Choosing the right people: Selection R. Anthony Turner, MBA, PhD Email me: anthony.turner@faculty.hult.edu Schedule a meeting: prof-turner.com/meet Keep in touch: prof-turner.com/linkedin
Talent Management
BHV6046
The great Greenwood Hotel debate • Team 1; Team 4; Team 7: Prepare a case for why Jane
should be hired and not the other two candidates; select a spokesperson to present it to ‘the hiring committee’.
• Team 2; Team 5; Team 8: Prepare a case for why Matthew should be hired and not the other two candidates; select a spokesperson to present it to ‘the hiring committee’.
• Team 3; Team 6; Team 9: Prepare a case for why Laura should be hired and not the other two candidates; select a spokesperson to present it to ‘the hiring committee’.
You have 7.5 minutes. Not just WHY your candidate but WHY NOT the others…
Bad selection decisions: Bad for all The employee • Poor fit makes it difficult for employees to perform their roles
well. Their reputation and their mental health may be impacted. They may have relocated or uprooted their family for no reason.
The company • If people cannot perform their roles well, it is more difficult
for the organization to carry out its strategic plans. This erodes an important source of competitive advantage.
• Substantial costs to recruit, hire, and train people are wasted when they quit or are fired. Productivity also is lost.
• When a company hires someone they knew or should have known poses a substantial risk and that person commits harm, the company is legally liable for it. This is ‘negligent hiring’.
You • When you make bad hiring decisions, others notice…
Selection: Finding the best ‘fit’ Depending on the job or organization, one or more of these might be the focal fit criterion
® Person-job fit – match between what a candidate can do and the demands of the job and between a candidate’s desires and the job’s attributes and rewards.
® Person–group fit – match between a candidate and potential work group and supervisor.
® Personality-job fit – match between a candidate’s personality and the characteristics of a job.
® Ability-job fit – match between a candidate’s physical and intellectual skills and the skills required in the job.
® Person-organization fit – match between a candidate’s personality and attitudes and the structure and culture of the organization.
Selection process The process of choosing the person who fits… Depending on organizational circumstances, steps may not be followed sequentially, or some parts may be omitted.
Preliminary screening Applications and resumes: Applicants’ information is compared to job specifications to weed out clearly unqualified applicants.
Information of applicants who appear to be qualified is later verified to detect fictitious or misleading information and protect the organization against negligent hiring claims.
Pre-employment inquiries Pre-employment inquiries – information requested on job applications and during interviews must be non-discriminatory.
1. Every question must be relevant to the job at hand. 2. General questions should be asked of all applicants and not just
some.
Questions that might otherwise be construed as discriminatory can be asked only if employers can demonstrate they are job related (Bona Fide Occupational Qualifications: BFOQs).
How well prepared are you to stay out of trouble
with preemployment inquiries?
Compete with your classmates answering the quiz on Kahoot.
Common selection devices
• Application Form – Avoid irrelevant questions
• Interviews – Biographical interviews (what’s your history?) – Behavioral interviews (how did you?) – Situational interviews (how would you?)
To assess applicants for a fit, companies may use any of these devices or a combination of them:
Selection interviews
– Interviews are generally the most heavily weighted selection devices, and, unless done very systematically and purposefully, are extremely unreliable indicators of future performance.
+ Allows candidates to learn about the job and organization.
+ Allows managers to assess factors about a candidate that cannot be obtained from other tests and to check accuracy of the application/resume.
Types of interviews ® Unstructured interview – interviewer has no preplanned questions or
sequence of topics. � extremely prevalent means of selection � least predictive of job performance � most susceptible to discrimination claims because it introduces the
most interviewer bias ® Semi-structured interview – interviewer follows a list of questions
but also asks unplanned questions. ® Structured interview – the most valid type of interview; all
candidates are asked all the same questions.
