I want to ask you a question. A one question interview.
In the past year, I have had the good fortune to conduct a one question interview with a number of thoughtful people involved in recruiting and staffing. Thoughtful people can put a lot of information into a 60-90 second response. The diversity of suggestions, ideas and insights about improving the candidate experience has been fantastic. After listenting to what thoughtful people have said, you may think so too. The interviews can be found on our blog here, or on our YouTube channel here. These interviews are really a great collection of ideas for staffing process improvement.
While at ERE in San Diego, I want to hear from you, collect your views, opinions and suggestions. Stop by our booth – #408 and set up a time to speak out. Your point of view is important, and I will assist you in opening a dialogue with the recruiting and talent community.
Kevin Wheeler posted an article on ERE that got the recruiting community fired up. He asked, “Do we need Internal Recruting at all?” His premise seems to rest with effectiveness, accountability and differentiation that a recruiting function may or may not deliver.
With 32 comments as of this post, it ranks near the top of the charts for getting folks riled up.
Here are my two cents, with a few more details than what I posted on ERE.
The dialogue is all good. It may be like the question about cars, is it better to buy or lease? And the answer is: It depends.
Kevin’s main point may really be rooted in economics. When an internal team has the same mandate to measure, track and report economic impact that an external provider does, there is most likely performance parity.
Unfortunately, the issue lies with the fact that many CFOs and CEOs do not hold internal recruiting teams accountable to document contribution and deliver continuous staffing process improvement. And without a mandate for economic accountability, the accounting infrastructure to document contribution is often lacking. A vice president of sales or manufacturing would never be allowed to operate with the poor economic reporting and accounting infrastructure that is deployed for the business process of recruiting. As such, it is common for internal recruiting teams to use ATS based reporting, thus relying on activity based measures instead of economic measures.
Henry David Thoreau gives us words to ponder for this situation: “It is not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?”
One gauge we use to explore the economic accountability of a recruiting team is how literate they are about job-specific performance metrics and how quickly they can access data sets of performance metrics. Ask a staffing professional, internal or external, if they measure and report on the cost of time to proficiency (total investment from sourcing to self-sufficient performance) for the position with the highest hiring volume. Ask who owns the budget for staffing waste. The answers to those questions reveal a great deal about the accountability expectations set by the CFO and CEO for recruiting.
Reporting on days to fill, requisitions open, requisitions per recruiter, and opinion-based quality of hire while good to know are a bit like busy ant metrics. Recruiters with economic accountability use HR analytics to document and report reductions in staffing waste and rework, increased yield in new hire productivity, reduced time to proficiency, increases in job family average performance metrics and the like.
From my experience, corporate resources flow to those who build a good business case and then document return on investment. Outside providers have to do this to earn repeat business. The best internal providers do so as well. Here is an example of how Key Bank documented high ROI from using pre-employment testing as a form of measurement rigor to reduce staffing waste.
I had a chance to speak with Teresa Fearis, Director of Global Alliances at SHL, while attending Taleo World. We discussed what can be done to improve the candidate experience.
Candidates are asked to provide a great deal of information during the application process. At a minimum they provide work history. Firms that utilize objective candidate evaluations methods such as pre-employment tests, assessments or simulations obtain even more information about the candidate. This generates a pretty lop-sided exchange of information. Teresa offers a few suggestions for improving the candidate experience based upon higher levels of information sharing. Click PLAY to hear what she has to say. Then scroll down to read more on this topic.
Provide candidate the same information the recruiter gets to see.
A candidate provides a resume and the interview will cover the content and work history. The candidate completes an assessment and it is rarely discussed. Why is this? Several reasons may come into play on this point.
