Improving Quality of Hire Starts by Banning Pre-screening Assessments
Over the years (and last week in particular) I’ve suggested the use of any psychometric pre-screening assessment tests should be stopped since they are either invalid, discriminatory or counterproductive. Worse, all are designed to make the hiring process more efficient, not help attract stronger people or improve quality of hire. Those who sell or have invested their careers in the validation of the statistical merits of these tests (for pre-screening purposes) argue points that miss this point.
Rather than rehash the obvious let me summarize my anti-assessment banter with the following:
- Finding top people for a career move is not the same as filling jobs with people who are willing to take jobs that are, at best, ill-defined lateral transfers.
- If the best people won’t take the test in order to be considered for a job you instantly rule out the best people including the 85% of the talent market that is classified as passive.
- The process is too leaky. Even the best active candidates recognize that applying directly for a job is the least effective way to get an interview. Instead they use a bunch of backdoor techniques to get an interview which bypass the initial screen. (Take this survey and review the results to validate this.)
- You can’t build a two sigma hiring process using one sigma statistics, aka, “Any hiring chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” There are just too many false negatives – good people being excluded for the wrong reasons – to use them to eliminate people before they’re properly qualified.
- Cloning people like you’ve always hired is a great way to build a non-diverse workforce. This is why these tests are discriminatory.
There is little dispute that using psychometric tests as part of a total assessment process is appropriate. Using them as a point of entry is what I oppose. The big argument for using them is the need to eliminate unqualified people who apply from consideration as quickly as possible. However, there are other ways to get the same result without eliminating good people in the process.
One way is to stop the problem at its source: Preventing unqualified people from applying to jobs they’re not qualified to handle. LinkedIn already advises candidates if they’re qualified or not, implying they shouldn’t apply, so the technology behind this advisory statement could easily morph into a locked door. Candidates think that by applying to as many jobs as possible they’ll increase their chances of getting an interview. This is a waste of everyone’s time. The most talented people don’t think this way. That’s why they use the backdoor approach to find jobs in the hidden job market.
Here’s how the hidden job market is created. Before hiring managers formally open a requisition and post it on a job board, they first try to find candidates internally or through their referral network. Over half of these jobs are filled before they’re ever posted. So it’s a huge market. Interestingly, candidates don’t need to be a perfect fit on skills and experiences to get these jobs. Instead they’re assessed on their comparable past performance, promotability and upside potential. It also turns out making assessments this way is more accurate than a combination of pre-screening assessments and behavioral interviewing.
A similar approach could be used to increase quality of hire for all positions – just open the backdoor to everyone. Here’s how this process works. Rather than forcing candidates to apply, state in your job posting that interested candidates need to prepare a one or two paragraph summary of some major accomplishment related to an actual job need to be considered. The job posting or email should emphasize the key performance objectives of the job, minimize the required skill set to the bare minimum and highlight the importance of the job as a career move. This will attract a broader group of top performers including passive candidates.
Since this approach is non-traditional and I wanted to include it in The Essential Guide for Hiring and Getting Hired, I first asked David Goldstein, a senior labor attorney with Littler Mendelson, for his opinion on the validity of this two-step process. He fully supported it and his whitepaper describing why is included in the book’s appendix. (For those interested, here’s a link to the summary and a webcast I did with David on this topic.)
It’s clear that pre-assessment screening along with competency models and behavioral interviewing have reduced hiring mistakes. But it’s equally clear to anyone who looks at the data, these tools have not improved quality of hire. This underscores the problem most business leaders have with HR: Their focus is on the wrong goal. Reducing costs, being more efficient and making fewer hiring mistakes is not the measure of success when it comes to talent management. It should be improving the quality of every person hired.
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Lou Adler (@LouA) is the CEO of The Adler Group, a consulting and training firm helping companies implement Performance-based Hiring. He's also a regular columnist for Inc. Magazine and BusinessInsider. His latest book, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired (Workbench, 2013), provides hands-on advice for job-seekers, hiring managers and recruiters on how to find the best job and hire the best people. His new video program provides job seekers inside secrets on what it takes to get a job in the hidden job market.
