How to Hire the Best People

Blaine Landis, PhD

Conducting an
Organisational Needs
Analysis
 Organisational Needs Analysis
• Organisational needs analysis is usually prompted by a problem
(poor productivity or turnover) or changes in what the organisation
wants to do.
• At this critical stage it is important to understand whether hiring
is an issue.
• For example, productivity issues could be the result of many things:
• Poor training
• Organizational policies
• Ineffective leadership
• The nature of the tasks being performed
• The overall way the job is designed
• Satisfaction
• Will changing the way it hires people improve the issues the END

organisation wished to tackled?

Job Analysis

Blaine Landis, PhD

Job Analysis
 Having Established a Need,
Conduct a Job Analysis
• Your first step in designing a selection system is to conduct a job
analysis.
• Job analysis involves collecting information about what tasks and
activities are involved in the job, as well as the qualities needed
to perform these tasks and activities.
• This is important because:
• You need to understand the job requirements in order to predict
who will do well in the job.
• It is legally encouraged.
• It will provide a basis for understanding whether your hiring decisions
are effective.
• It can offer a foundation for other important organisational practices,
such as performance appraisal.
 Methods of Job Analysis
• Fundamentally, all job analysis consists of observing what can be
seen and asking questions about what cannot.
• A job analyst watches, questions, understands, and summarises
information about a job to form a job description.
• Warnings about job analysis:
1. Different sources of information may yield different information, at
least some of it wrong.
2. Using all the complex information a job analysis provides is not
necessary for an accurate prediction.
3. Job analysis typically describes the job as it is, not how it might be,
ought to be, or will be in the future.
4. Job analyses rarely recognise alternative ways to do the job or to
qualify for it.
 Ways of Analysing the Job
• Observations and interviews
• Much work may not be observable.
• People may perform differently when watched.
• May go more “by the book” or add in things not
normally done, to impress the observer.
• Critical incident technique
• Meet with a group of people currently doing the job
and ask them about critical incidents.
• In these incidents, what made an employee unusually
effective at his or her job?
 Ways of Analysing the Job
• Task inventory surveys
• Present people with statements about work activities
and ask them to rate the extent to which the
statement defines their job.
• Occupational Information Network (O*NET)
• Competency modelling
 Having Analysed the Job,
Define Performance
• Performance is a construct, measurable in many
ways.
• Performance is work-related activity.
• Performance is the effectiveness and value of
work behaviour and its outcomes (SIOP).
• Performance is not unidimensional and may
have many components:
• Rank ordering employees on one dimension may not
match their rank order on another.
 Task Performance vs.
Contextual Performance

• Contextual performance refers to aspects

of performance unrelated to specific tasks.
• These include activities aimed at
enhancing the interpersonal and
psychological environment that
facilitates task completion.
• Organisational citizenship behaviour
• Emotional helping
• Advice sharing
• Altruism
 Task Performance vs.
Contextual Performance
• Key distinctions between task performance and
contextual performance:
• Task activities contribute directly to the core of the organisation’s
focus, contextual activities contribute to the social environment.
• Task activities differ across different jobs, contextual activities
are common to many if not all jobs.
• Task activities are associated with skills or abilities, contextual
activities are more associated with motivational or personality
variables.
• Task activities are things people are hired to do, contextual
activities are desirable but less likely to be demanded.

