Chapter 1: Use the Right Tools to Hire High-Performing Employees Flashcards
This chapter focuses on evidence-based methods for selecting high-performing employees who are best suited to the needs of your team.
Who is a Winner?
People who can take decisive action consistent with your team’s vision and goals.
Four Hiring Tools for selecting Winners
- Situation interviews
- Patterned behavioural description interviews
- Job Simulations
- Realistic Job Previews
The first three tools are useful in predicting which job applicants will perform at high levels and which will not.
The fourth enables people who are offered a job to decide if it is right for them.
Unstructured Interview
The most commonly used interview technique in organizations today - a free-flowing conversation - is ironically, the least effective.
The correlation between how people perform in an unstructured interview and how they perform on the job is very low.
Why is the unstructured interview not very effective for selecting winners?
- Different applicants are typically asked different questions
- The questions are often not directly related to the job
- Interviewers are often unable to agree among themselves what constitutes a great response versus a not-so-great response
Situational Interview
The situational interview presents people with situations they will encounter on the job.
It is extremely effective at predicting how people will perform in given situations. What people say they will do on the job and how they behave on the job have a significant correlation.
Patterned Behavioural Interview
The PBDI asks applicants how they behaved in the past.
It is a good predictor of how they will behave in the future because a person’s past behaviour predicts future behaviour.
Job Simulation
Job simulations test applicants right now, in real-time, to see what they can actually do.
Simulations are effective in predicting job performance (that is, current behaviour in a simulated environment predicts subsequent behaviour in similar on-the-job situations.
One kind of simulation, the assessment center simulation, has been successful in predicting the job promotions and salary progression of people over a twenty-five-year career.
Realistic Job Preview
The preview is called realistic because you explain what will be great for an applicant if that person accepts your job offer, and you also explain what job incumbents have found not to be as great.
No matter how good your other tools are, candidates will always know things about themselves that your selection techniques will not identify.
A realistic preview enables candidates to decide whether accepting a job offer is the right decision for them.
The Situational Interview
The situational interview assesses an applicant’s intentions for dealing with situations likely to arise on the job.
Given the clear relationship between intentions and subsequent behaviour at work, the situation interview should be a staple of every evidence-based manager’s hiring practices.
Structure of the Situational Interview
A situational interview is structured so that every candidate answers the same job-related questions.
The situational interview should be conducted by two or more people. The interview panel should include the responsible manager and someone from Human Resources.
Behavioural Scoring Guide (Situational Interview)
A behavioural scoring guide made up of illustrative answers is used to assess each applicant’s answer to a question.
A study correlated the scores given to the job applicants’ responses to each situational question with the scores the successful applicants received one year later on the job. And What they said in the interview correlated with what they did on the job.
Dilemma - Situational Interview
Each question presents a dilemma.
It is this dilemma that “forces” applicants to state what they believe they would do on the job (that is, their intentions) rather than telling interviewers what they believe the interviewers are hoping to hear.
The dilemma in each question forces applicants to state what they would do on the job.
The dilemma forces applicants to state their intentions rather than merely respond with what they believe the interview panel wants to hear.
Creating a Situational Interview
To create a situational interview, take these three steps:
1. Conduct a job analysis
2. Create situational interview questions that contain a dilemma
3. Develop a scoring guide
- Conducting a Job Analysis
A job analysis identifies important situations that an applicant will likely encounter on the job.
These situations typically revolve around your team’s vision, goals, and strategy.
From this analysis, you will be able to develop a series of questions that will help you assess how a candidate will respond to a given challenge.
Example: A job analysis for a purchasing manager has to choose between competing suppliers, minimizing costs, and maximizing a department’s bottom line.
Critical-Incident Technique (Job Analysis)
The best way to do a job analysis for developing a situational interview is to use the critical-incident technique, where managers interview job incumbents to identify the incidents that make the difference between highly effective and not-so-effective performers.
Subject Matter Experts
The job analysis focuses on observable behaviours that job incumbents (subject matter experts) have seen make the difference between a poor employee and an outstanding one.
Critical-Incident Technique Benefits
The critical incident technique allows you to ignore situations that occur routinely. It helps you zero in on situations that can have a significant impact on your team’s vision, goals, and strategy execution.
- Create situational interview questions that contain a dilemma.
Once your job analysis identifies critical incidents, you can design a series of situation questions to assess how job candidates intend to handle such challenges.
Example: questions that assess candidates’ technical knowledge, leadership ability, ethical behaviour, and team-building skills.
- Develop a scoring guide
Once you have a list of questions, you will be ready to develop a scoring guide for each one –before you conduct the interview.
The scoring guide will help you avoid one of the pitfalls of the unstructured interview: arguments among interviewers about what constituted a good or bad answer.
Benefits of a scoring guide
A scoring guide minimizes any bias a member of the interview panel may have about an interviewee’s age, race, sex, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or physical disability.
A scoring guide will make future hiring discussions more efficient because it forces you and your colleagues to confront your differences regarding what constitutes a highly acceptable, acceptable, or unacceptable answer at the outset, rather than waiting until a particular candidate is being discussed.
Content validity
The extent to which a selection process assesses a representative sample of what a person must do on the job.
In looking for this evidence, they look at what has been identified as important by the job analysis and whether that knowledge, skill, or ability is assessed by your method for selecting employees.
An interview with fewer than 10 questions is unlikely to be viewed as content-valid.
Scoring Guide Design
The scoring guide for each question typically consists of a five-point scale of illustrative answers, from most to least acceptable.
You should solicit these illustrations from the team who did the job analysis by first asking them to think of an employee they have observed to be outstanding on this particular dimension (e.g., ethics) and then asking themselves, “How would that person respond to this question” ( a five-point response).
The same question should be repeated about an employee who is considered minimally acceptable (a three-point response) and then for an employee considered to be unacceptable (a one-point response).
VIEW EXAMPLES
Scoring Guide Purpose
The scoring guide for evaluating an applicant’s answers should reflect the values and culture of your organization.
What constitutes a five-point answer in your organization may constitute only a three-point answer in another organization.
Pilot Test
Before using situational questions to make a hire, you should do a pilot test.
Try the questions with some of your present employees to see whether there is variability in the answers to each question and to see whether the interviewers can agree on the scoring of each answer (an issue discussed in the research as interobserver reliability).
If nearly every person who is asked a question gets the same score, delete the question. It won’t differentiate between losers and winners.
If the scoring does not yield agreement among the interview panel, either modify the scoring guide or discard the question.
