Posts

4 Reasons Not to Base Hiring on Skills

/ /by

The competition for talent isn’t going away. Nor is the need to hire people who know how to do the job and won’t leave. With the average life expectancy of an employee on the job in the U.S. shrinking — from 4.6 percent in 2014 to 4.2 percent in 2016 — we’re all looking for that perfect way to predict hiring success.

Among the questions hiring managers face: Rely on the old standby and hire based on gut? Or go straight to the science, and if so, what data? Skills tests do give a crisp, black-and-white reality as to what a candidate can do the moment they walk in their new employer’s door — such as make spreadsheets or program in Java. And hiring employees who have already learned the specific skills a job requires, so they can roll up their sleeves and get straight to work, is always a key objective.

But both approaches are a myth. Recruiters spend an average of 6.25 seconds reading each resume, in large part because some 250 resumes are submitted for every corporate job opening, and only 50 percent of those applicants are even qualified to apply. But locking into skills to hire gives not only an incomplete picture, it’s short-sighted. There are many reasons why, but let’s start with these four essentials.

  1. Hiring on the basis of specific skills is no guarantee of success on the job.

Even in positions that require very specific skills, hiring for specific competencies — sometimes known as micro-skills — is not a prediction of success. While skills tests measure for very focused and specific purposes — such as operating a particular production line or handing a software program, they are not a good indicator of long-term success.

The reason is so simple it’s easy to overlook: Tests that measure present-day proficiency are designed to do just that. Retention is based on many factors, but all have to do with how the employee experiences their work and their workplace. What engages an employee, and promotes retention is not their ability to crunch an excel sheet, and what keeps them productive may have to do with everything from ability to learn to having a personality that fits their job. The bottom line here is that you need a fuller way to predict success.

  1. You may not even be hiring for those skills next year.

Everything about how we work is undergoing a transformation right now, and that’s affecting nearly every single industry. You may not be using that same machinery or software next year. You may not even be using employees if you do. We don’t really know how radically work is going to be altered by AI and robotics, but we do know they are coming to our workplace soon.

And that’s certainly not the only change. As we transition to a blended workforce economy, your employees may soon be combined with gig workers and freelancers as well — that is, if they’re not already. 93 percent of companies are already relying on a workforce in which freelance workers team up with employees. One key reason, according to employers, is that freelancers have stellar niche skills, often better than your own employees. Depending on the project, you may want to bring in a crack team and shift your own personnel to a different project, requiring different skills.

  1. Emotional intelligence and aptitude may be more important than specific skills.

There are too many examples these days of companies who clearly didn’t hire for emotional intelligence, the ability to deal with people, or the awareness that their actions would trigger a cascade of consequences for their employer. The fallout in this digital and social era is instant—and devastating. The takeaway to me is that you need to hire for more than skills. But even outside the news cycles, and even in companies that are not providing a people-centric service, screening for the right behaviors, cognitive aptitudes, and basic skills is clearly a best practice with a long payoff.

A recent study by LinkedIn found that nearly two-thirds of employers surveyed look for two key qualities in their hires first: Problem-solving skills (65 percent) and the ability to learn new concepts (64 percent). Along with critical thinking and the ability to apply new information, these qualities can be effectively screened in a cognitive aptitude test. And according to Criteria’s research, there’s a clear correlation between cognitive aptitude and job performance: Testing for cognitive aptitude is twice as accurate a predictor as a job interview and three times as accurate a predictor as experience. And the higher up the ladder the position, the more accurate these tests are.

  1. Training on the job has more value than you might think.

There’s another, overlooked magical ingredient to the secret sauce of retention: On the job training. 94 percent of manufacturing executives viewed training problems as one of the best ways to close the skills gap, according to a recent whitepaper by Criteria Corp. But training has additional benefits, and these benefits also speak to the question of testing for skills. The answer: Keep it basic, and use training to not only develop the specific skills but also enhance the connection between employer and employee.

How? On the one hand, training can function as an extension of the employer brand, framed and presented to reflect company mission and message. On the other hand, it becomes a key facet of employee experience, a demonstration that an organization values its employees enough to invest in their growth. As cited by SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management), success on the job is determined in as little as two weeks to three months. Onboarding is a key factor in the outcome, according to SHRM’s report. Including skills training in an effective onboarding program may come to be even more of a critical and practical step for any company that wants to retain its talent. Seen in this light, screening hires for their innate aptitudes and behaviors makes even more sense.

So, What to Do?

Understandably, no hiring team wants to send new employees to the work site who don’t know what they’re doing. It’s true that many organizations are still wedded to screening for skills for that very reason. But in this transforming world of work, we need to hire employees who can learn and want to grow and develop.

