Assessing the job: the hidden part of selection
We hear a lot about assessing candidates, but nobody mentions the other side of selection: assessing the job.
It’s strange we miss this step, because it’s obvious different jobs make different demands. We can all think of a star performer in one role who bombed in another, and different contexts can have a huge impact: Someone who was a star buyer at Ralph Lauren is going to face very different challenges at Walmart. Finding the best candidate is not just about ranking absolute levels of potential: it’s about matching candidates to the specific demands of a specific job.
But when it comes to defining job demands, even speed-of-light sophisticated organizations resort to that donkey cart of recruiting, the job description. Job descriptions explain jobs in terms of tasks and responsibilities, reporting lines, necessary skills, education level and – rarely – a few broad behavioral factors. All this would be fine, if responsibilities, job size, skills, education level and generic, organization-level competencies reliably predicted performance.
They don’t.
The things that do predict performance in a job – the behavioral patterns, level of general mental ability and employee preferences that separate superior performers from average jobholders – are very precise, evidence driven and unique to each role. They can be determined by rigorous analysis of multiple people and their performance in the same job: What level of mental ability, and what type (verbal, numerical, spatial etc) is needed to carry out this role? What patterns of behavior get the best results? What individual motivations does this job satisfy? What are the potentially demotivating factors?
Phew. I’m exhausted just writing that list, never mind actually carrying out the assessments and analyses. Luckily, the hard work has already been done. Databases of performance predicting profiles for thousands of jobs have been built up by researchers over decades. These databases can be mined to find clones for a role, so all the recruiter has to do is quickly adjust the profile to the specific circumstances of the open job. Once the job profile has been finalized, candidates can be assessed against the very same factors, enabling an accurate match.
Okay, so assessing a job can be done quickly and can draw on real data. But aren’t jobs constantly changing? Surely those databases get out of date?
Jobs have changed. Look back 10 years, even 3-5 years, and the specific activities and technologies are probably different from today. Assessments based on knowledge or skills – like traditional job descriptions – go out of date very quickly.
But the fundamental attributes of jobs stay constant – as evidenced by the consistent predictive power of the same factors over time. These factors measure the deeper drivers of performance: the behaviors, attitudes and abilities that drive the skillsets and micro-behaviors that are used to perform specific tasks. Salespeople today may track prospects via mobile cloud computing instead of flipping through a rolodex, but the patterns of behavior that drive effective networking are the same as they were forty years ago.
And getting the right match matters, more than ever. As jobs become more self-managing, as performance expectations increase, getting the right person in the job – and getting that match right first time – becomes vital for any organization’s success. Trying to make the match without knowing what’s really driving performance in the job is like picking candidates with a pin. Maybe you’ll be lucky. Probably you won’t.
