“The effective executive fills positions and promotes on the basis of what a man can do. He does not make staffing decisions to minimize weakness but to maximize strength.” Peter Drucker

According to the Harvard Business Review, 80 percent of turnover is caused by bad hiring decisions. These are costly mistakes.

Two Major Hiring Mistakes :

• The first big mistake is hiring someone who underperforms. Most of the times, these are people who are competent to do the work, but not motivated to do it for any number of reasons. ( Maslow's hierarchy of needs - a ‘content theory' of motivation explains it vividly and an effective assessment tool “ Graphology ” helps unearth the motivational factors of a person)
• The second big hiring mistake is not hiring the best person for the job. This is a hidden problem, and because it's hidden, people don't even realize it needs fixing.
  Hiring Woes : While there are both tangible and intangibles issues to bad hire, the intangibles could far outweigh and could even impact brand reputation. In IT/ITES/Retail sectors, where there are huge hiring requirements, Can the companies afford to judge a candidate, in say 15-20 minutes of interview?

Various management attitude surveys make the point well :

• Question : Knowing what you now know, how many of your current employees would you re-employee?
• Answer : About 60%

A lot of aggravation could be avoided if the effort is placed on getting recruitment and selection processes operating smoothly. It is better to avoid performance problems.

Recruitment Is Distinct From Employment And Selection :

“Recruitment” is getting a pool of candidates to choose from and “Selection” is choosing the right candidate from the pool.

Recruitment & Selection Success :

In summary, recruitment and selection success involves many critical elements, but two major ones are:

• Attracting the right number of candidates through careful targeting by brand building, recruitment advertisement, choosing the right recruitment consultants, references etc.
• Using a variety of methods in the selection process, including behavioral interviewing, taking the help of decision making assessment tools like ‘Psychometric Testing' and ‘Graphology's' and role plays relevant to the position description.

Whatever Recruitment Process an organization follows, distinct steps to systematically hire superior people are:

Defining Superior Performance Before Beginning of the Recruitment Process :

The benefits of using a performance profile include more accurate assessments, a bigger pool of top candidates to choose from, significant reductions in time to hire, and -- by clarifying expectations upfront -- a more highly motivated and competent workforce.

A performance profile is not a job description listing skills, duties, required experiences, and responsibilities. Instead, it describes what the person taking the job needs to do to be successful.

It defines the job, not the person taking the job.

• Who would you rather hire -- someone who could deliver the results, or someone who had all of the skills?
• The oft-stated job description: "good interpersonal skills." Or "Work with other departments in completing the launch of the new system."
• For jobs that are more process-focused (e.g., call center, retail, non-exempt), performance objectives can be determined by benchmarking the performance of the best employees.

Reengineering the Assessment Process :

The basic requirements of an effective interview :

• The candidate must leave each interview wowed by the job, and one must do this without the interviewer overselling and over-talking.
• To prevent inflated offers, more competitive offers from other companies, and counter-offers, one need to ensure that the candidate evaluates the job based on the opportunity, not the compensation.
• To prevent partial (a person who does a part of the job well) and unmotivated (a person who is reasonably competent yet not motivated to be consistent) hires one need to accurately assess long-term competency and motivation across all job needs, not just a few core traits like technical and team skills.
• Asking the candidate to describe a major accomplishment in great depth. Spend 12 to 15 minutes on this accomplishment, peeling the onion, digging deep, looking for facts and details validating the accomplishment.
• By asking the candidate to describe other major accomplishments, a trend line of performance and consistency over an extended period of time soon reveals itself.
• To get more insight one may ask standard behavioral questions as part of this fact-finding, like asking the candidates to give some examples where they had to influence others, deal with conflict, take the initiative or handle a tough challenge.
• As part of the assessment process one can then compare these accomplishments to the real performance needs of the job
• By using the push-and-pull techniques, one gets the candidate to sell you, rather than you having to sell the candidate. There's a significant after-effect with this. Candidates are more confident when telling their family, advisors, and co-workers why they're accepting your offer rather than any others, since they've had to sell themselves first.

Using Decision Making Assessment Tools :

According to the British Psychological Society, 80% of companies in the UK use personality profiling for all levels of recruitment. The trend is just as popular in the US . In India too, it is an emerging trend and there is more than just a random interest in this area. For many organizations, hiring process is incomplete without assessment tools.

 The consensus seems to be that selection is only one part of the story. There's whole world to be explored with psychometric assessment, so smarter organizations are going ahead full steam by exploiting the power of ‘Psychometric Tests'. For bulk recruitments, in IT/ITES/Retail sectors, ‘Psychometric Tests' are being widely used.

For top & senior management positions, “ Graphology ” – Handwriting Analysis has proved to be very effective. Renowned Graphologists not only do the analysis based on the available handwritten samples, but instead simulates a condition for job requirement, wherein a candidate imaginatively experience futuristic condition. This is being done by asking the candidates to answer couple of questions, related to the job requirements, in their own handwritten answers. The handwritten answers along with the signature of the candidate helps Graphologists unearth the different aspects of the personality & motivational factors of that candidate.

 In nutshell, all stages of the selection process should be based on identifying motivational factors, attitude along with assessing the key skills, behaviors and competencies for successful performance of the job.