The best hiring decisions are formed after considering the whole spectrum of employee behaviors and performance, by blending aptitude with the appropriate behaviors and then adding in education and experience. Given the pressure to retain our human capital, that’s the best way to protect our strongest investment—people.

This post is sponsored by Criteria Corp.

Photo Credit: midwest.communications Flickr via Compfight cc

Why Job Interviews Are Not Foolproof

/ /by

Here’s the reality of hiring today: work itself is undergoing rapid changes, shifting to a new kind of workscape that’s digital, global, diverse, leans on automation and functions across multiple platforms — including social media and mobile. The job market is highly competitive: the unemployment rate was at 4.7 percent in February of 2017. Business cycles are shorter, with faster rates of new demands and needs to match. In this state of constant disruption and an ongoing race for talent, HR is being challenged to rethink how to recruit and hire more effectively.

The Bottleneck

Adoption of new technologies tends to be somewhat sticky: we tend to cling to the status quo if we’re not sure how to change it. But focus, for a moment, on the process of hiring as many of us know it. Short attention spans, a barrage of digital distractions, and employer information scattered across multiple platforms mean candidates who don’t fully read or understand the job description but tend to send out their resumes anyway. It’s easier than ever to do it, so why not?

On the receiving end are overloaded recruiters and hiring teams, flooded with resumes and applicants. Only half of these candidates are actually qualified, according to a number of recent polls of recruiters. But the process of winnowing them down is cumbersome. Somehow this giant pool of talent has to wind up flowing through a very narrow, one-to-one bottleneck: the interview. It’s like taking a raging river and sending it through a drinking straw.

There are other problems with the interview process, including questions of fairness. Objectively speaking, two humans get together and have a chat, and one tries to offer enough information to answer the other’s essential question: Should I hire you? But we know how fallible interviews can be, from limited bandwidth to first impressions formed in seconds — based on an array of “thin slices” of data that may smack of bias, conscious or not. The issue is significant enough that states are working to legislate bias out of interviews. Massachusetts just enacted a “Don’t ask” law that prohibits interviewers from asking for salary history — a question which has been found to put women candidates at a disadvantage and perpetuate pay gap.

Empowering a Better Interview

But we are human, after all. Nothing wrong with that. What if there’s a way to turn our humanity into a success, and not a potential liability? There is — and it comes in the form of data-driven tools that winnow out and spotlight objectively and accurately. Well designed pre-employment tests are more than ways to screen for specific skills and qualifications. They function as objective and effective predictors of success based on a range of additional characteristics, including personality and cognitive aptitude; the former can measure traits that may demonstrate fit, while the latter is increasingly important as we become far more specialized and as the technology we use evolves faster. Even more importantly, research shows that cognitive aptitude is one of the best predictors of actual on-the-job performance, making it a more objective tool for predicting long-term success.

But from my perspective, they also do something else. They’re an opportunity for both sides to learn about each other. The candidate can learn from the testing experience what kinds of skills, aptitudes, and behaviors are required for the job. The recruiter can learn from the test results what kind of potential the candidate has in terms of those measurements. Armed with this information, they can proceed to the next step if it’s appropriate.

No more shots in the dark. The candidate, as well as the recruiter, are both on the same page. Now, imagine the interview based on the results. The interview can now fulfill a more meaningful function: a face-to-face (whether virtual or not) meeting that conveys a candidate’s interest and potential to the employer, and communicates the employer’s culture and values to the candidate. Both are equally important, particularly in terms of a good hire and increased retention. No one’s time is wasted. A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) backs this up: using pre-employment tests was shown to tangibly improve hiring results.

Still, Don’t Ditch the Interview

Does this all mean that we should simply do away with interviews completely? I’d say no. The advantage of pre-employment tests in hiring is that they provide relevant, objective data about a job candidate. For candidates, they provide a clearly objective and specific set of criteria that enhances the candidate’s understanding of the position, can (if tailored that way) convey employer brand, and provides a positive experience. But it may be that instead of unstructured interviews, we lean more on structured interviews — with their standardized set of questions. It puts additional work on the hiring manager’s desk, at least up front. But it also takes more uncertainty and the risk of bias off the table. If that can’t happen, the pre-employment tests have taken care of much of the heavy lifting.

We’re about to move into yet another phase in HR and recruiting, soon: Deloitte’s 2017 Human Capital Trends report stressed that we are heading into an era of cognitive computing, an augmented combining AI and people, and organizations made of teams may work together intensely but be located in different hemispheres. But of the key trends in this report, it’s important to note that 81% of the executives, managers, and recruiters polled said that no matter what the field, talent acquisition is imperative. Which makes a hiring process that uses the best tools even more like a change we all need to make right now.

