Hiring and promoting great people is more challenging than ever. First, the mandate for organizational growth is causing a lot of pressure on HR professionals, staffing managers, vice presidents of talent acquisition to bring in good people to carry out business strategy. But the pressure is also causing organizations to make mistakes in choosing the wrong people, which results in high turnover, and unachieved business goals. It's a big problem in HR.

Secondly, technology has finally been applied to selection and hiring. There is new job board that the candidates can go to and the company can sign up to choose all these candidates. There are new applicants-tracking systems, candidate management systems, HR information system with the major focus on recruiting, all causing a lot of confusion about the best way to bring candidates from outside of the organization into the company and from lower level ranks to higher level positions.

Thirdly, there are many choices for types of contents to use to hire and promote good people. Organizations are offered more options of tests, like new personality test, compatibility test, skill test and new types of interview questions. All of these are coming together to cause a lot of confusion in what to do. So it is important to clarify some key themes on the functions of hiring and selections.

To begin with, we have to understand that hiring is a system to support the business. Business has to become the focus. For too long, HR has been almost an irrelevant support function within companies. But now companies are asking for more: HR people are not just to push paper or fill out forms. That doesn't add to the business. HR people are required to think more strategically. If they can have the skill to step up and be strategic, then HR becomes more relevant to the business and CEO would need their advice instead of keep ignoring them. It is a great opportunity to actually be relevant.

Another theme is to improve hiring process. In the past, cost was the key metric for staffing. The companies wanted to know what they are investing in people, and what they get return on their money. But when this was the case, there was so much pressure on cost that HR organizations were laying off recruiters. There is a hope if the internet technology, data base management tools and data warehousing tool are more widely used, the cost of hiring and selection will be greatly reduced. However, quality is the name of the game today. With quality people, it doesn't matter if one has spent a little more to have extra test or interview, because good people pay back with their performance and they stay with the company for much longer. Organizations are lean these days, having not as many people as in the past; in some companies, there are no mid-level managers any more. Every person has to contribute at a high level. Therefore, quality is what makes a big difference.

So let me share a model with you first to ground us in the focus for selection. It's the way DDI trains its consultants.

THE ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT MODEL OF DDI

First and foremost, one has to understand the business, for instance, what the business need is and what the role of the people would be in supporting that business. Then he can measure whether the "people strategy has been successful or not. Good HR people understand the business. There are even cases where the operation person has been moved over into HR, because that person understands the business. But the problem with it is that unless they are very good at balancing people issues, operation people tend to make decisions on the side of the business and care less about people, values and so on. So in selection, one has to ground what he is doing in business.

A clear understanding of the business can well define what people need to do and say in order to be successful, which is called the success profile. In the past, the job description describes what is now in the success profile, including the activity people need to do, the education, the potential and the knowledge they need to have. Through the 80s and 90s, it is realized that competency was important. Now, it has boiled down to motivation and personal characteristics. One might be smartest guy and the best consultant in the world, but if he doesn't like to travel, to meet new people, to make presentations, or even to be able to get out of the bed the next morning, he will fail miserably. So it is the combination of ability, motivation and attitude that make people successful. And depending on the business needs, the success profile varies greatly.

If HR people understand the success profile, then they can choose tools to gather information about people. All that we are doing with hiring and promotion processes nowadays is gathering information to make good decisions. And the trick is that some tools are better than others and different tools gather different parts of the information that we need. The information has to be useful and understandable, for it will be used to make decisions about placement, promotion, development and on-boarding.

This is the process that companies go through when they think about improving selection performance. Whenever a process is broken, it is probably because something in this chain of events is not working. For example, sometimes something is not communicated right, since the hiring manager or operation manager skip the interview guide and ask their own questions instead. Therefore, to do a proper job in staffing, one has to grasp the key elements in the area.

THREE FOCUSES AND KEY STAKEHOLDERS IN STAFFING

Accuracy

One shall remember that quality is the name of the game. If the information about the person is not accurate, then it's useless.

Efficiency

One needs to get the information quickly, because if much time is wasted in making a decision to hire a person, the competitor will give him the job offer first and the rest will lose out. So the number of days to fill the job is one of the key metrics. This number has increased in the last 2 to 3 years, because people are using too many tests, too much technology and delaying the decision.

Sustainability

Changing the selection practices is very hard for the companies, for it is like the culture change. The company has to train people in something new, teach people to interpret data differently and so on. It is very wasteful to change selection every year. A better strategy is putting the programme on the ground and then measuring and making small changes over time.

