We are looking for an energetic and creative self starter with 5 years + experience and a tertiary education, you will be mature and have amazing interpersonal skills.
Do you see anything wrong with that as a job advertisement? You mightn't but the words most likely to discourage an applicant according to Ivan Robertson and Mike Smith are: analytical, creative, innovative, energetic and interpersonal. Yet these are words that are used in job advertisements every day.
I attended a seminar earlier this week by Andrew Marty the Managing Director at SACS Consulting, Andrew was presenting on recruitment and selection methods and their accuracy and effectiveness. The data used by Andrew was from a 2001 report which appeared in the Journal of Occupational and Organisational Psychology. Now, back to the point, the focus was on the success of various recruitment methods which are employed in organisations.
The things that I found to be the most interesting were that age, years of education and years of work experience are not indicators of success when it comes to employment. After all, what is experience really? How can you know whether those 5 years of experience was different or just 5 times the same experience?
In regards to selection methods the cognitive ability of the candidate that is, the 'process of thought' is a greater indication of success. Does the person have the aptitude and the ability to carry out the tasks required? Will they be able to articulate thoughts and communicate them clearly others?
The structured interview scores highly when it comes to accuracy of selection methods. I read a post recently by David Talamelli in which he spoke about informal interviews, and how it is important no matter the setting to remain professional. Interviews won't always be a good indicator of how well someone will perform in a role. I think the longer I work in HR the worse I get at being interviewed, I think too much about how I would think if I interviewed me, now that's confusing. Interviews won't necessarily be good indicators for nervous candidates or for great actors. For an interview to be an accurate indicator it needs to be structured and have a focus on behavioural questions and on the competencies required to carry out the position.
With all selection methods there needs to be validity, if someone is a bad candidate one week you need to be sure that in three months time they will still be a bad candidate. Ratings, rankings and tests need to be valid and reliable. A large amount of recruitment can be subjective and be based entirely on the person recruiting for the role, what is important is making the shift to being objective.
There are a myriad of tests that can be used to assist in selection exercises whether they be on integrity/honesty, personality traits, job knowledge testing and work sample testing, these are all additional tools which can assist in an accurate and successful selection exercise.
What is the point here? When it comes to recruitment mistakes can be costly to the business, to morale, to productivity. By using all the tools and resources available to you to assist in making selection decisions you can reduce the error rate and improve your success rate. Who doesn't want that?
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