Psychometric Language – Assessment results may be presented in psychometric terms versus business terms. Without proper interpretation training, explaining the nature of what was evaluated may pose a challenge. Candidates may not find this information of value. Single Score Results – Some assessment providers reduce the candidate results to one overall score. Recruiters may be ill-equipped to accurately describe what the score means and how it was derived beyond the hollow response, “Higher is better.” Or even worse, recruiters may use terms such as Pass and Fail, which in most cases is a poor or inaccurate way to describe the outcome. Think of it like this – “Your resume failed.” Recruiters just don’t use that language, it should not be used with assessments either. Fear – There have been a few cases of candidates challenging the appropriateness of an assessment. Sometimes, the content of an assessment raises doubts in a candidate’s mind as to the relationship between the test and the job. This is referred to as poor face validity – it just does not look right to the candidate, which may mean it is not the right assessment for the job either. Well designed assessment reduce fear, and may create fans with positive things to say about the experience. Descriptive versus predictive – Without in-house validation analysis, there is no documented evidence that assessment results actually have a statistical relationship to job performance. As such, there may marginal confidence in the value of score. It is difficult to have a meaningful conversation about an evaluation without underlying evidence of its value
To provide candidates with feedback on their results, the assessment report should define the candidates scores on the job-specific competencies evaluated. Very few assessment providers offer that service.
Contact me for an example of the Candidate Profile Report from the Virtual Job Tryout. After a brief review, you can decide if this is the type of information you would be comfortable sharing with your candidates.
Allow candidates to post their assessment results on their social media profiles.
In the last 20+ years of providing assessment services to companies I have never heard someone say, “We are just like our competition.” As a matter of fact, I hear just the opposite, “We are different than our competition.” So what does that have to do with assessments? Well if you use the same assessment as your competition, and evaluate the same traits and characteristics as the competition, you by default become more like them. When your measurement system is calibrated the same, the outcome is similar.
The their book, The Differentiated Workforce, authors Becker, Beatty and Huslid discuss the practices high performing organization use to distance themselves from the competition. Harvard’s Michael Porter states competitive advantage comes from the use of business process that are difficult to replicate. Using an off the shelf assessment with a scoring model based upon mass research and huge norm pools is a ‘Me Too” strategy.
Teresa suggests that a candidate may get value out of posting their assessment results on their social media profile. For companies who view assessment as a generic or universal evaluation this may hold true. However, assessment can also be viewed as company and job specific measurement rigor that creates competitive differentiation in a business process called staffing. When assessment is designed and validated for your job, the results will be of little value to anyone else, unless of course your strategy was to mirror the talent and management practices at another firm.
I think Teresa’s points on what can be done with assessment results have merit – share and make it more public. The path to that state of business practices will require more work. However movement in this direction will raise the level of accountability for the use of best practices for pre-employment testing, increase skills in user groups, and drive broader acceptance of objective candidate evaluation.
Click here see what others have said about Improving the Candidate Experience.
So much digital dust has been sprinkled over the candidate side of this question. But, as a recruiter, where do you reside?
Candidates who are not engaged in looking for a career change, and who wait for an e-mail or phone call to consider a job are often called passive. Using that same logic, are recruiters who use post and hope, and wait for candidates to fill up their applicant tracking system passive recruiters? That might be considered an unfair or inappropriately simple definition for passive recruiters.
What criterion transforms a candidate into the active camp?
Applying for one job? Three or more jobs?
One job in the last five years. Five jobs in the last year?
How about those candidates who develop a spray and pray resume distribution machine, ah yes, those are truly active candidates.
How about creating a profile on LinkedIn or other social media? Does investing energy to be visible to digital detectives constitute active?
How about candidates who set up a job agent to alert them of the ideal opportunity? Does that count as active? Or is that really passive, waiting and hoping the ideal job miraculously shows up in their in-box?
I offer a few ideas for consideration on the topic of passive recruiters.
Passive recruiters: Rely on resumes and social media profiles to screen candidates
Only use the demographic profile and contact information section of their ATS/CRM
Measure sourcing effectiveness by candidate volume/traffic
Begin an interview without written, competency based questions
Use fundamentally the same methods of candidate evaluation for high volume hiring and one-off searches
Worry about requisition load and back-log
On the other hand, active recruiters engage in very different activities when it comes to managing the business process called staffing. Active recruiters understand the staffing process is ripe with metrics that document yield, performance variation, and contribution to the business plan. Active recruiters partner with finance, accounting and database specialists to measure, monitor, and improve the yield or results from their business process. Active recruiters document the return on investment from their use of corporate resources – people and dollars.
