Did you know that...
- 95% of applicants will exaggerate their credentials to get a job?
- 2/3 of new hires will be a disappointment in the first year?
- 2/3 of employees would rather work somewhere else?
- The average cost of recruiting, selecting, orienting and training a HK$26,000/month employee is HK$390,000?
- A 1% reduction in employee turnover for a 100 employee organisation yields HK$390,000?
- And most importantly, that 80% of employee turnover is avoidable
Fixing people problems
There are only three places in the employment cycle where we can fix our people problems.
Selecting (prevention)
Training (correction)
Replacing (termination)
Q: Which one do you think has the most potential for improvement and highest return on investment?
A: Selection
Q: But where do we throw most of our time, money and effort?
A: Trying to change the person, via training, after we hire them and, more often than not, eventually losing and replacing them anyway.
If you hire misfits, and train them, all you end up with is a bunch of trained misfits. You can’t teach a pig to sing and you can’t teach a rock to swim, but you can find out who the pigs and the rocks are before you hire them.
Tired of playing Russian Roulette Recruiting?
Most organisations rely almost exclusively on resumes, applications and interviews to make their hiring decisions. Given the facts, we would have the same success, or failure, rate by just flipping a coin. The candidate crafts the resume. The candidate fakes the interview. The candidate provides the references. Where do you take control of the process?
A lot has changed in the world of employment screening and selection, but relatively few employers have updated or enhanced their toolkits. We spend more time and effort researching the purchase of a copying machine than the people we hire. With today's technology, it is not only easy, but also inexpensive to look under the hood of our job candidates. Would you spend $100 to take control of the screening and selection process? Would you spend $100 to stop the revolving door of hiring and firing, to increase productivity, to increase customer satisfaction, to increase retention?
Believe it or not, with today’s sophisticated, web-based instruments and tools, that’s about all it costs to screen for the basic, but most important success factors. Some of the best-known companies in America: Disney, Nordstrom, Ritz-Carlton and Southwest Airlines have known for years that the most important predictor of job success is not degrees, not experience, not even training--it's job-person match. These companies share philosophies such as…
- Hire hard, manage easy
- Hire slow, fire fast
- Hire for style, train for skills
You can train someone on your company's processes, policies and procedures, but you can't train someone to change their personality. You can't train someone to enjoy solving people problems. You can't train someone to be customer-focused. How many times have you heard a job applicant say, "I love to work with people", then you put them on the job, and find out they are Attila the Hun—no eye contact, no warmth and no empathy.
The most important success factors cannot be determined from a resume, an interview, or even a reference check. But now they can be measured with proven, valid, reliable and legally defensible instruments. With today's technology and tools, anyone can easily and inexpensively identify the ideal profile for any job, then screen candidates based on that profile. It’s not only legal—it’s smart. For example, one of the systems uses something called a Role Behavior Analysis (RBA) that asks you to force rank a series of questions about a job, such as:
How important is it for this person to:
- Choose carefully among alternatives before acting?
- Interact frequently with new people?
- Stay at the same physical location much of the time?
- Make unpopular decisions to complete a task or activity?
Then your candidates complete a questionnaire, either online or in your office that identifies their behavioral tendencies, traits, strengths and weaknesses, in areas such as problem-solving, communicating, conflict-resolution and customer service. The computer then compares the job profile to the candidate profile and tells you exactly how closely their traits match the traits required of the job. It even gives you sample interview questions to zero in on areas of concern. Now you have control. Another advantage of this process is that you only have to profile the position once. Unless the job changes dramatically, its profile doesn’t change, so you just store it in your computer and merely compare it to future candidates’ profiles. It’s a little more work than flipping a coin, but look how much time and money we waste playing recruiting roulette.
Today, there is no reason to hire misfits, and continuing to do so is a disservice to everyone. The employee loses, the customer loses, and so does the organisation. So stop the roulette wheel, put away your coin, and prepare to build a high-performance organisation.
John Putzier, M.S., SPHR is President of FirStep, Inc., USA and best-selling author.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
