Organisational Coaching – Great Organisations and Great Managers

What are the best ways to select candidates?

The post, The Interview Illusion, talked about the common self-deception that managers can read people well during an interview. Unstructured interviews are an unreliable way of selecting candidates. So which approaches are stronger?

Here are three suggestions.

1. Situational Assessments

   The most accurate way to assess whether someone is suitable for a job is to observe them on the job and measure their output.

   This approach suits operational jobs very well. To select a machinist, ask them to make something on the required machine. To select a call centre operator watch them answer test calls. To select a designer watch them design. For other jobs a realistic job environment is difficult to create and so a good proxy must be found. For selecting managers, business simulations, case studies and situational questions help.

2. Structured Interviews

   Structured interviews are twice as effective as unstructured interviews. In a structured interview, the questions are determined before the interview and all candidates are asked the same questions. This helps in three ways;

   1. The questions can be designed based on the requirements of the company and the position.
   2. The interviewer is not tempted to follow intereresting diversions based on the candidate's responses.
   3. All candidates are asked the same set of questions which provides a basis for comparison.

   Given that structured interviews are so much more effective than unstructured interviews and the only additional cost is the effort to write the questions, there is no reason not to use them during the selection process.

3. Cognitive Ability Assessments

   A cognitive ability test is a written or online test which explores thinking and reasoning skills. Different test explore different attributes such as verbal reasoning, numerical ability, verbal analysis, problem solving, visual analysis and symbolic reasoning. They have been in use since the early 1900's and have shown to be strong predictors of job success. To be used successfully the job has to be analyzed to identify the critical factors for that particular job.

A key reason that these three approaches are so much more effective than normal interviews is they force the recruiter to first analyze the requirements for success on the job. This is the real work in recruiting.