new and better ways to deliver tests and to use the millions of data points captured from candidates to make tests shorter and more powerful. This information also allowed us to really get to the truth when it comes to understanding how to predict performance at a variety of job types and levels.

We are now emerging from this intense period of growth and new understanding. The combination of clarity around human performance and new technology has led us to the doorstep of an era that I predict will see huge increases in the adoption of pre-employment assessment. What I saw at HR Tech really crystallized this vision for me. Here’s why.

We I/O psychologists have been operating with a business intelligence mindset for more than 60 years. We have continually tried to demonstrate the value of testing programs via validation studies looking at the relationship between test scores and job performance. I wrote an article for ERE on this very issue seven years ago explaining the basics of a business-intelligence-driven mindset and how it can clearly show the value of various HR practices, including assessment.

What I saw at HR tech this year was the prediction I made in my 2004 article come to life! Fast forward to 2011 and the major players in assessment have created a whole new way to demonstrate the value of assessments (as well as other related HR processes). I believe this mindset and the technology to support it and make it accessible will allow them to quickly show their clients the money. Once a firm is able to have this level of insight there will be no looking back for assessment tools.

Here are some of the things I saw that have led me feel so optimistic:

SHL is dedicated to “people intelligence” and supports this mindset with a brand new analytics dashboard tool that will allow its clients to model and understand many aspects of their hiring process all the way to how applicants are sourced and how their hiring processes stack up to a variety of reference points, including industry, geographic location, etc. This tool is essentially a wide-open data mining tool that allows a deep level of insight and analysis about the relationship between data yielded by the hiring process and organizational outcomes.

DDI has created a new platform that allows for the ability to track and evaluate data from individuals across the entire employee lifecycle. Data is capture in pre-employment mode and is managed longitudinally so that growth and potential can be tracked and evaluated.

Taleo has begun to focus on the concept of “talent intelligence” and has data available for its clients across the entire hiring process, allowing for deep levels of insight around the hiring process.

Kenexa has also created an impressive dashboard that allows for analytics across the entire hiring process, providing an easy way to examine talent pipelines all the way back to source of hire. Kenexa’s system also learns and allows for changes in the workflow process to adapt to various situations based on real-time data.

What I saw from the major players servicing the assessment market is a collective drive to help their clients clearly understand the value that any number of services can provide in actual outcomes that either represent, or can easily be paired with, actual dollars. In the past when we I/O psychologists were asked how we know assessments work, we would respond by saying “trust me.” While I know that we are sound in our understanding of value, it is hard to close the deal based simply on trust; thus, the adoption of assessment has been slow. Firms who are selling pre-employment prediction are now equipping themselves with powerful tools to break out of this quicksand and clearly model value propositions for those firms willing to listen.

Within 10 years, the collective value shown via the new breed of business analytics tools just now being offered in the HR space will lead the business of assessment to a whole new level of integration and adoption.

We still have our work cut out for us in convincing companies how important it is to take a business intelligence mindset within HR. It is high time that all companies serious about making their people a profit center should have a dedicated data analytics team within HR. The role of this team will be to work with various analytics tools, syncing them with internal data feeds and monitoring dashboards to answer questions and support business decisions, based on real live data. Prediction in the hiring process will be one core part of this, but it will go well beyond this. Early adoption of this mindset and the infastructure to support it will be a serious competitive advantage and soon those who don’t buy it will see their businesses losing ground rapidly to those who do.

In 2004 I wrote about the things I saw at HR tech this year in the hypothetical realm. In 2011 these fantasies are reality that is here for the taking.

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.

Williams’ paper is basically an analysis of the data provided by the Bureau of National Affairs, a private company that publishes information and analysis for business and government. Believe it or not, the BNA offers paid access to a database called Employment Discrimination Verdicts and Settlements that can be searched to identify each and every employment discrimination case filed with the EEOC and OFCCP. This database is a literal gold mine for anyone who wants to know why companies are being sued for their hiring practices. It represents the reality behind all of the conjecture around what will get you strung up by the feds when it comes to hiring practices, and it’s data should serve as a good way for companies to gauge their level of risk.

