4.1: 5 Steps for Designing Your Employee Selection Process

5 Steps for Designing Your Employee Selection Process

Jeff Furst

Fmr Founder/CEO. Now - Vice President, Go To Market, Americas - Harver April 30, 2015

This post originally appeared on The FurstPerson Blog

When you maximize the effectiveness of your employee selection process, you can drive powerful business results into your organization. This includes cost savings from reduced turnover as well as increasing profitability through improved productivity and customer satisfaction.

The key to an effective process is good design. The five steps outlined here will help you design a results-driven hiring process to consistently improve your quality of hire.

Step 1 - Recruitment Strategy

Recruitment often gets overlooked in the pre-hire process. However, it is one of the most critical stages – the more candidates you can drive into your hiring process, the more options have for filling open positions.

Using a three-tier model to categorize your recruiting sources can help you understand how effectively they are working for your organization. This also provides an opportunity to more closely evaluate recruiting spend and determine how to best shift your budget to optimize your process.

Tier 1: Traditional Recruiting

Newspaper ads, job fairs, etc. Traditional recruiting is the most straightforward, yet also the most costly. It also tends to result in weaker retention and performance measures once employees are onboard.

Tier 2: Internet-based Recruiting

Online job boards, resume databases, etc. There are a lot of internet-based recruiting resources available today with varying benefits. In general, these resources offer both good retention and performance outcomes.

Tier 3: Person to Person

Employee referrals are a good example. Employee referrals may result in the best retention and productivity outcomes.

Step 2 - Measurement and Assessments

The best way to determine candidate fit for a particular job is by taking a holistic approach to your assessments and measuring three key areas – knowledge and ability, job relevant skills, and personality and motivation. Measuring just one area leaves other areas uncovered.

Using a variety of assessments provides a holistic approach to your measurement process. Simulations or situational judgment tests evaluate job relevant skills by putting candidates in scenarios that require them to perform the job. Personality assessments and biographical data testing measure motivational fit – the attitudes and behaviors around a specific job role.

Problem solving or knowledge and ability assessments ask questions that get at verbal and written communication skills or logic and numerical skills. The goal here is to determine whether a candidate can look at information, absorb and apply it back to resolve a problem or situation.

While a well-structured interview can be very effective, it is difficult to get answers that are as reliable as those provided through other types of assessments. Taking a holistic approach using a variety of assessment tools will result in stronger outcomes for your hiring process.

Step 3 - Improving Interviews

Improving interviews requires making the process more measurement driven than interpretive. The challenge is that organizations often have different people conducting interviews with different skill levels and different approaches.

Reduce variance by creating a consistent interview process that includes an interview guide with standardized questions. Interviewers should not make up their own questions. In addition interview questions should have anchors, such as answers on a scale of 1-5, with descriptions of what a 1 looks like vs. what a 5 looks like.

Take the time to train interviewers. Put them through mock interviews and have them rate the interviewee. Analyze how scores differ among interviewers who are rating the same candidate. Use that information for additional training and insight into continually improving your interview process.

Step 4 - Candidate Experience

Think about the candidate experience as you design your system. How are you going to interact with the candidate through the process? What are they going to experience? Often candidates can dictate how they approach your company.

Be sure to follow up with candidates. Create service level agreements between your recruiting team and the hiring managers so clear standards and expectations are in place. Establish a coherent process through which everyone who comes in contact with a candidate knows what to do and how to act, building in the appropriate follow-up.

Step 5 - Workflow Modeling

Most pre-hire processes traditionally involve three steps – reviewing applications, interviewing and onboarding. Recruiters tend to spend a lot of time interviewing. For example, they may interview 100 candidates and 50 are going to pass.

When technology and data come into play, the recruiter’s job becomes much easier. Using an automated pre-hire assessment such as personality testing or simulations, you can significantly reduce you interview population. Now instead of talking to 100 candidates, recruiters are talking to 56. And, these candidates are more qualified.

Using automated assessments before you engage in interviews will help you move more candidates through the process more efficiently. Spending time modeling your recruiting workflow will ultimately uncover the best hiring process for your company.

The intersection of recruiting, sourcing, and quality of hire offers opportunities to create a more effective pre-hire process for your organization. Understanding that relationship in your organization helps you put negotiation leverage back to your suppliers and helps you reduce spending in areas that are not delivering.

Source: "5 Steps for Designing Your Employee Selection Process", LinkedIn, April 30, 2015.