 |
If you think job interviews are nail bitingly painful affairs, imagine what it's like for a Human Resource manager who has to screen through all the job applications, narrow down the best and then conduct each and every interview himself while his other tasks keep piling up on his desk! |
Once the interview is over, the job applicant just has to wait patiently for the call that may or may not eventually come. The HR manager on the other hand, has the task of deciding who the best among the many hopefuls is. He picks the right one and the (company profits), the wrong one and this horror hire is a blemish to his name.
So how does one pick the person that is exactly the right fit for the job? And how sure are you that that person who 'aced' the written test will actually pass with flying colours on the work floor itself, say a year down the road?
Gutted by gut instinct
Some might choose to go purely by gut instinct; others will base their decision on the recommendations of family and friends. That can prove to be so very right or disastrously wrong as one small local engineering firm discovered to its dismay. It had hired a manager who was highly recommended and who supposedly had chalked up quite an impressive resume
working with multinational companies as far as UK and Singapore.
The new manager was supposed to help streamline the company's operations but in the first thee months, he behaved so arrogantly and antagonised the lower rung staff, they refused to work with him and chaos ensued. The company was forced to terminate him only to discover that he had obtained the e-mail contacts of all their clients and associates which he used to exact revenge.
He e-mailed allegations against the company to their clients and threatened to cause even more malicious damage to the company's reputation, unless they paid for his silence! The enraged company was forced to hire outside expertise to investigate his background, counter his claim and fend off his allegations. They paid for a due diligence report to be conducted and forwarded the reports to their
clients. Then they hired a lawyer to block further action by the ex-employee.
Life and death decision
Such horror hires may be more common than you think. Justin Kan one of the founders of
web calendar start-up Kiko who sold it off for US$250,000 last year on eBay writes in his blog that, "Picking the right people is life and death for your company.
"We hired two people for Kiko. One of them (Rich White, our interface designer) was awesome; everything I could have asked for and more: selfmotivated, entrepreneurial, competent, hard working, and very smart. However, one of our hires turned out to be a huge
mistake. He basically spun his wheels, didn't complete anything, and left for months at a time without word.
Working with "someone like this can easily make working on your company not very fun at all. If you have any reservations about someone at the outset, you should probably not hire them." Internet businesses or traditional businesses, hiring right is a vital need for today's firms.
A study which was published by the Journal of Basic and Applied Psychology showed that 60% of people lie in a 10-minute conversation while a study by the Society for Human Resource Management found that a poor hiring decision that ended in termination actually costs the company concerned around 38% of an employee's salary! Multinational companies and SMEs will find it tough to just shrug off a bad
hire, not least because too many unproductive hours would have been chalked up and the amount of money spent on that individual would have been a sheer waste.
So the HR personnel must now be more vigilant in ensuring that such `corporate terrorists' are kept at bay but the question how should one go about selecting the right person for the job especially when gut instinct alone won't suffice? Simple - put in more effort at the preliminary stage to cull the good from the bad. With so much at stake today, it's about time
that companies ramp up the assessment process and cull those who misrepresent themselves versus those really competent. It is best to give an in-depth testing on the candidate's competencies rather than glide along on first impressions.
Competency assessment
Competency assessment focuses on assessing the total eligibility and suitability of the candidate for the tasks he's expected to accomplish.
Competency based interviews are a targeted yet highly flexible way to sift through the sea of potential candidates and zero in on just that right person that can add true value to the company.
The candidate is assessed in two key areas - eligibility or technical competency and
suitability or behavioural competency. The former touches on the issue of whether or not the candidate can conduct the necessary technical responsibilities given to him and in the latter, he is tested on whether he can be an effective performer for the tasks at hand. What's
needed is to get the `innerview' - the indepth, inside view of the candidate's capabilities and abilities - rather than the traditional `interview' shallow assessment of his presumed paper skills.
One great strategy is to craft a written or an online test where the candidate is presented with a real-life crisis scenario and what would be his likely response be in such an environment?
While it's true that more companies are turning to personality profi le tests to resolve these two issues, one must remember that personality profi le testing is merely one of several job assessment methodologies that one can administer when interviewing new hires.
The good news for many a harried CEO or HR personnel today, is that one need not reinvent the wheel where competency based testing is concerned, there are experts in other countries that have already set the ball rolling and fine tuned the entire process so that getting the right person for the right job on-board is no longer a headache.
All these may appear to be rather tiresome for a HR or CEO used to gut feel when it comes to the hiring and firing process but in the wake of such horror hires as mentioned above, it
truly does pay to use proven and well researched methodologies, if only to find the jewels in the employment marketplace. Remember, if you choose to rely on your gut instincts as before, just be prepared to be gutted by your next horror hire!
Kevin Tan is an Associate Consultant of Malaysian Institute of Management.