What Was Analyzed

Williams’ paper analyzed the nature and outcome of legal proceedings involving the EEOC and OFCCP, including all cases related to external hiring (not promotions) that were settled both in and out of court during the time period between 1998 and 2010. The findings reported cover two key areas:

1. Issues with a particular type of selection measure or test including: unstructured interviews, structured interviews, biodata measures, cognitive ability tests, psychomotor tests, and “other tests.”
2. Issues with the way the selection tools were used within the hiring process, including the following key issues: lack of documentation, inconsistent process, quota for affirmative action programs, recruiting source violations, violations of the 4/5th rule, and “other” process issues.

Findings

I don’t have room to present a detailed review of the findings from Williams’ study in this article. Those interested in a full list of the findings should obtain a copy of the article itself (email her at mailto:kate.zaner.williams@gmail.com). However, a brief run through of the highlights still provides a ton of useful information and presents an excellent picture of what not to do when building a hiring process.

A total of 224 complaints were identified. Within this total 109 were settled out of court (73 by the EEOC and 36 by the OFCCP). Of the 224 total complaints, only 78 of these actually went to trial. Note that when examined over the 12 years covered by the study, the total of 224 cases breaks out to about 19 per year. The total number of cases that end up facing legal challenges is very small when one considers the massive number of hires made each year in the U.S.

Issues with Selection Measures

Of the 52 complaints about a selection instrument, a bit over half (52%) were settled before trial.

Issues with selection measures almost exclusively involved either interviews or cognitive and psychomotor testing.

Interviews

No cases involving complaints about interviews were settled out of court. In all cases employers decided to take their chances in court and prevailed more often with structured rather than unstructured interviews.

Of the cases that went to trial involving interviews, structured interviews held up better than unstructured, with only 13% of the structured type being ruled discriminatory and 50% of the unstructured ones being ruled as such.

The bottom line here is that if you get challenged on your interviewing process, you are likely going to court, and if you follow best practices and take the time to develop a structured interview process, you are more likely to prevail. If not, it is going to cost you big time. This makes sense given the fact that structured interviews create consistency across interviewers and usually provide excellent documentation of the rationale behind the interview scores that contribute to hiring decisions.

If you are not using a structured interview process, you have a problem. You should make every effort to move out of the stone age and adopt this easy and painless upgrade to your hiring process.

Testing

Two types of tests (cognitive ability and psychomotor tests) ended up accounting for almost all of the challenges related to testing. This makes sense given the fact that these tests consistently demonstrate adverse impact while also having some of the highest levels of validity (i.e., ROI). Welcome to the crazy, mixed up world of testing, where the most effective tests can land you in the most trouble!

Completely opposite of the results for interviews, all of the challenges related to cognitive ability tests and two-thirds of those related to psychomotor tests were settled out of court. This is likely due to the fact that if a test cannot be shown to be job related by the plaintiff, there is no possible way they can win a challenge. Cases that are settled for the plaintiff almost always relate to a failure to demonstrate the job relatedness of a test that demonstrates adverse impact.

For example, in EEOC vs NationsBank of Tennessee (2001) a cognitive ability test discriminated against Hispanic employees by requiring English proficiency, a competency that was not required on the job.

Cases related to psychomotor tests that were settled also showed serious issues with job-relatedness. For example, in EEOC vs. American Airlines (2002), the company used a pre-employment test for meter readers and janitors that had adverse impact against females and measured skills that were not required on the job.

The issue of job relatedness and adverse impact can be a bit complex, but the bottom line is that failure to demonstrate the job relatedness of any sort of test can land you in big trouble. Doing so with cognitive or psychomotor tests will significantly increase your risk factor because these tests are most likely to cause issues with minority score patterns.

Process Issues

While selection devices are a common source of litigation, this study shows that the legality of the selection process is a much more important factor. Cases that went to trial around selection devices were decided for the plaintiff only 28% of the time, vs 68% for those related to the selection process, meaning that process issues are more likely to land an employer in hot water.

