A discouraging word improves your interviews - Recruitment/Hiring Practices

Most interviews today are not a very effective way to make hiring or promotion decisions. Indeed, they never were.

Industrial/organizational psychologists recommend a battery of tests and assessments. They use correlation coefficients to describe the relative strength of different predictors of subsequent on-the-job success.

The highest possible coefficient of 1.00 would mean that a test (or other predictor) would correctly identify 100 percent of the good performers and 100 percent of the bad performers. At the other extreme, a zero correlation means that the test worked no better than flipping a coin. (Correlations can also be negative--a -1.00 means a test was wrong 100 percent of the time.)

No predictor of future success in a position is perfect, and correlations rarely come anywhere close to 1.00. The cumulative body of previous research indicates that the best predictors are ability tests, job simulations and previous life experiences. But even with these items, the correlations with subsequent performance only range from .30 to .60, depending upon the test and the position. By comparison, most interviews score in the 0.00 to .30 range, little better than the luck of the draw.

Why interview?

While the interview process is not the most effective way to make decisions, the interview is still an essential tool. Most managers don't want to "buy a pig in a poke," regardless of the pig's pedigree. And, when they search their memories, almost all interviewers can summon up an example of an interview that spared them from a hiring mistake.

The value of interviews is something like that of reference checks. Almost all letters of reference (and even most telephone references) are extremely positive (or at least cautiously neutral). The reference check seems to pay off only when you unravel an applicant's lie on a resume or in an interview--an unearned graduate degree, an exaggerated job title or extended dates of employment to cover gaps of joblessness.

Like the reference checks, you have to conduct the interview steps, even though it may be unnecessary in cases of good hires or ineffective in spotting some bad apples.

But both the reference check and the interview will identify some people who should not be hired. The cost of a hiring or promotion mistake is so great that the interviews and reference checks are worth the time and trouble.

Look for a mutual fit

One way to understand the matching up of persons and jobs is to look at it as a kind of marriage.

When we look at "successful" marriages, we do not see that the husband fits the bill as the ideal man or the wife as the ideal woman. We see two individuals whose patterns of peculiarities fit those of the other. Either might prove an unacceptable partner for a different spouse. The issue of mutual fit, not absolute perfection on either side, is what makes the marriage work.

Likewise there is no such thing as the ideal employee or the ideal job. Take any employee, however good at his or her present position, then place him or her in an inappropriate job, and you will see an inadequate performance.

In hiring decisions, we have to make a judgment--not about the person being interviewed, but about the fit between this person and this position. Many how-to-interview articles written for hiring authorities warn them against talking too much and listening too little. Some consultants even advise that the interview time should be devoted 95 percent to listening to the candidate. This advice is based on some solid evidence that interviewers who spend most of the time speaking feel better about the interview and, consequently, rate the interviewee more highly.

The problem with this "passive interviewer" approach is that it can give the interviewee too much control and turn the process into a performance, which the interviewer then judges like a critic at a movie. This may be OK if the job requires someone who can perform convincingly in an unstructured one-on-one, but that skill is rarely the most important aspect of a position.

One of the worst elements of judging these performances is that most managers will tend to hire clones of themselves--someone with a similar pace of speech, size of vocabulary, preference for (or avoidance of) profanity and favorite topics of small talk. The real problem with unstructured, listening interviews is that they will end with the interviewer judging the candidate as "a nice person" and not as "the person who best fits this position."

In most cases, what causes a divorce is not that the positives in the relationship sag, but that a previously overlooked negative surfaces and comes to dominate the relationship. Similarly, it takes only one factor in which the person and job do not fit, to make it the wrong fit.

If the applicant lacks an essential item that the position requires (a skill, a personality trait, or willingness to accept the working conditions, shift, salary or supervision style of the immediate superior), that applicant will not fit the position. The hiring decision will be a mistake. Maybe the mistake will not be serious enough to warrant firing the employee three years later or even obvious enough for a first-line supervisor to recognize it. Usually, the first person to recognize the lack of fit is the employee.

One survey by Adia Personnel Services found that nearly half of the employees who quit their jobs cited "wrong fit" of person and job as the reason. If you keep hiring the wrong people for the job, and they keep quitting or you have to fire them, you have to face the turnover costs of recruiting and training new employees.

Talking the negatives

To determine the points on which there may be a lack of fit, you will have to discuss the negatives of the job. These might include low salary, poor benefits, long hours, forced relocation, cramped working conditions, lack of opportunity to learn new skills or be promoted, or unsupportive supervisors. Indeed, it would help to make a list of possible negatives about the job and the organization (or at least all the things that may not fit with certain people).

To help you do this, think of people in similar positions who were fired over the years and of some people still with your organization whom you wish had never been hired. Why didn't they fit in? In a few cases, you might be able to cite incompetence, but usually the problem is faulty expectations on either side by the employee or by the company.

Bringing out negatives might go against your previous training and your company's style of accentuating the positive and not airing dirty laundry in public. But remember: You can't hide the negatives after hiring has taken place, and then it is more expensive to undo the wrong hiring decision.

One police department used to look for academy graduates with outstanding academic records. These recruits lasted for about a year, then transferred to suburban departments that had more computers, educational benefits and less street crime. The department then changed its approach, emphasizing the real problems of drug dealing and burglaries, and began attracting those recruits more interested in hands-on work.

A small college was having difficulty keeping its program directors. The advertisements and interviews emphasized the joy of teaching graduate students and the beauty of the campus. The realities of the positions were that they involved mostly recruiting and administration. The hours spent on paperwork, meetings and phone calls to prospective students were three times the hours spent in the classroom.

When the interviewing process switched to an emphasis on the negatives of the job, most of the applicants stated flat out that they would not be interested, but those who still wanted the job proved to be adequate to the tasks involved, and to date, none of them have left their positions.

An old German proverb is, "Before marriage, open both eyes. After marriage, close one eye."

Just as too many people marry in haste and come to resent the initially overlooked negatives in their spouse, too many interviewers and interviewees are painting false, rosy pictures of each other, leading to mismarriages of people and positions.

If you are honest about your company's shortcomings and the job's constraints, you might discourage a few applicants who would have done all right in the job, but what's more important, you will discourage those who would not fit.

T.L. Brink, Ph.D., teaches at Crafton Hills College, Yucaipa, Calif. A published author, he was formerly with an executive recruiting firm in Silicon Valey.

COPYRIGHT 1992 Society for Human Resource Management
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group