The unstructured interview: An analogy
If you were picking a player for your basketball team, and you had Candidate 1 shoot & dribble; Candidate 2 dribble & pass, Candidate 3 pass & play defense, and Candidate 4 rebound & pass and you then concluded that Candidate 1 was the best player for your team,
that’s the equivalent of unstructured interviews. This makes no sense because you won’t know the same information about all the candidates, so how could
you know who’s best? Yet managers all over the world do this every day.
Panel interviews ® Having multiple people interview a candidate can increase the
usefulness of the interview as a selection device because it introduces multiple raters, and if they agree you can have more confidence in the reliability of the conclusions drawn from it
® Panel interviews allow multiple people to interact with the candidate, which can be useful in judging organization or group fit
® Panel interviews are costly because they take several people away from their work tasks and can be very difficult to coordinate
® Panel interviews can be intimidating to candidates, especially young, inexperienced ones
Types of interview questions ® Closed-ended – requires a limited response (e.g., yes/no).
Appropriate for fixed aspects of the job. ® Open-ended – requires a detailed response. Appropriate for
determining abilities and motivation. ® Hypothetical – requires candidates to describe what they’d do
and say in different situations. Appropriate for assessing capabilities.
® Probing – requests clarification. Appropriate for improving interviewer’s understanding.
David, office manager at the Daily Gazette newspaper, was flabbergasted while talking with Amanda, the HR manager. He just discovered that he was the target of a lawsuit filed by an applicant who had not been selected. “All I did was make friendly inquiries about her children to break the ice. She seemed very receptive to talking about them and was really proud of her family. She even told me about every aspect of the difficult divorce she’d just experienced. She seemed to want to talk, so I let her. I thought I was merely setting the tone for an effective dialogue. I thought nothing of it when she told me that she needed a day care facility when she went to work. Here we are a year later, and she is claiming discrimination because she believes that a man would not have been asked questions about his children. There’s nothing to this lawsuit, is there, Amanda?”
But I Didn’t Mean
To!
Minicase
Common selection devices
• Employment Tests – Cognitive ability tests – Physical ability tests – Skills tests – Personality tests – Brain teasers
• Assessment Center – Work sample tests
• Online Checks – What does your social
media say about you?
• Application Form – Avoid irrelevant questions
• Interview – Biographical interviews – Behavioral interviews – Situational interviews – Structured interviews – Panel interviews
To assess applicants for a fit, companies may use any of these devices or a combination of them:
On your own: Social media scan
Go into incognito mode and search for
information about yourself online, using only the information
available on your resume
Better yet, pair up with someone else in the course, swap
resumes, and do this process for one
another
Employment tests ® Any test or selection procedure that is used as a basis for
employment decisions. ® Employment decisions
– Hiring and training – Promotion and demotion – Membership – Referral and retention – Licensing and certification – Transfer
® =
Employment tests ® Employment tests must meet two criteria:
– Valid • must measure the knowledge, skill, ability, trait, etc., that
it claims to measure. – Reliable
• scores must be consistent (similar) when taken by the same person more than once (test-retest reliability) and when more than one person grades/scores the test (inter- rater reliability).
Employment testing & the law In the USA, if the EEOC investigates a complaint about an employment test being discriminatory, the company must be able to prove the selection procedure is valid for that job.
Brain Teaser You are at the beach and are given a 3 gallon bucket and a 5 gallon bucket. I would like for you to measure out exactly 4 gallons of sand for me – no more and no less. You can accomplish this with the resources you’ve been given. Tell me how.