This table (click to enlarge) summarizes the reason for legal challenges related to discriminatory selection processes.

The data clearly demonstrates that the most common reason for process cases is inconsistency in the hiring process. Cases related to inconsistent process accounted for the largest percentage of all process related cases and over half of these were settled prior to court. A whopping 91% of all inconsistent process cases were found to be discriminatory.

Some examples of process related cases that were lost by the plaintiff include:

In Dennis v Columbia Colleton Medical Center (2002), the U.S. Court of Appeals described the hospital’s selection process as “a peculiarly informal process” because their explanations for not hiring the plaintiff were different from the written job description, giving the decision “a flavor of post-hoc rationalizations.”

In Dunlap v Tennessee Valley Authority (2008), the court determined the company’s hiring process was discriminatory because they found 70 counts of manipulating test scores and changing interview and test scores in candidate rankings.

ERE readers should know that issues related to the selection process include the source of candidates and the way positions are advertised. In Allen v Tobacco Superstore (2007), the company relied on word of mouth to publicize open positions and had no consistent procedures for advancement; employees simply asked a supervisor to be considered. The court found the word-of-mouth hiring and promotion process — which resulted in a company-wide dearth of Black store managers despite operating in communities with large Black populations — was discriminatory.

Hiring processes must be standardized in terms of the information that is used to make employment decisions. Informal practices or doing an end-around and ignoring the documented process can lead to a heap of trouble. Those who think this is just a silly little nuisance should be sure to read on.

Costs of Legal Complaints

Settling out of court resulted in average fees per case of $590,266 for EEOC cases and $668,785 for OFCCP cases.

Cases that were settled by individual plaintiffs rather then a government body averaged $12,292,492. In comparison, cases that went to trial and were found in favor of the plaintiff cost organizations an average of $13,306,346.

Settling out of court is a much cheaper way to go when faced with a challenge to a selection process or tool. Complaints about selection processes can be very expensive and greatly outweigh the costs of taking the time to do things correctly.

Concluding Remarks

The most interesting thing I gleaned from Williams’ article is how much employers’ thinking about hiring practices reminds me of the Ford Pinto. Most of us are old enough to remember Ford’s exploding car bomb and the fact that Ford’s bean counters knew about the risks related to using faulty components in its fuel system, but decided that the estimated cost of litigation was less than the cost of fixing the defective parts.

Like the Pinto, while employment litigation or challenges can be expensive, the numbers show that it is highly unlikely that an employer will have to pay the price, making this an issue of risk tolerance. The odds are in the employers’ favor that they will get away with poor practices and as such the threat of legal action is not enough incentive to force them to action.

The good news is that there are two wonderful reasons to use job-related tests within a consistent and standardized process. The first is that companies have a moral and ethical obligation to do the right thing and treat all applicants fairly. The second is that the two key issues here — job relatedness and standardized process — are directly related to ROI. That’s right, folks: doing the right thing is also a direct path to profits!! We I/O psychologists have decades of data to support this fact, and almost every vendor out there can produce dozens of case studies to support this fact.

So it’s time to flip the risk equation and realize that doing the right thing can also lead to excellent profits. Use your hiring practice to build a Prius, not a Pinto!

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.

These days, when companies claim to place a premium on collaboration and teamwork, “it would seem that people high in agreeableness would have at least a slight economic advantage over those low in agreeableness. The fact that researchers repeatedly report the opposite is puzzling,” write the authors of the paper.

They suggest a few possibilities for the disparity, including weaker bargaining for salary by the more agreeable types, a greater focus on building relationships rather than advancing themselves, and they simply may be less verbally assertive in meetings.

Although altruistic behaviors are a facet of performance, they involve self-sacrifice and are often not rewarded. Voice behaviors may, on the other hand, attract rewards, particularly when they are directed toward persuading others of the value of one’s ideas.

Here’s one observation you can test in your own workplace. According to the authors, citing research by others, note that “people who were highly critical of others were rated as more competent than those offering favorable evaluations.”

