Science

Behind the applicant mask

How to know what candidates are really like before you hire them.

We all think we can pick a winner.  Whether it’s the Kentucky Derby or our corporate recruitment process, we are all confident we can tell the superstar from the also-ran before the race starts.

Mostly – as any professional gambler will tell you – we get it wrong.  Six months into a new job, only 46% of hires rate good or very good on performance appraisals.  A year later, one in two will have left the organization.  Back a loser at the track and you’re out a few bucks.  Hire the wrong candidate for the job and you could end up costing the business multiples of that individual’s salary.

We could talk more about the crushing economic impact of hiring the wrong person – and in future newsletters we will – but now let’s look at the big, hairy question: Can we predict how people will perform in the job before we hand them an employment contract?
Sure we can, if we use science rather than gut instinct.

Research over almost one hundred years into job performance and hiring has found three things make a difference:

• Measure what matters.  The right selection criteria beat the rest hands down.  Mental ability tests, especially when you add in competency assessment – predict work performance strongly (correlations of 0.6 – 0.7 with subsequent performance – about as good as it gets in psychometrics).  Weaker predictors (correlations around 0.1 - 0.18) include the length of previous employment, education level or conclusions drawn from unstructured interviews.  Bringing up the rear are candidate age, graphology and astrology, none of which do anything at all to predict how well candidates will work out (-0.01 - 0.02 correlation with performance results).
• Assess every candidate objectively.  Reliable selection needs to be free of bias, personal interpretation or context variation.  If it isn’t, you can’t compare candidates in any meaningful way, plus you’re leaving your company open to lawsuits.
• Be systematic and efficient.  Hiring has to be replicable, but large numbers of candidates and ever-shorter hiring timetables make this a tough challenge.  Structured, smart and smooth processes are a must – and make them user-friendly or people will work around them, defeating all the good work you’ve done to make your system predictive and objective. 

It all makes sense.  Until we get the check.
 
Until recently, using best practice in selection has cost $$$.  Even extremely profitable companies have used it only for their highest value hires, at a late stage of recruitment.  Main Street America has had to rely on resume keyword searches, unstructured interviewing and other approaches that are weakly predictive at best.
 

But Matchpoint Careers is changing the game. 

Our online profiling system predicts success as strongly as any other method.  We assess candidates for free, at the earliest stage of recruitment, so selection is based entirely on the scientifically proven predictors of job performance. 

And we’re going one better.  We’re not just assessing candidates, we’re matching them to the specific performance demands of each job.  In the next Matchpoint Careers Newsletter, we’ll talk about the employer side of our matching process – why it matters and how organizations can profile jobs quickly, easily and – above all – accurately.

Next month’s Sciencers: how do you assess a job?

Thought Leadership Latest: 

The buzz this month is all about stars vs. systems.  Should we hire outstanding individuals to make a big splash or look for people who can work together to build sustainable value?  Check out Bill Taylor's blog for Harvard Business Review that kicked off the debate, the comments it provoked and Taylor's follow-up post.  Take part in our poll and look out for Matchpoint Careers' take on stars vs. systems in an upcoming newsletter.