Active recruiters: Perform a Pareto Analysis of their current and future hiring requirements to appropriately allocate resources to the demand
Develop Realistic Job Previews for their highest volume jobs
Implement the weighted-scoring candidate screening questions in their ATS
Use objective candidate evaluation methods such as simulations and assessments to get better candidate data and quantify applicant qualifications
Deployed some form of objective pre-employment assessment for jobs with over 100 incumbents
Conducted in-house validation analysis for all jobs with more than 100 incumbents
Calculated (not estimated) the cost of on-boarding, or investment in time to proficiency for the one to three jobs with the highest volume of hiring in their company
Documented the cost of staffing waste and re-work from 90 day turnover for key positions with early retention challenges
Conducted a new hire performance variation analysis to document trends and outcomes in quality of hire measures
Developed written interview questions for each competency they evaluate
Deployed behaviorally anchored rating scales for evaluating candidate interview responses
Document quality of hire and yield by source from social media
The list goes on.
Each of these items represents a effective practice for staffing process improvement, supported with research. Active recruiters go beyond opinion and anecdote, they want evidence, documentation of impact and favorable trends on their metrics dashboards.
And remember the words of Henry David Thoreau :
“It is not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?”
If you would like to learn more about optimizing your level of active recruiting, give us a call.
In Part One of the Interview with Mike Hudy, he discussed the demands and opportunities I/O Psychologist face in developing simulation for pre-employment testing. In this conclusion, Mike offers a few suggestions on how to determine if a simulation may be appropriate for staffing process improvement in your organization.
What considerations should a company examine in deciding if a simulation would be appropriate for one of their jobs?
There are several factors to consider when examining if a simulation makes sense. If you have jobs with more than 100 incumbents, building a business case for simulations is typically pretty easy. Another factor is hiring volume. If you will hire more than 100 people into the same job in a year, simulations can make a significant contribution.
An additional factor would be the complexity of the job itself. This variable is often under-valued prior to a thorough job analysis. The more complex the job, the more complex the demands are on the pre-employment assessment.
The last and a very important factor to consider in the use of simulations is the candidate experience. As general rule, candidates find simulations engaging, a more valuable way of presenting their capabilities and companies who use simulations stand out in a positive way from other places the candidate may be applying.
In short, simulations such as the Virtual Job Tryout add selection science value across a range of factors that have a positive impact on staffing process improvement.
General Colin Powell spoke about growing talent in the Army at TaleoWorld 2010. He asserts that the Army may be doing more than most companies when it comes to grooming and advancing leaders. Listen to what he has to say, then click here to review a client case study and learn about CVS Caremark and their approach to growing leaders from within for their pharmacy operations. Great minds think alike.
Assessing potential is essential for both internal promotions and external hires. General Powell is quite clear in his observations that success in a current position is not a predictor of success in another position. CVS Caremark set out to achieve staffing process improvement for promotions with the use of realistic job preview, assessment and assessment-based development.
Internal candidates for the role of pharmacy supervisor are able to access a four part overview of the job, its demands, rewards and required competencies. Through a career interest prioritizing exercise, candidates receive immediate feedback about how their aspirations and interests align with the supervisor role.
Initiative to come forward after the feedback is left to the individual. A tailored development plan is created and the individual is invited to complete the Pharmacy Supervisor Virtual Job Tryout to further educate the candidate and evaluate job-fit. This multi-method assessment lets the candidate take the job for a test drive, completing a series of day-in-the-life exercises. While in-house validation of the assessment was a critical performance requirement, it was considered table stakes. The differentiator CVS Caremark was looking for was an assessment that delivered a candidate experience as unique as their brand and as challenging as the job. They wanted to make better decisions using better data.
Just like General Powell and the Army, the Leadership Development Team at CVS Caremark acknowledges the challenge of making well considered promotion decisions. The combined use of interactive realistic job preview and Virtual Job Tryout has elevated the quality of hire into leadership roles.