END
Principles of Effective
Hiring Approaches

Blaine Landis, PhD

Principles of Effective
Hiring Approaches
 Principle #1: Reliability
• Recall that reliability equals consistency.
• Imagine if every time you stepped on a
bathroom scale, it produced a different weight—
how useful would the scale be?
• Interview scores, personality measures,
assessment centre ratings must all produce
consistent (reliable) information.
• If information gleaned in the hiring process
is unreliable, it will not be valid (accurate or
predictive).
 Principle #2: Validity
• Recall that validity equals accuracy.
• Hiring decisions must be based on valid information that
is relevant to the job and predictive of performance in
the job.
• We establish validity by demonstrating that hiring
information is related to what people will actually
have to do on the job—it predicts job performance or
some other meaningful, relevant aspect of the job (e.g.
number of accidents or worker safety).
• This evidence shows that we are hiring on the basis of
relevant, performance-related information.
 Principle #3: Fairness
• Be sure to examine the legal issues related to the recruitment and
hiring of individuals in your particular country.
• We should be using hiring information based on business necessity:
• “Business necessity means that a selection procedure must be related
to job behaviour or performance—usually that it is a valid predictor of an
important criterion—and therefore serves a useful business purpose not
as well served by a known alternative with less adverse impact.” (Guion &
Highhouse, 2006, p. 84–85)
• Adverse impact exists if the selection ratio in one group (presumably the
minority group) is less than 80% of the selection ratio in the other.
• Example: A company has 80 white and 20 black applicants. The 80%
rule says that, if the company hires 25% of the white applicants (i.e. 20
of them), then it is reasonable to expect that 20% (four-fifths of 25%) of
the black applicants would be hired (i.e. four of them).
 Principle #4: Cost
• Assessments can be expensive.
• We should also think about cost in terms
of effort and opportunity—how much
effort does it take to gather the information
(e.g. by conducting interviews or
administering situational judgment tests),
and how predictive is the information?
 Principle #5: Transparency
and Applicant Reactions
• We should be as clear and transparent as
possible in helping people understand how we
evaluate potential employees and what it takes
to get hired.
• Nebulous or confusing hiring practices can
engender unfavourable applicant reactions.
• If applicants do not like a test or hiring
procedure, consider replacing it with a
comparable one that they do like.
END
The Application
The Most Popular Selection Method

Blaine Landis, PhD

The Application
The Most Popular Selection Method
 Weighted Application Blanks
• A scoring method for identifying candidates
likely to perform well.
• Identifies the information provided during
the application process that may be
predictive of on-the-job success.
• Weighted application blanks are useful for
narrowing the pool of applicants down
to those who meet the job requirements
and may therefore be suitable for further
screening.
• Too often application blanks are “weighted”
informally or non-systematically—basically
picking people who seem acceptable for
various reasons.
END
Interviews
The Second Most Popular
Selection Method
Blaine Landis, PhD
Interviews
The Second Most Popular
Selection Method
 Interviews
• Interviews are the second most commonly used
assessment method after the application blank.
• Interviews are a method, meaning that you can
use an interview to assess personality,
situational judgment, and so on.
• Interviews vary dramatically:
• Some are informal (mere conversations), others are
formal.
• Some are entirely unplanned, others are as tightly
structured as any test.
• Some use one interviewer, others use panels.
 Interviews
• Interviews vary dramatically:
• Some are done by highly skilled interviewers, others
are done by people who have no training or
experience.
• Interviewers themselves are not standardised,
meaning that the same questions can be asked in
different ways by different interviewers.
• Critically, some interviews are structured—an
interviewer asks all candidates the same questions
and collects the same information, and others are
unstructured (different questions are asked across
candidates).
 Interviews: Valid or Not?
• The earliest study of interview validity revealed that the rank order of
57 candidates interviewed by 12 different sales managers showed
no agreement (Hollingworth, 1923).
• 20 years of research identified unreliability as a major problem.
• Interviews were being lumped together from:
• Interviewers who varied dramatically in skill and experience
• Interviews that were unstructured and structured
• Essentially informal conversations being labelled as interviews
• These early reviews suggested that improving reliability would
produce gains in predictive validity.
• The latest evidence indicates that interviews, if well structured,
can be valid predictors of job performance, but too often they
are not structured or reliable.
 Interviewer and
Interviewee Characteristics
Research shows there are Differences between interviewees
differences between also affect the information
interviewers in the way they use provided by the interviewee in the
information to reach overall interview:
judgments and the predictive • Impression management
validity of those judgments. • Interviewees used more
• Interview experience ingratiation tactics when
• Experience breeds confidence answering situational
and bad habits, hindering questions, but used more self-
insight (Gehrlein, Dipboye, & promotion tactics when they
Shahani, 1993). answered experience-based
questions (Ellis et al., 2002).
 Interviewer and
Interviewee Characteristics
• Interview experience • Impression management
• Interviewers do most of the • Extraverted individuals tend to
talking, sometimes two to engage in more self-
three times as much as the promotion, agreeable
interviewees, and talk more individuals tend to engage in
with applicants they accept more ingratiation (Kristof-Brown et
(Anderson, 1960). al., 2002).
• Interview stereotypes and
biases
• Interviewers prefer candidates
who are similar to themselves
(Lin, Dobbins, & Farh, 1992).
Interviewers prefer candidates
who fit the “prototypical” ideal
for the job in question.
 Worst Job Interview Ever
Watch the following clip and make note of why these
interviews are the worst ever…
 Worst Job Interview Ever
Reasons why they were terrible interviews:
1. Irrelevant to the job description.
2. Different participants were asked different questions.
3. Interviews were short.
4. Unnecessary information was emphasised.
5. Do not allow the candidate to ask questions during the interview.
6. Answers were not rated.
7. No notes were taken.
8. No multiple interviewers for each interview.
9. The interviewer was not trained.
10. Disrespectful approach to applicants.
11. Disrespectful approach to colleagues—applicants might not accept
the offer even if they get the job.
Source: Daphne Sobolev.
Work Samples