Does that hold true where you work? Are the managers who do the toughest performance reviews paid more and more likely to advance than those who are less critical?

“People who are low in agreeableness may be perceived as more competent by virtue of their lack of warmth,” the authors write. And this phenomenon  holds true for recruiters and hiring managers. Citing a 2001 study, the authors observe, “people recommended a higher-status position and higher pay for job applicants who expressed anger — a display that is more likely among disagreeable people.”

Other studies, not to mention the personal experience of millions of workers, attest to the cost of bosses who are disagreeable to the point of being unreasonable. Administrative staffing firm OfficeTeam published a survey that found 46 percent of American employees have worked for an unreasonable boss in their career. Some just quit outright. The majority — 59 percent — stayed and either tried to deal with it or just lived with it.

In the United Kingdom, a study by the government there found that worker stress was costing $42.2 billion (U.S.) annually in lost time, productivity, and worker turnover. The leading cause of workplace stress: line managers.

Disagreeable people may well be bad bosses, but they are probably not the cinematic version of Horrible Bosses. As the authors of the study note, “People low in agreeableness are basically amicable. They are just slightly more likely than people high in trait agreeableness to behave disagreeably in certain situations by, for instance, aggressively advocating for their position during conflicts.”

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:

Dear ######,

I am sorry you had this experience.

It is the norm that companies don’t share test results with applicants.

They get concerned about this because they think applicants may sue them.

I don’t know enough about this situation to say if the profile for the job is a good match or not to your skills.

I can say this: if you don’t fit the profile they have developed and you answered honestly, you may not be a good fit for that company and their culture even if you can do the job. This may be a good thing in the long run as no one likes to work for a company culture where they don’t fit in.

What can you do to learn more about why you were rejected in this situation? Unfortunately not much.

I would suggest you call the recruiter directly and ask them to share result with you. If they say they can’t, you do have a right to ask HOW the test results are used and what kind of test it is. You have a right to know about the process they use and then you can see maybe what happened due to your testing scores. However, I seriously doubt if any information at all will be shared with you.

In terms of the questions about sex and race, these should never be required. The EEOC has an optional form that they may have provided but if they required this info from you and if you had no chance opt out then they are not playing by the rules. If you feel discrimination is at hand here contact your local EEOC office or an employment lawyer and they can tell you if you have a case.

I hate to say that the kind of thing you experienced is common, but it is. It is the result of several things, including the fact that companies don’t have enough time to discuss information with rejected applicants, companies are worried about being sued, and companies often do stupid things because they don’t know any better.

In today’s economy you are very lucky to have a good job that you like. When it does come time to apply for another job, do your best to ask about the process that will be used to evaluate your suitability for the job.

Regards,

Charles Handler

I am willing to bet that the scenario experienced by #### is a common one. This is highly unfortunate. With high-volume automated processes, for entry-level positions the norm is that no candidate feedback be given. In this situation the recruiter was going after a passive candidate for a professional level position and a relatively deep dialogue unfolded.

We I/O psychologists talk a lot about ROI from assessment via predictive accuracy of assessments. This is definitely important but it is also important not to lose sight of the big picture when it comes to assessments and hiring. Value from the hiring process is much more than just a chance to crawl around an applicant with a microscope. It is also a chance to provide someone with a positive experience and build your company’s brand image.

The company that tried to poach #### certainly does not share this perspective. It left the applicant asking:

Do you value my time? An hour is a pretty long time to ask of a candidate. Assessments taking this long are more common for professional level jobs in which the dialogue with the recruiter has progressed down the funnel. Still it was enough that the candidate noted the exact length of the assessment.

Are you being fair to me? The candidate did not say if the race and sex info request was optional or not. I think that candidates often miss the fact that the EEOC form added to all assessments is actually optional, as this is sometimes not very clear. There is definitely a chance that it was not made optional. Users of assessment tools should review this kind of thing from the candidate perspective and make sure that everything is crystal-clear. You can see what happens when this is not the case. When there is a job applicant who has even the faintest thought of legal action swimming around in her head, bad things are afoot. This is a scenario to be avoided at all costs!