This post is sponsored by Criteria Corp.

Photo Credit: neil.trickett Flickr via Compfight cc

How Assessments Create Successful Manufacturing Hires

/ /by

Want to make the right manufacturing hires? A 2016 MRI survey on recruiting found that 80 percent of all hires are mistakes that cost companies time and money. In manufacturing, according to research by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute, nearly 3.5 million jobs may be needed over the next ten years. Some 2 million are expected to go unfilled due to the skills gap, however. This serious issue requires a serious shift in perspective: Discovering the right fit needs to be about more than skills. A pre-employment test can accurately evaluate aptitude and personality to assess a candidate’s real potential. The good news is that there are tests to do the heavy lifting and there’s no reason not to take advantage of these tools.

Aptitude: The Key Differentiator

A pre-employment assessment, that looks at a candidate’s potential, shifts our criteria to more effectively look at talent to address today’s realities. We’re staffing up in a super-tight job market that’s also experiencing a marked skills gap, so an open position can have a direct impact on production, as a 2014 study conducted by Accenture for The Manufacturing Institute uncovered. The talent shortage is costing American manufacturers an average of 11 percent in annual earnings— or $3,000 per existing employee.

The key is to recruit for aptitude as well as skill. A pre-employment test for mechanical aptitude, for instance, may convey that a potential hire will be able to ramp up fast and learn into the job. Recent research on hiring shows that aptitude is generally a far more effective indicator of on-the-job success: it’s twice as predictive as a job interview, three times as predictive as job experience, and four times as predictive as education level.

Pre-Hiring Tests Help Shape Careers, Not Just Fill Jobs

In the big picture, successful hiring is also about considering the candidate as talent, not just a pair of eyes and a pair of hands; and acknowledging that from their point of view, it’s not just about walking into a job and staying there. We know that in general, candidates prefer organizations that offer opportunities for growth.

Additionally, manufacturing may not be perceived as having the same kind of growth potential as other fields. Not to put too fine a point on this, but manufacturing was actually ranked last by Generation Y as a career choice in that Deloitte / Manufacturing Institute study. If the perception is that you won’t be hired if you don’t already know everything and have every skill, then the company is going to lose out on applicants from the beginning.

But companies can convey the potential for growth by demonstrating that they’re screening for it. Businesses that provide tests to measure aptitudes and potential for the future may be perceived as more competitive, and therefore more desirable to candidates. As a compelling piece by my colleagues at SHRM (the Society for Human Resource Management) pointed out, when companies make an effort to demonstrate that there’s a tangible skills ladder to climb, they may attract more applicants.

Metrics for Better Performance

Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute found that 80 percent of manufacturers have at least a moderate, if not a severe, shortage of qualified applicants for skilled and highly skilled production positions. The basic skills most lacking among applicants include:

  • Computer and technology skills — 70 percent lacked
  • Problem-solving skills — 69 percent lacked
  • Technical training — 67 percent lacked
  • Math skills — 60 percent lacked

So if you’re looking for new talent, screen for these as aptitudes — and then provide the training and growth that cultivates them into specific skills.

Companies can also establish benchmarks based on existing best-performing employees — a new but proven strategy that’s catching on. Take this example from Criteria Corp’s website: Criteria stands at the vanguard of pre-hire testing, enabling firms in the manufacturing sector — from small businesses to larger ones — to winnow out top talent efficiently. Criteria works with companies in a whole range of fields, to be sure. But here’s an example from manufacturing: an American installation and repair service company wanted to decrease turnover rates and improve the productivity of more than 3,000 service technicians. The solution: Set a standard, and go from there.

The company first administered the Wiesen Test of Mechanical Aptitude (WTMA) to one group of its techs to create a standard. What emerged was a set of scores associated with high performance that could be used as a baseline for pre-employment testing. The result with this kind of process is that everyone is happy. The candidates are happy to participate in a process that’s data-driven and transparent. Companies are satisfied because the process works. Hiring managers and recruiters are assessing candidates based on qualitative data rather than hunches, which drives a new kind of commitment we all want in our workplaces.

In terms of engagement and alignment, here’s how it works: The candidate experiences, firsthand, the company’s commitment to both making a fair hire and investing in a candidate’s learning and development. The company gets a candidate motivated to do the legwork to grow. The results: better hires, better performance, but also a better workplace. That’s better, in my book, than gambling on guesswork.

To read more from Criteria Corp about manufacturing and assessments, click here.

This post is sponsored by Criteria Corp.

Photo Credit: mycos2012 Flickr via Compfight cc