Blaine Landis, PhD

Work Samples
 Work Samples
• Work samples may be faithful reproductions of actual
assignments, sanitised simulations of critical
components, or the extreme abstraction (measures of
isolated skills used on the job).
• Examples:
• Pilots completing a series of required manoeuvres
• Bartenders being asked to describe their favourite drink
• Teachers designing lesson plans
• Work sample tests have face validity and consistently
predict job performance, but are time-consuming and
difficult to develop for certain jobs.
 Work Samples
• Evaluating work samples:
1. Job experts should choose work sample content,
specify desired performance, and provide at least a
preliminary scoring key or protocol.
2. Scorers should be trained to use the protocol: what to
look for and how to evaluate specific events or
product components.
3. The same performance or product should (if possible)
be evaluated by two or more independent observers;
impermissible differences in ratings should be defined
and reconciled. END
Situational Judgment Tests

Blaine Landis, PhD

Situational Judgment Tests
 Situational Judgment Tests
• Situational judgments are low
fidelity simulations of important
work tasks.
• Typically, the situational dilemmas
are related to core job
competencies, such as responding
to irate customers for service jobs.
• Situational judgment tests predict
job performance above and
beyond job experience, cognitive
ability, and personality (Chan & N.
Schmitt, 2002).
• However, the success of
situational judgment inventories
depends on how well they’re
constructed.
Example item from the situational
judgment portion of the FBI
Special Agent Selection Process:
You are shopping when you notice a
man robbing the store. What would
you do?
a. Leave the store as quickly as
possible and call the police.
b. Try to apprehend the robber
yourself.
c. Follow the man and call the police
as soon as he appears settled
somewhere.
d. Nothing, as you do not wish to get
involved in the matter.
Assessment Centres

Blaine Landis, PhD

Assessment Centres
 Assessment Centres
• Most assessment centres are organisation-specific.
• Assessment centres combine multiple forms of assessment and assess
multiple attributes believed to be relevant for success on the job.
• Examples:
• In-basket exercises
• Stress tolerance tests
• Group exercises
• Role plays
• Business decisions and delegations
• Qualities assessed by assessment centres:
• Analytical skills
• Judgment
• Tolerance for stress
• Persuasiveness/sales ability
 Assessment Centres
• Assessment centres tend to predict job performance, but also to be time-
consuming and expensive to run.
• Predictive validity of assessment centres varies:
• Prediction is more accurate when more kinds of assessments are included
(multiple samples of work-related behaviour and multiple assessments of the
same constructs).
• Prediction is more accurate when peer evaluations are included.
• The assessor’s background matters—psychologists are more valid than
managers.
• Although assessment centres tend to produce ratings on many different
dimensions (10 or more), often only about four account for the ability of the
assessment centre to predict performance.
• It is easier to predict ratings of potential for management progress than for
predictions of future performance.

END