Understanding Applicants' Past Jobs
It is often said, "Past performance predicts future performance." Well, maybe. Behavioral predictability depends on many factors, such as recency, job-relatedness, reporting accuracy, interviewer and interviewee bias, applicant recall, and questioning skills.
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Recency tells us whether applicant's skills are current or rusty. Job-relatedness tells us whether the past example closely parallels future job requirements. Accurate reporting avoids false conclusions. Interviewer bias distorts information. And good questioning skills make information hard to fake.
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Nevertheless, interviews are still self-reports. Behavioral interviews still erroneously screen out applicants who cannot think of good examples, do not have job-related stories, or do not have experience. That's why we need to add tests and simulations. They provide additional real-time skills data.
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How do we minimize interpersonal bias between interviewer and interviewee? We use multiple interviewers who meet afterward to integrate their individual data. 1 M2 S7 d: U6 C2 D9 a1 Y
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Will the Real Professionals Please Stand Up?
, x% y9 m5 F" L: a3 bThe internal HR clients with whom I work are generally more concerned with quality than the professional recruiters I deal with. No one wants to do more work than necessary to recruit, hire, and promote good people, but HR people face hiring managers every day and are often on pins and needles trying to justify their continued employment.
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On the other hand, professional recruiters have proudly told me, "We measure success by each candidate who survives the guarantee period." Professionals who only do enough to get by? That doesn't sound like any profession I know. Maybe it's just me, but I think this kind of self-serving agenda is unethical. 7 l) N0 c6 e7 A8 g
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What Can Eggheads Teach Us? ' r& H% \: C+ h0 ^- C3 I
"You can't believe Eggheads. They have never done my job." I hear this all the time. It is ego-centered thinking that places the author squarely in the middle of his or her personal universe. ! z3 L" A. O1 u$ V" M
( i9 q, d7 \0 u: `Everyone has something to offer. Eggheads may not have been recruiters, but is that any reason to discount their contributions as test experts? Eggheads have run thousands of controlled studies comparing Interview Method "A" to Test Method "B". It's true that they don't recruit and find people. But they know a great deal more than most about how to identify and measure skills accurately and fairly. We can learn much by continually reading and adopting their research.
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Going Forward
8 a. d# y- k A& W' ]' d& u$ z `Time is overdue for both professional and internal recruiters to abandon homegrown ideas, to stop taking and receiving silly advice, and to abandon embarrassing and unprofessional beliefs.
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; B( Z3 T* V; x& S' ]% PBehavioral interviewing has a long history of effectiveness few of us are capable of improving upon. Sure, we can turn the clock backward, reinvent the wheel and potentially screw up everything by thinking our homegrown solutions are better than anyone else's. But any recruiter who wants to be considered professional, should use professional tools.
