The Worst Candidate Short Listing Mistakes Hiring Managers Repeatedly Make

This one is going to hurt... the feelings and ego of some of you reading. You’ve been warned. ?Here is an uncomfortable truth that many hiring managers, perhaps even you, must confront. You have been conditioned and indoctrinated into an outdated way of selecting and assessing candidate potential.?You've been taught to focus on the wrong things at the wrong time, likely yielding less than stellar results.

Candidate Short Listing Mistake #1

For many of you the first point of screening candidates is to begin looking at resumes. And this is a fundamentally flawed approach that happens almost unconsciously across industries and sectors. You need to ask yourself why is this your first point of evaluation? What does it really tell you? Seriously. Resumes, in today’s world, are pretty much branding and positioning exercises filled with relatively useless platitudes and peripheral information that more often than not does not relate to the needs or requirements of your role. At best, they provide a listing of job titles. Even in this last context, they have become somewhat suspect as candidates flock to AI tools to rewrite their work history, providing summaries and documentation, that in many cases, have no actual bearing on their ability to perform effectively in your role. To make matters even more problematic, many hiring managers continue to rely on these resumes to screen out, or worse, screen in, certain candidates.

Here is a statistical fact you might want to ponder. Resumes provide a mere 1-7% correlation with performance in a specified role (Schmidt and John E. Hunter). Yup, pretty concerning. Despite this poor correlation, hiring managers still often solely rely on this one piece of information to decide if they should meet with a candidate. Is it any wonder then, that so much time and effort is wasted in the interview process. The fact is, most candidates that do get interviewed should never have even be considered in the first place. At least not if the hiring manager knew what to do, instead of looking at resumes. ?

Candidate Short Listing Mistake #2

Now let’s move on to the next repeated mistake – the dreaded interview. Oh boy, this one is volatile, and I’m sure I will hear from people who are interview “guru's” (you know who you are) but let’s just stick to the data for a minute. The fact is most hiring managers are simply really poor at interviewing for performance, capability, fit, emotional intelligence, potential, etcetera. Worse the majority of hiring managers really do not understand personality or cognition at the level needed to make informed decisions about candidates based solely on interviews. And they would certainly be hard pressed to comment on how certain innate traits or cognitive style are related to specific competencies. In fact, the majority of hiring managers would not be able to provide a standardized or validated set of behavioural traits that are linked to any set of competencies. And if you can't do that, then the probability of knowing who to select drops to the level of chance. The research suggests that the majority of hiring managers are not able to keep up with the latest strategies, approaches and knowledge about human psychology as related to workplace performance and evaluation.

Here are a couple of statistics to help drive home this point. A University of Berkley California study found that the correlation between job interviews (as typically conducted by hiring managers) and subsequent candidate performance is approximately 4%. That's right only 4%. This is very concerning. More alarming is the that research has shown that even "perfectly executed, structured and behavioural interviews carried out by expert trained professionals will only yield at most a 51% correlation for success. Just a 51% correlation between interviewing a candidate and success and that is with professionals who only do hiring interviews, all day, every day, doing the interviewing. I think we need to pause here for a minute and really process this. Think about this...

The 2 main points of evaluation used by the majority of organizations will at best provide a 50/50 chance of hiring the best candidate (but only if executed by specially trained experts). But we all know the majority of hiring managers are not trained experts. In our real world day to day business life the best we can hope for given the strategy of using just resumes and interviews is less than a 10% correlation. This is really something to be concerned about, yet, if you really take the time to think about this, it makes sense. The majority of hires do not work out well long term. Something comes up. Either the new hire is not exactly as they presented. Or something seems a little off when they arrive, or their performance is not exactly as it was described by them or some innate personality quirk surfaces which impacts the team. Even if we look towards the most liberal correlations between expert interviews the metric only moves to 51%. Even in this best case scenario it is at best almost 50/50 in terms of success and satisfaction on both sides.

I know, it hurts to read this but we need to focus on the science. We must remember that selection is ultimately a science, infused with art. It is not about gut instinct, or intuition, or any other unsubstantiated means of evaluation regardless of what others may tell you.

Today, I don't want to digress into the psychology of why hiring managers continue to hold on to these outdated and poorly performing strategies. Yet, I will briefly suggest a couple potential reason. The first is habits, poor habits mind you, but habits nonetheless and perhaps a nice dose of comfort and ego. And, let's not forget our favourite reason for not changing - functioning on autopilot.

The reality is such that even if you are a trained and well seasoned behavioural interviewer who does this everyday, you are more than likely to get it more wrong than right. Even if you keep up with the latest strategies, you are only going to be right about 50% of the time in the interview. This is the research and I’d be happy to debate this with those of you who feel slighted. ?If you can remove the stranglehold of your old ways of looking at selection and be open to moving the pieces around, accessing different lenses and trusting a process outside your own, there is a relatively simple way to add in strategic tools and processes, smart systems and psychological algorithms. And this is where the magic can happen. And by magic I mean, the ability to raise the correlations to a point where selection recommendations become predictive of future behaviour. This is a movement away from personal bias and perception to a science driven method infused with experience. It is important to keep in mind that selecting a high performing candidate is not a personal exercise.

In providing the research findings and data I'm hoping to help us all make better decisions when selecting candidates and to genuinely help those of you with hiring responsibilities to be awesome at your job, increase your success hit rate, retain better fitting and more engaged employees and improve the overall performance of your respective organizations via a roadmap that has been extensively validated, predictive, reliable, and linked to a large number of competencies. ?

The question now becomes, if resumes and interviews yield poor decision results, how do we increase the odds, or more specifically, reduce the evaluation error percentage, so that we can make better and more accurate decisions about candidates and whether to hire them or not.

?If you want to partner with us and access to our core strategy and process that we have been using with clients and refining for the last thirty years, simply email me at [email protected] for more information.

?Cheers. I hope you decide to stop using the hope and wait method when selecting your next candidate and leverage the science of selection to help you make the best decisions about those who apply for your roles.

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