Traditional job interviews are flawed yet, no one gets a job without one… Why? Kevin Green finds out
Mountains of research over decades has shown that interviews are poor predictors of in-job performance. In fact, the statistics are so bad around interviewing that Malcom Gladwell has argued that once you’ve removed irrelevant CVs you’d do better choosing blind i.e. interviewing is not much better than random at predicting who would be best for a role.
There are a number of reasons why interviews don’t work. The first is bias. We all have a biological preference to appoint people like ourselves. People like to hire people like them. Stanford Professor Rob Sutton calls this homosocial reproduction. When we meet someone who speaks our language, shares our ideas and has similar background and values to us we are predisposed to think they are as good as we are. We gravitate towards similarity. The biggest bias of all is about ourselves: we tend to think we’re great judges of character. The big news is we’re all wrong.
The second problem with interviews is they don’t test the candidate at anything other than whether they are good at interviews. Instead of evaluating candidates to see what skills, competences and abilities they have, most interviews are made up of fact checking and generic questions for which the answers can be rehearsed. Few interviewers ask questions that illuminate how the candidates think or make decisions. Most interview questions prompt universally agreed responses.
So, what does work when selecting which person to appoint? There is clear evidence that testing candidates with activity as close as possible to the real job improves our ability to make better selection decisions. We need to design the assessment based on activity that person appointed will actual need to perform on a daily basis. For a leadership role, for example, you could test how they would make a difficult decision, chair a team meeting, give feedback to a direct report and communicate to the whole organisation. Seeing people perform these real-life tasks radically improves the validity of subsequent hiring decisions. If at all possible I recommend ‘try before you buy’ with graduate roles or if you have lots of roles at the same level, bring in more people than you need and then you can observe them in real world situations. Hiring people because of real on the job performance rather than a subjective interview is a the way forward.
Thirdly, collaborative hiring or involving a range of people in the selection process also improves the validity of hiring decisions. Utilising a range of people with different roles and values allows for a variety of perspectives to be taken into account. This process also helps counter unconscious bias.
Involving people who will work with the role holder, be they prospective peers, team members and others who have roles that interface is incredible informative and ultimately improves hiring decision making.
The cost of getting it wrong
The data is very clear that we all get hiring decisions wrong. The key is to avoid making regular mistakes and obvious pitfalls. In research conducted by the Recruitment & Employment Confederation, over 85% of HR leaders admitted they had made a hiring mistake in the last year. What is even more worrying, over 33% of the same audience also said that they didn’t believe that it had cost the business anything. This highlight one of the core issues with recruitment; leaders and managers don’t understand the significant cost of poor hiring decisions. Recruitment is seen by many as a transitional, easy-to-do process or add-on to their core job rather than being something that should be taken seriously. As a leader, hiring talent should be one of their most critical tasks and should be done professionally and effectively. The importance of getting the right people in the business is recognised but the critical significance of your employer brand, candidate experience and an effective selection process are still very much undervalued.
In exploring the cost of hiring mistakes, the REC report stated that employers recognised, when directly asked, that poor hires have a negative impact on staff morale, performance and productivity. They also recognised that the direct costs of advertising, training and any agency fees were often being repeated. They estimated the cost of getting a middle manager or professional (£42,000 salary) hire wrong was over £132,000. That’s a ratio of over three times the salary cost. If you identify the number of poor hires in your organisation in any one year (the average is believed to be about 20%) and multiply that by three times their respective salaries, you will see that the cost of getting recruitment wrong is very high. In a business that hires just 200 people per year, and by applying the 20% failure rate and the average cost, the expense of getting recruitment wrong could exceed £5.2million.
This of course also excludes all the great candidates that didn’t apply, dropped out of the process or weren’t selected. This opportunity cost is difficult to quantify, but even just using the transaction calculation above, you can see how important it is to ensure that talent attraction, selection and recruitment process is effective. This should be recognised as a critical, measured, reviewed, tested and invested business process.
Kevin Green, is Former CEO of the Recruitment & Employment Confederation and Former HR Director of Royal Mail. He is Author of Competitive People Strategy: how to attract, develop and retain the staff you need for business success, published by Kogan Page.
