John Sullivan, a respected consultant in the field of HR from Silicon Valley and current professor of management at San Francisco State University, writes about it in a recent interesting article on Ere.net. Most companies, according to Sullivan, unfortunately don't realize how high the failure rate of their recruitment process is. They can't detect which components of their recruitment process lead to hiring the wrong employees who fail very soon. Sullivan sees the biggest problems in the following facts.
1. Resumes lie
Companies use CVs as a major selection criterion even though they know very well that CVs are written in order to present candidates in the best possible light and include no negatives. Very often they include even outright lies. Candidates who are really good for the job may have poorly written CVs and so are not hired.
2. Interviews last a long time without finding anything out
Interviews can't reliably predict the future success or failure of candidates for a job. They are also full of manipulation when candidates try to present themselves as the best experts. It can happen that real experts who can't present themselves well remain unemployed. Many interviews lack a clear structure, which makes it impossible to compare the candidates.
3. Selection criteria are unclear and imprecise
Most recruiters and managers define selection criteria from scratch, based on their inner feelings - there is no scientific foundation for the criteria to truly reflect success in the given job.
4. Assessing candidates' ability to fit into a corporate culture is subjective and imprecise
Most companies have no clear idea about what it means to "fit in" with their culture. They can't objectively assess whether candidates lie or withhold important facts about their true potential to fit in. Moreover, they do not count on the fact that people may change.
5. Referrals are not objective
Neither referrals provided by former employers nor colleagues have an objective predictive value. In most cases, referrals describe candidates too positively without mentioning important negatives.
6. Employees are chosen based on intuition
Managers who have the final say in selecting employees often lack adequate training and so aren't aware of the related pitfalls. Unconscious bias, thought processes that lead us into making wrong judgments, is a big problem here.
7. Past success does not predict success in the future
Success in one company does not mean that a candidate applying the same techniques will succeed in another company. The context of work in different companies may be significantly different. All sectors are, moreover, changing more and more rapidly and something that worked a few years ago may no longer be relevant. Recruiters should not ask how applicants solved specific situations in the past, but how they would solve the problems today in their company.
All these problems have one thing in common: data, respectively, the inability of companies to collect and analyze applicant and employee data and remove the causes of bad recruitment decisions.
Read more
-kk-