Any organisation, especially in the times of growth, will experience the challenge of advertising for vacancies and sifting through hundreds of applications, one more qualified than the other, making the selection very difficult. We all want to hire the best candidate for the job and this should always be the aim, irrespective of who’s related to whom – if you have your company’s best interests at heart. But the process in reality is never that simple.
You receive two hundred applications for a customer care job. Quick sift through qualifications will knock out a hundred, leaving the qualified and over-qualified in the game. You now pay attention to writing style; most can write well but you see gaps in education through some basic mistakes like starting the sentence with “Am…”. This leaves you with about forty applicants. You should not discriminate on gender and tribal basis but you will drop foreigners because of the complicated work permit process, so you remain with 35 applicants.
What do you do next? Do you engage your HR manager, customer care department manager and a couple of others in five full days of interviews, do you just draw a few people out of a hat and fix them in a one-day rapid interviewing session? Do you personally conduct the interviews? Who prepares questions, who asks them? Who takes the score, no – wait – who prepares the score sheet, who compares the scores after the interviews? How complex is your interviewing procedure? And – what are your chances of still choosing the wrong person?
Take the job description for this job (you have it, of course) and first, try and imagine the ideal person. Make some notes, this should be a reminder as to who you are looking for. Visual impression is reasonably important, the new employee should resonate well with the overall visual impression of your company. If the applicants really want a job with you, they should research in advance how to present themselves at the interview. Voice and expression are the other important attribute. If your team and your customers have to listen to this person all day long, they better be in a possession of a very pleasant and soothing voice. Finally, eloquence and wit should be the deciding factor. You want smart and capable people around you, especially if they will interact with your customers.
On D-day, you are ready with your questions just as much as your applicants are ready with their answers. The ones who will impress you the most have, most probably, rehearsed the interview to the finest detail, alone in front of the mirror or with help of their support group. They will be prepared to roll off their tongues exactly what you want to hear, making your choice even more difficult. Scores are pretty even across the board and you are ready to employ everyone you’ve seen on day one yet you have four more days to interview the remaining 28 applicants… and you realize this is a bit of a nightmare.
At this stage you make a mental note that you’ll get a recruitment agency to do this job for you next time. Wait! You’ll actually hire a company that has nothing to do with your business, to recruit for you the person you need inside your business? I wonder if this is a sound decision, but this is a story for another time.
What if you are actually able to employ some science in this whole recruitment process? What if you are able to define exact parameters to describe the job and thereafter able to determine which candidate has the matching parameters that fully satisfy the demands of the job?
What I first experienced the Predictive Index, I was pretty fascinated by the accuracy of the report that was delivered to me by my husband to be. He did the wise thing – he made sure he understood my behavioral mindset from the very start of our relationship. That fascination with the behavioral survey system made me study Predictive Index more, until I implemented it in my own company to simplify the recruitment process. No prior HR knowledge or education is required which makes Predictive Index training of top managers a very attractive prospect. Majority of top managers trained in Predictive Index will tell you that this was the most valuable training they received in their entire life. And companies like Nestle, Maersk, BAT, ThoughtWorks and some 100 out of Fortune Magazine’s Global 500 companies around the globe.
A simple assessment of the job you are advertising will give you a behavioral pattern of the right candidate, as well as the right statements to use in the creation of the job advert, that will resonate well with and attract the right candidates to apply. Next, after scrutinizing the applications for eloquence, writing skills and correct qualifications, you invite the potential candidates to complete a survey that takes five to ten minutes online.
Each survey will result in a report and a pattern; invite for interviews only the applicants with the behavioral pattern same or similar to the behavioral pattern of the job. This can save you days of engagement in interviewing people who will tell you what you want to hear but will not necessarily be the right fit for the job.
Once you have the tool that enables you to find a behavioral fit for the job, your interview can focus on discovering competences and evaluating the cultural fit. It sounds too good to be true but it is: Predictive Index is helping organisations achieve their business objectives since 1955, and is based on decades of painstaking research into the employee behavioral needs at the workplace.
Your selection interview can finally become the last check before you welcome someone into your company, without hesitation, knowing that you are employing the right person for the job, with the right talent that’s required to excel in the job. Selection interview finally becomes just that: selecting the best fit among all the great choices.