Absolutely right Sir. Nowadays people apply to jobs just for the sake of staying in the hot leads for recruitment. There are instances where people apply to jobs even after bagging high-end jobs just to reassure himself that what if there is something better than this. This not only deprives relevant and deserving candidates to acquire any interview for their good, also wastes enough time to screen candidates actually looking for change.
Account Manager at Logistics Supply
8 年I very much like your thinking Lou Adler. I was unemployed for two years in 2013 when I obtained my current position. When the pre-employment screens, you had to be the perfect round peg for the round whole or else. Employers could afford it since there where more candidates than jobs. There still are but they complain they can't find people. They need to branch out as you say.
Nurse Patient Advocate PAFY, Inc and nurse Consultant Certified Dementia Practitioner
8 年I totally agree, I was once asked if I were a car what kind of car would I be?? What this has to do with a job interview is clueless to me. Let's go back to basics and stop trying to psychoanalyze everyone. It's frightening. Glad I now have my own company
Quality Assurance Manager/Quality Assurance Analyst - Senior
8 年I have applied for a hundreds of jobs with a multitude of companies over the years, most of them have had built in assessments. The questions I have had to answer in most if not close to all of those assessments had nothing to do with the company or the position but instead they would mainly be about the morals of the applicant and nothing concrete. It would be nice to see questions pertain to the job at hand or something like a test to show to demonstrate the knowledge that company would be looking for. One company I applied for actually gave a test that showed me I wasn't as qualified as I thought and forced me to re-evaluate what positions I apply for, it also gave me the results and did not just send a rejection email afterwards. Personally I feel the best ways to peg someone's personality, if the company really wants to test that, are either in an interview or in a general meet up where both parties are relaxed not trying to read the other persons mind with how to answer a question.
I help companies turn recruiting solutions into top and bottom-line business results based on my 25 years of experience and lessons learned.
8 年Lou - Asking 'How many didn't apply' because your stating that good people are not interested or turned off, is akin to saying 'How many people have not read your book' because they think it would take to long to read. You are never going to know the answer to that question and either will I. I have not read your book but I don't think any less of who your are (insert company) or your brand. It does lesson the quality and content of your book either :-) In short I have no idea how many people don't apply beyond asking survey questions to people in the past that have visited my website and who did not apply for whatever reason. While this has provided insight to building a better website and application process, it still falls short as it is only capturing the people that want to take the survey. So clearly there is also a gap of people that never bother to take the survey. I can and have looked at visitor traffic to a the careers web site but you can not correlate directly to visitors that did not apply because of a job description. As we all know many a passive candidate will look at a JD, like what they see and circle around through the side or back door anyway. I have not read the other book you mention so I can not comment on how it might sway my opinion on this subject. I can though confidentially state this based off facts of being in many roles where the need to create pre-screening questions was needed. Some companies (usually large brand's) have a ridiculous amount of unqualified candidates applying to their positions. We all know and have seen plenty of candidates that are habitual job applicants for many roles they are not qualified for. Trust me when I say from experience that writing a tighter and more focused job description does not completely solve this problem either. It helps yes, but it will not fix the challenge of in some cases hundreds and even thousands applying to a role. Any smart recruiter/leaders will quickly work out that it is impossible to review all applications as the number of recruiters/resources needed to do this will drive up the cost to aquire and given recruiting is a cost center, will in turn gain the frowns of the CHRO or CEO if ever thrown on the table as a budgetary request. So they try and work out how to determine who meets the minimum qualifications and then determine the best of that group as efficiently as possible while also trying to balance the candidate experience.......as we also know you can call hundreds of candidates either. See above. So if you go through the exercise of defining what is success criteria and then study, validated and implement a process that allows to evaluate against it, then of course smart recruiters/leaders are going to implement it to help solve this challenge. The important key in all this I have found is to remember that in situations where hundreds of candidates apply, that the real goal is not trying to make the hire decision off reading the resume, but rather how efficiently and quickly can you move people into the 'A pile' and reach out to have a conversation. Surprisingly a lot of people I have spoken to over the years seem to forget this last point. As a final note, just in case people read some of my comments open to interpenetration, clearly this is significantly less of an issue when you have a handful of candidates applying at any one time to a role. In that case I would argue and agree that extensive pre-screening is a waste of time.