As an HR executive in your company, it is essential to understand the importance of making strong hiring decisions, as those decisions will, in the future, impact the performance of the business. Though recruitment can be a tedious, time consuming, and challenging process involving the scheduling of interviews, assessing candidates, and short listing the right person for the job, doing so pays off in the future in terms of employee satisfaction, productivity, employee morale, and hence, employee retention. However, many organizations do not have a disciplined hiring process. Unstructured interviews and hasty hiring decisions can lead to the selection of the incorrect candidate. A structured selection process is essential in order to make better hiring decisions. A number of factors have to be considered while implementing a selection system.
How a Structured Selection Process Can Be Put In Place
The key steps to follow while putting together and executing a structured selection process for an organization are:
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Conducting A Job Analysis
The knowledge, skills, abilities and competencies of the candidates must be determined. Analyzing the job will help recruiters:
⁃ Understanding the nature and purpose of the job
⁃ Identifying potential changes that are expected to affect job tasks
⁃ Identifying how knowledge, skills, abilities and competencies of employees will affect business decisions
⁃ Choose selection methods that are most relevant to job performances
Conducting a thorough job analysis for key roles in an organization sets the foundation for an effective selection system.
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Choosing Appropriate Selection Tools
After shortlisting a few potential candidates through the selection process, employers use effective tools including pre-employment tests, interviews and assessments to choose the right candidate for the job.
Pre-employment tests:
Pre-employment tests help HR leaders gather job-relevant information about candidates, thus giving them an insight into their performance.
The most commonly used pre-employment tests are:
• Personality tests:
Personality tests assess an individual’s ability to respond in a particular manner depending on the situation they are faced with. A number of personality traits of an individual can predict the future performance on the job. This test reveals the traits of an individual’s dependability and their chances to thrive and succeed in the company.
• Cognitive ability tests
Cognitive ability refers to the capacity of an individual to mentally process situations, comprehend, and manipulate situations. Cognitive ability tests have been found to have predicted the job training performance and technical job performances of employees once they are selected.
• Physical ability tests
These tests are designed to assess the ability of a potential employee to perform on a physically demanding job. The physical aspects of the job might include either lifting or pulling large amounts of heavy items or spending long periods of time sitting at a desk.
When should pre-employment tests be used?
• During the Initial Screening Process:
In order to narrow the candidate pool, a pre-employment test can be used as an initial screening test for skills that are a necessary requirement for the position being applied for. Candidates who do not possess the required skill set for the job are then removed from the selection process. A pre-employment test must be conducted prior to finalizing the right candidates for the job, to test if the candidate has the potential to make a good employee. The candidates must be tested to prove they possess the required skills for the job. The pre-employment tests can help interviewers gain an insight on the capabilities of the employee, thus helping recruiters distinguish the qualified candidates from the unqualified candidates.
• After the Initial Screening and Interview Process:
In order to shortlist candidates for highly critical roles, recruiters put the potential employees through a series of tests post the initial screening and interview process. Well-drafted pre-employment tests are used to overcome any bias or prejudice that might emerge during the interview process. The pre-employment tests can thus be used to objectively distinguish between the qualified and unqualified candidates.
• During the Initial Screening Process and Later the Selection Process:
During the initial screening process, the candidates who do not meet the minimum requirements of the pre-employment tests may be removed from the candidate pool. The selected candidates are then made to take a series of tests at the interview or the assessment centre. These scores are then combined with their scores from the initial tests to make a final decision.
Interviews
Interviews are one of the widely seen, most common and powerful job selection tools used by organisations as they give the hiring managers and recruiters an insight into the skill-set, abilities, interpersonal style, and knowledge of the candidates.
Selection interviews are categorized as structured and unstructured.
Unstructured Interviews
Unstructured interviews are a less systematic form of interviewing process. During unstructured interviews, interviewers are provided with guidelines regarding the content of the questions or the format, and they may then choose to put the guidelines to practice in a different way with every candidate. Though there is some form of consistency in the content and the process of conducting unstructured interviews, they generally lack standardization.
Structured Interviews
Structured interviews are standardized processes. They are almost identical in their layout. Questions asked during these interviews are structured to cover various job dimensions. Candidates’ responses are evaluated by trained professionals using structured rating scales. These interviews make it easier for interviewers to shortlist the deserving candidates. Structured interviews provide a more valid assessment, thus resulting in better hiring decisions by the company.
Developing structured interviews
The main objective while planning an interview is to cover all the information relevant to the job and all its dimensions. In order to standardize the scoring of the answers to the interview questions, behaviorally anchored ratings scale (BARS) is generally developed for each question. BARS helps to standardize interviewer ratings across the candidate pool to help the interviewer focus their attention on the most important aspects of candidate responses.
Implemented Structured Interviews
Prior to implementing structured interviews, the interviewer should be trained to efficiently conduct the interview process. Interviewers must rate each candidate’s response immediately to help prevent any bias and to ensure the most accurate assessment of each job dimension.
Assessment centers
Assessment centers refer to a collection of activities designed to gauge the competence of the candidates. Well-designed assessment centers effectively differentiate between high-performing and low-performing candidates,while also predicting job performances. Assessment centers require candidates to demonstrate the skills in a variety of job-relevant areas such as, problem-solving, decision making, organizing, planning, and communicating. Assessment centers enhance selection validity leading to better employment decisions.
Assessment centers include a variety of exercises to drive candidates to put their knowledge, ability and skills to the best possible use. A few exercises used in assessment centers are:
• Role Play
The candidates demonstrate their skills in a hypothetical work situation that could possibly be a situation they might be faced with at work someday.
• Leadership Group Discussion
This exercise gives candidates a chance to put their leadership skills, teamwork, and communication skills to the best possible use while problem solving. Tasks are provided to a group of participants with no assigned group leader. The group is then asked to work toward finding a solution to a given problem. This exercise gives the taters a chance to observe the level of leadership, communication, involvement and teamwork to assess the qualifications.
When Should Companies Use Assessment Centers?
Assessment centers require a large investment of time and money as compared to other selection tools. The development and implementation of the assessment centers is too high to be borne for entry-level jobs by employers. However, for supervisory positions or jobs that involve significant financial responsibilities, assessment centers are useful in determining employee promotions.
As you can see, a comprehensive Pre Employment Test & assessment goes a long way in hiring candidates who can go a long way in beefing up your talent arsenal and set the stage for a successful organisation with high performing and highly empowered employees working for it.
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