1. Fill 3 gallon bucket with sand 2. Pour those 3 gallons of sand into 5 gallon bucket 3. Fill 3 gallon bucket with sand 4. Pour sand from 3 gallon bucket into 5 gallon bucket until 5
gallon bucket is full, which will leave 1 gallon of sand remaining in 3 gallon bucket
5. Empty 5 gallon bucket back onto the beach 6. Pour the 1 gallon of sand remaining in 3 gallon bucket into 5
gallon bucket 7. Fill 3 gallon bucket with sand 8. Pour into the 5 gallon bucket, joining the 1 gallon of sand
already there… 3+1 = 4 gallons of sand
Comparison of old and new selection devices
Checklist or portfolio? ® Multiple-hurdle selection model (checklist approach)
� Requires applicants pass a selection device to go to the next test. Saves money because applicants who don’t clear a hurdle are dropped from further consideration. A candidate must ‘check all the boxes’ to be hired.
® Compensatory selection model (portfolio approach) � Allows applicants to fall short on one selection device (e.g.,
has 2 years of experience instead of 3 or performs poorly on one skill test) but make up for that by doing well on other selection devices. A candidate may be hired if, all things considered, they are thought to be the best person for the job.
Written tests
® Skills tests – measure ability to apply a specific knowledge set.
® Personality tests – measure psychological traits or characteristics to determine suitability for a specific job.
® Interest tests – measure intellectual curiosity and motivation in the specific field of the job.
® Cognitive ability tests – assess intelligence or aptitude for a specific job.
® Honesty/integrity tests – assess truthfulness; can be written or, in some lines of work, a polygraph.
Physical tests
To ensure applicants can physically perform tasks defined in job specifications and descriptions.
Physical skills tests – Work samples – Assessment centers – Simulations
Physical exams – must be directly related to job functions.
Illegal employment tests Always illegal ® Genetic testing – Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act
(GINA) protects people from discrimination by health insurers and employers based on their DNA information.
Sometimes illegal ® Polygraph tests – Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA)
makes it illegal to use a polygraph but has two exceptions. 1. Armored car services 2. Dispensing controlled substances
® Drug testing –– For workplace safety and productivity drug tests are legal so long as they are administered universally, systematically, or randomly. They cannot be administered in a targeted manner.
Background checks Before extending an offer, you will want to validate information provided by the candidate and minimize the risk of negligent hiring, especially in high risk positions. You perform a background check.
This might include any or all the following: � Reference check [most common] � Credit check � Criminal background check � Web searches
Problems to avoid during selection
• Rushing (think of Sheila missing out on the great candidate in the second mini case)
• Stereotyping • “Like me” syndrome • Halo and horn effects • Premature selection (satisficing – accepting the first
solution that we deem “good enough”)
Final hiring decision • Compare candidates’ qualifications and consider diversity. • Consider if they truly desire the job and have been honest. • Assess person-organization fit via a variety of organization
members’ impressions. • Contact the best candidate and offer the job. • If the candidate refuses or accepts but soon leaves, consider
offering the job to the next-best (‘second choice’) candidate. • Go through a rigorous onboarding procedure to ensure compliance
with HR laws, equip the new employee with necessary knowledge and resources, and begin the socialization process.
Passing organizational culture to new hires
Culture is, by definition, passed on from one generation to the next. In an organizational context, that means it is passed on from existing employees to new employees. There are three essential mechanisms through which this occurs: • Selection – Identify and hire individuals who will fit with the
culture. • Modeling – Senior executives establish and communicate the
norms of the organization. • Socialization – Formal and informal mechanisms through which
newbies are ‘taught the way things are around here…’
Onboarding: Training & socialization options
• Formal vs. informal (or both) – E.g., formal training programs vs. learning from
coworkers • Individual vs. collective (or both)
– E.g., on the job vs. group boot camp • Fixed vs. variable
– E.g., fixed schedule of stages vs. advancement when one is “ready”
• Serial vs. random – E.g., role models training the newcomer vs. no assigned
role models • Investiture vs. divestiture
– Confirming views and qualifications within the newcomer vs. stripping them away
Team TM Workproduct Portfolio • Revisit the instructions in myCourses and ensure you
understand everything!
• You should be working on: – Culture Plan – Attraction Plan – Selection and Onboarding Plan – Motivation and Engagement Plan [Later] – Executive Summary [Later]