What kind of jerks are you all anyway? Most of all this experience smacks of a company that does not understand the impact of its employment brand on applicants. The web and social media are making brand erosion due to poor experiences a serious reality. Treating candidates poorly is something that is going to be tolerated less and less. Each candidate interaction gives a company a chance to show how much it values applicants and how well it treats its employees. Creating a positive, engaging candidate experience should be a prime directive for all hiring processes. Why not create an interactive online application that serves as a two-way street, engaging applicants while informing them about the job and company and collecting relevant predictive data? This is the future for best-practices-based hiring. Get with it!

What’s wrong with me? While we can’t know for sure if the assessment was the stake through this candidate’s heart, it seems likely. While this may or may not have been appropriate, no one deserves to be treated as poorly as ### was, especially after sharing so much about herself. While it is often the case that assessment results are not shared, companies can still provide rejected applicants with some information that allows them to understand why they were rejected. It is amazing how easily we forget the golden rule. In this case silence is not an effective solution. Sweeping problems under the rug may work in the short run, but in the long run it can lead to some really smelly situations!

If enough applicants ask the questions above based on their experience in the hiring process, eventually this kind of thing is going to cost the company customers, good employees, and revenue!

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.

A couple things happen when we are asked to describe ourselves. In the best case, scores are idealized self-presentations … how we want people to see us. In other cases responders might be completely out of touch with reality or just faking it. Even when tests include an internal truthfulness scale to flag inconsistent answers, self-reported information exists purely in the mind of the candidate.

Averaging Leaks

Averaging scores is a bad thing. Averages can describe groups, but they cannot describe individuals. For example, you might believe Californians are flaky and southerners are rednecks. But when you get to know an individual Californian or Georgian as a human being, you usually learn he or she does not match the average stereotype. Accordingly, when people are assigned to performance groups, it’s rare for any individual to match their group average. Group test scores and individual scores are two entirely different things.

Score-Setting Leaks

Passing scores are supposed to predict good performance. Failing scores are supposed to predict bad performance. If you set cut-scores based on averages of high-performing groups, you learn nothing about the low group. In fact, both groups may have a lot in common! Hiring accuracy depends on knowing what makes them different.

Cause or Pause Leaks

Not all test factors cause performance. For one thing, many tests like the MBTI, the DISC, and others were all developed to measure on aspects of normal personality. They might work in a communication workshop, but not all normal personality factors apply to jobs. Research shows only three factors correlate with job performance and six to job fit. The rest are either irrelevant or overlapping.

Be wary of tests that ask a few questions and use the answers to comprehensively describe behavior. Watch out for tests that try to describe every aspect of human personality. Finally, avoid like the plague any test that comes without objective supporting data showing factor scores directly lead to (or somehow affects) job performance. If it does not cause, you need to pause.

Assumption Leaks

How many people do you know claim they are intelligent, but aren’t? Claim they are good with people, but aren’t? Claim they are organized, but aren’t? Research shows there is almost no correlation between scores on a personality test and skills such as building interpersonal relationships, solving problems, or ability to learn. Organizations that trust personality scores to predict actual skills are pre-destined to make mistakes.

Purple Dinosaur Leaks

I love you/ you love me/we’re a happy family/ with a great big hug and a kiss from me to you /won’t you say you love me too? … Ratings are like Barney the Dinosaur relationships: grouping is often based on who the manager likes best. Whenever you ask managers to rate employees’ performance, the scores will probably underemphasize actual job skills and overemphasize sociability.

Performance Confusion Leaks

Even assuming your managers are blunt-force honest, and ratings are made on jobs where numbers can be tracked (e.g., customer service, production, sales, and so forth), what happens when an employee such as a Customer Service Representative is rated both on quality and number of customers served (i.e., the two are usually inversely related)? If management cannot decide what’s most important for an employee to accomplish, then what exactly are you supposed to measure?

Employee Similarity Leaks

All those high and low performers you are studying belong to a special group: sufficiently skilled to remain employed. In other words, there really may not be enough difference between one employee and the next to measure a useful difference in scores. If you have no identifiable and trustworthy standards for comparison, then how can you set scores?

