The Sunday Mail
Memory Nguwi
RECENT research shows how recruitment and selection processes have the greatest impact on business performance.
The cost of hiring the wrong person for a job can be more than 30 percent of the annual salary.
This cost excludes expenses related to seeking a replacement while you are hiring and the lost productivity when the job is vacant or is occupied in an acting capacity.
Given these costs, you would think that organisations try to be thorough and vigilant as they hire employees.
My observation is that some organisations treat this process casually, and end up with bad hires that negatively impact performance.
If your organisation is not performing as well as it should be, it is likely due to bad hires.
Use a checklist to interrogate your hiring process.
1) The Need to Hire
Before you initiate the employment process, you need to be sure that the role you are about to hire for is required.
In too many cases, managers think that every organisational challenge can be solved by bringing in new people.
Our research proves this is the most prominent mistake organisations make when hiring people. Make it a point to check that adding an extra head will positively change the organisation’s performance.
2) The job description and the job advert
Generally, people charged with developing job profiles, which are in turn used in job adverts, are lazy.
Instead of customising and creating job profiles that speak to the organisation’s needs, they copy job profiles from other institutions on the internet.
Such profiles will have requirements that do not talk to your organisation’s needs, and you will end up hiring the wrong people.
I urge you to spend more time creating a good job profile. Focus on things that are mandatory for the job because that is what you require.
Avoiding putting things like an MBA will be an added advantage.
3) A survey we did a year ago found that over 80 percent of people who sit on job interview panels have never been trained in job interviewing.
Therefore, this implies that most of them do not understand the core principles of job interviewing.
Such principles include: asking all the candidates precisely the same questions in the same way.
Also important is not asking any question that has nothing to do with the capacity to perform the job, recording responses in a standardised way and supporting ratings with written evidence of what the candidates said in answer to the question.
Other questions that should not be asked are all those that may bring biases, such as age, marital status, university attended, gender, etcetera.
As you may be aware, scientific evidence shows that the interview method, if not correctly structured, can bring lots of errors in the process.
This makes the interview process less reliable and less valid.
To benefit from job interviews, make them structured and follow best practices in designing questions and scoring the answers.
4) If you allow new employees to join at any stage in your hiring process, without following transparent hiring processes, you are doing a disservice to your organisation.
In some organisations, an employee can just come in because they have been referred by influential people.
Is this happening in your organisation? If so, you are probably experiencing severe performance problems.
Make it a policy that no employee should be hired without following an approved recruitment policy.
Give everyone an equal opportunity to join your organisation. That way, you create enough scope to attract the best talent.
5) There is a new trend in Zimbabwe where new senior executives bring other employees they may have previously worked with.
Is that good? I would say no. It is doubtful that such individuals will be subjected to the same scrutiny as other candidates vying for the same job, but with no connections.
Workers who are employed this way are unlikely to challenge the person who brought them in. Never allow any particular manager or executive to build an empire.
You will end up with a compliant team that does not challenge when things go wrong.
6) Psychometric testing is an assessment approach that measures things like aptitude/cognitive ability and personality.
As you would recall from research, cognitive ability is the biggest predictor of job performance.
Fear of using psychometric testing arises mainly because people want to bring in their candidates.
Unless you want to defy science, there is no reason why a modern organisation is not using psychometric testing as part of its recruitment and selection process.
7) Some organisations start with interviews and then do a psychometric assessment on the last two or three candidates.
That is a wrong approach.
The correct approach is that you begin with psychometric testing soon after shortlisting, and successful candidates proceed to the interview stage.
The logic in this approach is that psychometric testing is more reliable than the interview methods.
Therefore, the sequence starts with something that predicts job performance better. Interviews then follow.
Some think they are saving money by starting with the interview, but risk missing good candidates who an unreliable interview process may screen out.
8) Some organisations select an interview panel to push a specific agenda.
This will lead to wrong hires.
The best way to select interview panels is based on the job to be interviewed for.
When choosing the interview panel, select those with enough technical knowledge about the job and the organisation.
9) Some organisations have earned a bad name on the market where their recruitment process is now referred to as “just a formality”.
They are perceived to have their chosen candidates earmarked for the role even before the interview is done.
If you can fix the issues above, you will have a good recruitment and selection process that will add value to the organisation.
Senior leaders must lead this approach and set the tone for what should and must not happen.
*Memory Nguwi is an Occupational Psychologist, Data Scientist, Speaker, and Managing Consultant- Industrial Psychology Consultants (Pvt) Ltd, a management and human resources consulting firm. Feedback https://www.thehumancapitalhub.com and http://www.ipcconsultants.com/ and email: [email protected]
