The aim of this mini-course is to motivate you into systemising your hiring process. The assortment of new employees are about legal discrimination. We first start off with a large selection of applicants. Through a process of "hurdles" based on the Knowledge, Skills, Attitudes, Mental ability and Experience or KSAMEs for short needed for the job, what we end up with is what we 'hope' is the right person for the job. From experience, most HR managers do just that, rely on 'hope'.
If choosing a new employee is about discrimination, then it is absolutely necessary that we discriminate fairly. A way to ensure this is to systemise your hiring process so that all applicants are treated identically and fairly. For example, all applicants are faced with the exact same interview questions, the same interview panel and the same psychometric assessments. This provides you with better hiring decisions as the process is standardised or comparing "apples with apples" if you will.
A good analogy of the selection process is to visualize an iceberg. A third of the iceberg is visible above the waterline. This depicts the Knowledge, Skills and Experience (KSE's) that are observable of the candidate and whether or not they can do the job. This kind of information can be teased out through CV's, Resumes or application forms as well as interviews and referencing. KSE's are learned behaviours, thus they can be trained and coached.
The remaining two thirds that sit under the waterline is what most hiring managers will fail to assess - "will" or "how" they will do the job. This two thirds represents the applicants mental abilities, motives, personality traits and values; or in simpler terms - their attitude. It is really only through psychological profiling that this can be assessed. More information can be found at Tip #5.
A lot of hiring managers will hire based on KSE's, but end up terminating or having problems with employees further down the track because of their mental ability, personality and attitude.
Achieving the right mix of both personality traits and mental ability applicable to the job will help to insure the applicants' skills, experience and knowledge are applied in the most productive way possible which benefits both the applicant and the organisation.
Just as a note of caution, there are various ways of systemising the selection process dependent on the job itself. The tips to follow in this mini-course are generalised and designed to make you think about what elements you require to develop your own peace-of-mind selection system.
What's wrong with the traditional selection process?
1. Poor/Lack of planning. Has a job analysis been done? Do you have a printed/written list of the Knowledge, personal Attributes and Skills required for this job?
2. A lot of HR Managers hire on emotion. They may be good at hiring people based on what they can do, but are poor at assessing who they really are. Emotional judgements and Gut feelings generally tend to rule. Thus, managers tend to hire people who are much like themselves.
3. Many managers hire on experience instead of ability - you can teach people to sell, but you can't teach resilience, optimism and motivation to persuade.
4. Interviews are just unstructured 1-on-1 conversations.
5. The interviewer does most of the talking.
6. Interviewers are untrained.
7. The personal characteristics of the applicant are rarely tested through critical reasoning and personality tests.
8. Poor effort in terms of background checks and/or references.
There is much more, however, the above issues are the key areas we would like to address in this report. - 16069
If choosing a new employee is about discrimination, then it is absolutely necessary that we discriminate fairly. A way to ensure this is to systemise your hiring process so that all applicants are treated identically and fairly. For example, all applicants are faced with the exact same interview questions, the same interview panel and the same psychometric assessments. This provides you with better hiring decisions as the process is standardised or comparing "apples with apples" if you will.
A good analogy of the selection process is to visualize an iceberg. A third of the iceberg is visible above the waterline. This depicts the Knowledge, Skills and Experience (KSE's) that are observable of the candidate and whether or not they can do the job. This kind of information can be teased out through CV's, Resumes or application forms as well as interviews and referencing. KSE's are learned behaviours, thus they can be trained and coached.
The remaining two thirds that sit under the waterline is what most hiring managers will fail to assess - "will" or "how" they will do the job. This two thirds represents the applicants mental abilities, motives, personality traits and values; or in simpler terms - their attitude. It is really only through psychological profiling that this can be assessed. More information can be found at Tip #5.
A lot of hiring managers will hire based on KSE's, but end up terminating or having problems with employees further down the track because of their mental ability, personality and attitude.
Achieving the right mix of both personality traits and mental ability applicable to the job will help to insure the applicants' skills, experience and knowledge are applied in the most productive way possible which benefits both the applicant and the organisation.
Just as a note of caution, there are various ways of systemising the selection process dependent on the job itself. The tips to follow in this mini-course are generalised and designed to make you think about what elements you require to develop your own peace-of-mind selection system.
What's wrong with the traditional selection process?
1. Poor/Lack of planning. Has a job analysis been done? Do you have a printed/written list of the Knowledge, personal Attributes and Skills required for this job?
2. A lot of HR Managers hire on emotion. They may be good at hiring people based on what they can do, but are poor at assessing who they really are. Emotional judgements and Gut feelings generally tend to rule. Thus, managers tend to hire people who are much like themselves.
3. Many managers hire on experience instead of ability - you can teach people to sell, but you can't teach resilience, optimism and motivation to persuade.
4. Interviews are just unstructured 1-on-1 conversations.
5. The interviewer does most of the talking.
6. Interviewers are untrained.
7. The personal characteristics of the applicant are rarely tested through critical reasoning and personality tests.
8. Poor effort in terms of background checks and/or references.
There is much more, however, the above issues are the key areas we would like to address in this report. - 16069