Same but Different Leaks

Some vendors offer norms for drivers, salespeople, emergency medical technicians, and so forth, implying they can be used for selection. But look at your own workforce. Are all your employees with the same title high performers, do their jobs require identical tasks, do individuals match the group average, and do high and low performers have score differences? Playing the job-norm card is an effective way to market a leaky test but it does not help the test user make better hiring decisions.

Conclusion

Leaky tests are great examples of junk science. I advise my clients to take them with a grain of salt. Leaks come from many sources: restricted score range, conflicting metrics, useless test factors, self-report errors, overemphasizing manager bias, underestimating job skills, trusting personality to predict actual skills, comparing individuals to group averages, and assuming job titles all involve the same skills. Considering the cost of water these days, don’t you think it’s a good idea to tighten-up the faucets?

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.

For example, skirts and stock markets tend to move up and down together, beach ice cream sales and shark attacks tend to move together, and watermelon sales and temperature move together. But, skirts do not cause the market to change, sharks do not buy ice cream, and selling watermelon does not cause it to be hot. You can probably think of many others, but the most important statistical concept is, “If it does not cause, you need to pause!”

True professionals know beforehand the factors they want to measure. Then, they use stats to compare scores with performance to try to prove themselves wrong! I know it does not make sense, but remember that since the future is murky and uncertain, it’s better to reduce mistakes than seek perfection. Explaining things after the fact is creative story telling. Professionals make an informed prediction, collect data, and try to disprove it.

Screwy Thinking

Returning now to our example: We already discussed why throwing things against the wall to see what sticks is unprofessional. Now let’s consider the Lake Woebegon effect; that is, the men are all strong, the women are all pretty, and the children are above average.

Let’s suppose in our previous example that shoe size was one of our factors. We know individual shoe sizes in both Group A and Group B ranged from size 6 to 12. However, Group A folks averaged size 8 and Group B averaged size 10. Does that mean an applicant wearing a size 9 will become a member of Group A? A size 12 a member of Group B? Nope. And, Nope. Group-level data tells us about groups, not about individuals! Bad analyst! Bad!

How about this? There are four people in Group A and 10 people in Group B. Aside from the problems we already discussed, can we compare the two groups? ‘Nope again. One person in Group A has a 25% impact on the group’s overall score, while one person in Group B has only a 10% impact. Furthermore, the group sizes are so small it would be silly to think scores would generalize to all candidates. It takes at least 25 (preferably, hundreds) of subjects to draw reasonable conclusions. No soup for you, analyst!

Oh, yes, one more thing. Can we trust someone with a high score in the judgment trait to be smart? Get real! Most studies show less than a 1% relationship between personality scores and cognitive skills and about a 10% relationship with interpersonal behaviors. Why? When people take a self-descriptive test you never know if they are honest, trying to make a good impression, delusional, clueless, and so forth. If you need someone who is smart, give them a problem to solve … not tell you about it!

Importance of Being Wrong Less Often

It may sound counterintuitive, but it is easier to reduce the number of bad hires than it is to find superstars. The future is murky, filled with unpredictable events that elude even Karnak the fortune teller. Folks who expect 100% hiring and promotion accuracy are going to be frustrated. No system known to humankind can perfectly predict the future. There are just too many uncontrollable variables.

The present, however, is more tangible. So, instead of trying to ensure perfect success, it’s actually easier to reduce test error by screening out unskilled people. It goes without saying that manager-employee compatibility is very important; but, in addition to personality factors, organizations expect employees to have cognitive abilities, motivations, and so forth. This is the 20% that delivers 80% of job results.

Summary

Selecting or promoting people based on silly science is more than just bad practice. It’s unethical, irresponsible, and unprofessional. Qualified people are rejected, unqualified ones are hired or promoted, and the inevitable potential of legal action increases. And, it could get worse. What do you think will happen when all those incompetent employees think they should be promoted to management?

