How to Reduce Hiring Risk Post Pandemic

The world is finally opening up again and depending on the type of work you are involved with or the geographic location of that work, you’ll have noticed that a lot has changed - organizationally, interpersonally, structurally, socially, and culturally. The pandemic has jump-started many dramatic organizational changes and for our purposes, I’ll be focusing on assessment and mental training, both of which impact every facet of organizational performance.?

The Shift

Gone are the days of long and arduous recruitment practices. Candidate attraction has moved to social. Initial candidate screening is becoming automated by virtue of new algorithms and huge advances in AI. And much of the heavy lifting that historically has ?occurred at the front end of a recruitment has or is quickly becoming replaced by technology infused tools and virtual processes that actually do a more efficient and in many cases better job than the historical human counterparts did. The current expectation for talent managers is that there will be large numbers of candidates applying for pretty much every role and that they will need to be adept at using these new online and virtual tools and technologies in ways that they have never needed to before. The bottom – learn to adapt or be left behind.

?The screening of large pools of candidates to find the few “best” worthy of being interviewed is now commonplace. With this comes changes in how talent managers attract, screen, short-list, and then finally select candidates. Technology has provided some wonderful tools to assist in the screening process and the ability to generate a large list of interested and available candidates is as easy as creating a social media post or visiting any one of a number of recruitment-type web portals. All of these advances have their share of pro’s, and con’s and we’ll get into those issues in a later post. For now, I want to focus briefly on hiring risk in a post pandemic world.

?As hiring managers, or those tasked with evaluating candidates for roles, it is essential to keep in mind that any psychometric or testing program used to provide analysis, feedback, or evaluative measures of a candidate is only going to be as good as the specific psychometrics used. It is essential to understand the implications of that statement, especially in the new world where self-proclaimed expertise is not only commonplace, but actually accepted blindly. In many ways, even more critical, is the issue of the assessors assessment knowledge, skill, and level of experience. Combined, these two issues form the basis of understanding the how to reduce risk when hiring as well as recognizing the strategic role, power, and impact proper psychometric testing has in the hiring process.

?Let’s look at a real-life example – a client was recently complaining about how the hiring test they used on a candidate was not useful (incidentally the test used in this case was a type-indicator, not a validated, predictive selection protocol). I asked the client how they decided on that particular test and who helped with the interpretation of results? The answers were not surprising. They decided to go with a provider who had a slick website with glowing client testimonials, scientific sounding information, impressive graphics, and lots of references to global use and applications to every industry imaginable. With some brief exploration of the site, it became clear the company (individual) was not a professionally trained talent assessment consultant. In fact, the individual had only taken a “weekend-intensive” and gained a “personality evaluator certification”. They used the testimonials from the certification site and thus the client thought they were in good hands. They weren’t. The so-called personality evaluator certification was granted by an unlicensed person with no psychometric training, supervised practice, or on-going mentorship support in assessment or psychometrics, and the certification did not meet any requirements of the American Psychological Associations standards for assessment and evaluation ( if you wish to learn more about these standards please visit?www.apa.org/about/policy/guidelines-psychological-assessment-evaluation.pdf ).?

?The client also shared that the assessor missed critical information that related to certain underlying habits, values and motivations that would negatively impact the candidates’ ability to perform, especially as stress and uncertainty increased, but the consultant did not see this because they were not actually trained to understand the complexity of human behaviour and how different aspects of cognition are tied to an individual’s performance and functioning. They did not understand how stress and duress impact both cognition and psychophysiology or how a dysregulated state can negatively impact a candidate’s ability to access whatever potential they possess. Lastly, the consultant couldn’t provide objective and targeted recommendations for the hiring manager to explore in a follow up interview with the candidate. In the end, the client ended up not being able to make a decision on the candidate, wasting time, money, and resulted in a negative candidate experience. This is one of many examples I hear about regularly from clients who hope that a quick and easy “test” and cursory debrief will be enough to make well informed evidence-based decisions about a candidates fit against their performance criteria. Unfortunately, it won’t. when dealing with people decisions, short cuts only cause problems and worse in some instances they can result in litigation. ??

?The point here is that organizations who choose to use psychometrics (and every organization should) and hiring managers need to make sure the consultants they work with have appropriate training and front-line experience assessing candidates across a variety of industry sectors and equally important are skilled with a variety of assessment tools, protocols, platforms, and algorithms. It is best to verify the consultants background including assessment related education, specifically training around cognition, interpersonal dynamics, behaviour change, motivation, values, capability, and stress. Then there is the issue of interviewing skill. Can the consultant, not only interview effectively? Can they do it in a standardized manner with objectivity? Are they capable of being self-aware? How do they manage their own biases? Can they build a performance map of the candidate which provides objective, specific and detailed answers about the candidate’s functioning, style, approach, and motivation. Finally, as a consumer of assessments and or assessment support, you might want to know about the specific psychometric training, number of assessments completed, and level of skill of the consultant before you engage their services. Some additional things to consider - Do they do this type of work everyday? Or is it in addition to something else they offer? Are they known for being able to strategically deploy assessments as part of any number of talent initiatives? The reality is that many of the so called "assessment" experts in the market today are only trained in the one test they happen to be selling or promoting.

Professionally trained assessment consultants will have a combination of the following: advanced psychology degrees, multiple types of psychometric training, extended supervised internship experiences, interview training, professional association memberships, and a history of working exclusively in the assessment arena professionally. They will be professionally certified to administer a variety of standardized/validated psychometric tests that abide by the American Psychology Associations standards for testing and evaluation, and that are not available to the general public without advanced training or degrees. They should be comfortable explaining the different types of standardized testing and validation methods that are effective in work settings and they will not likely be tied to any one specific test or platform.

?Collectively, this allows them to function as objective unbiased consultants that can better serve their clients needs and the demands of the work situations at hand. It is best to remember the adage - if it’s too good to be true it most likely isn’t. There is no such thing as the "one-test fits all" scenario and professionally trained assessment consultants can provide the appropriate and necessary structure, rationale, explanations, and comparisons of test processes to justify their test selection to support your mandate. This will ensure that the best psychometric program is designed to serve the objectives of the work situation and support and inform the other dimensions of each unique organizational process used for selecting candidates. ?

RK.