Reducing the odds of making a wrong decision requires tests, interview questions, application blanks, and so forth that are grounded in a solid theory of job performance; that is, they measure things that cause high or low performance. If you cannot, for certain, prove you are measuring factors that cause performance, you will never graduate from the half-wrong club.

“If it does not cause, you need to pause!”

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.

Ten years ago we didn’t hear very much about fit, although it has always been a concern and a part of the decision on whether to hire someone or not. But recently it has become the most important concern, often overriding technical skills or experience. As we move to flatter organizations, more team and project work, and increasingly collaborative work environments, finding people who get along with others and fit into corporate culture are essential to success. They keep harmony, they build community, and they create trust, all important ingredients for success in innovative global and competitive environments.

Personal fit should be an integral part of your candidate assessment process. Fitting into a culture, organization, team or job is not always easy. Some people feel more connected and more included than others, and those who feel the most connected and involved tend to be the ones who perform well and stay. People who feel that they belong to something important — something that engages and excites them — make organization more successful.

Candidates experience the corporate culture almost from their first contact with the organization. They see it in how they are treated, how diligent and caring the employees are, and what the work environment is like. As soon as they meet the hiring manager, they are assessing his or her style and values. When these are in alignment, good performance follows.

Likewise, recruiters and hiring managers are subconsciously assessing candidates from the moment they meet. That gut feel we frequently have about a candidate is probably based largely on how we see them fitting into our team and how well we think we will get along with them. This is often partly based on people who have similar interests or hobbies, who have had similar experiences, or who have known the same people. The more common connections with a candidate, the more likely they are to fit into our culture.

But the first step in more objectively assessing culture fit is to articulate what makes up the culture of your organization.

Know Your Culture

Most firms do a poor job of figuring out what makes up their culture and whether candidates would be comfortable in it or with a particular manager. Many factors make up the corporate culture. Some of those are as basic as work schedules and travel demands, but perhaps more significant are the ethics and values the organization believes in, the style of everyday management, and how communication takes place.

Take the time to understand what the ingredients are of your true culture, not the espoused one, and then you will be able to assess candidates with far greater success.

Four Ways to Assess Fit

Here are four ways to determine whether or not a candidate fits your culture.

Realistic Job Previews. Some firms rely on realistic job previews, where candidates get a glimpse of what it would be like to actually do the work. The Shaker Consulting Group has created these for firms such as Key Bank and Starbucks. Previews allow candidates to select themselves “out” of the interview process and also, when combined with testing, allow organizations to determine the potential quality of fit of a candidate. The downside is that but often candidates overlook potential mismatches and move forward.

Use Referrals and Internal Connections. Referrals have been widely written about here on ERE and elsewhere. They can be a gold standard for cultural fit because current employees, or even those who may not be employees but know your organization well, typically choose to refer people who will fit the culture. You can simply ask employees to focus on people who would be a good fit, rather on people with high skills levels or experience. The downside of referrals is that you can overuse your network and run out of good candidates, and it is always hard to get referrals consistently. It often requires a “push effort” to get people motivated and once the push goes away, effort falls back to low levels.

Use Social Networks. Social networks are a potentially highly effective way to determine cultural fit or at least to see whether or not a potential candidate communicates and interacts in a way that fits. By developing a Facebook or LinkedIn page and then engaging candidates in conversations, recruiters can learn a great deal about communication skills, language ability, and motivation. The downside is that these require time and effort; often, more than an average recruiter has available. However, it is probably true that candidates who have joined your network and participate in conversations at all are a better fit than those who do not.

Fit Testing. There are many tests of cultural and personal fit that can streamline assessment and that add a quantitative dimension to the selection process. These tests have been around for decades and have a solid track record when used properly. Of course, the downside of testing is the candidate’s acceptance and the time needed on both the candidate side as well as on the recruiters to interpret the results.

But whatever method or combination of methods you decide on, making sure candidates will be comfortable in their work environment and with their hiring manager should be a key consideration.

By getting candidates who are aligned to your culture, you will experience faster time to productivity, deeper involvement in problem solving, greater innovation, and less turnover.