Therefore, for director of staffing and vice president of talent acquisition, the above three elements should be the objectives of the performance management plan.

The key customers and their business needs

First is the senior manager. What he wants is "Return-on-the-Investment (ROI), "Tell me the money I am spending is paying off. And if you promise me to come up with a shorter interviewing process, I want you to deliver on that. That's realization.

Second major stakeholder or major customer in staffing is the hiring manager. What does he want? Great candidates. He hates being given a whole batch of candidates and having to interview every one of them just to find them unfit for the job. The last thing he needs is waste of time. He longs for a process that allows him to not only gather information about the candidates, but also sell the job to them. So when the job is offered, good candidates will say yes. That's what the hiring managers want.

For the HR specialist, or the recruiter, they have all the pressure to fill the job quickly. Since they have to sort through so many candidates that really don't fit, what they desire is the tools that allow them automatically to go from many to few based on the requirements of the hiring managers. Also, they need efficiency in communicating with candidates and in data-processing to facilitate quick decisions.

The last stakeholder is the job candidate. First of all, he wants to feel valued and respected through the hiring process. Secondly, he expects to learn about the job along the way. Every single question he is asked during the process should telegraph to him what the job is going to be like. So they can decide accordingly whether this is the kind of job suitable for him. Try to keep the realistic job preview as accurate as possible. Thirdly, the job candidate anticipates the feedback. In fact, more and more candidates are demanding to learn about their actual performance in the process. Today, the job market is the seller's market where the candidate is in the driver's seat. When the company has few candidates that really fit, more have to be done to get the attention from the candidates. Especially in selecting executives, people that are going to make the biggest difference in the performance of the company, it is often difficult to get them to go through the assessment, for they don't want to spend their time on that. But giving people feedback is a way to keep them engaged, for if they don't get the job, they at least can learn something about themselves so as to improve in the future.

With all these key elements of the hiring process in mind, one will be able to identify the right kind of tool and process and even to create new methods. When staffing departments or HR recruiting departments are getting confused, they should try this framework in order to find where the biggest problem is, or in other word, what stakeholder is causing the problem. Then, the solution will be produced to fix that particular problem. Don't try to fix everything at once.

THE TOOLBOX TO IMPROVE SELECTION PROCESSES

The toolbox for HR professionals to improve selection processes may be boiled down to five things.

The first tool is the success profile itself. If we understand the business, then the success profile is the target that we try to hire towards. It has four main components of knowledge, experience, competency and personal characteristics. People fail in jobs most probably for one of these four reasons. Personal attribute is getting a lot of attention these days. As one moves into a more senior level, the personal characteristics become exposed more: they might get more arrogant, more reluctant to listen to other people, more volatile, and more likely to get mad too fast and shut everybody down unapproachable, because they don't have enough achievement motivation and enough drive at a senior level. So when developing people, the company needs a balanced approach. The worst thing is promoting the best technical person who actually doesn't have leadership skills. By doing this, the company will lose the technical contribution they made in their own job, and in the new job, they will destroy the team.

Second are the screening and testing tools. Screening is used for the administration of questions over the open web. Its business benefit is very clear: the screening system DDI installed in the GM saved 3 million dollars in the first year, because with this system DDI didn't need to fly everybody into Detroit for interviews; rather they could gather information over the open web. But there is security risk in the real identity of those who answer the questions. So, testing tools are reserved for checking on this. Procter & Gamble (P & G) invested heavily in screening and chose DDI to develop the world's best test engine. It ensures that no candidate gets the same test and that the target skill in the success profile gets measured much faster. Many of the things we are measuring with testing and screening are non-trainable. We are screening people out for those things that are very difficult to change. For example, we design the test tools to measure one's safety behaviour and integrity behaviour.

The third tool we have is interviewing. It is fairly well recognised that behaviour-based interviewing is the best way. In this kind of interview, the candidate is asked about what he did in the past, because past behaviour predicts future behaviour. DDI have designed behaviour-based interviews for ability, for motivation, and even for personality. One of the hot topics in hiring is engagement. The companies want to hire people that are engaged in their work. So one may find out in the interview about the candidate's engagement readiness.

The fourth tool is the simulation. Simulation is the job try-outs by picking the most critical element of the job and simulating that in the role-play, or business case, or presentation. Take for example the project of finding country managers for the UN. It turns out that good country mangers are very good at being interviewed by the media. So we developed a role play where the assessor played the role of a media reporter, asking different questions about how the environment was being polluted. The right response was to be authentic and open, yet to protect some of the things that woul be very damaging. This is what differentiates good people from great people.

The last tool is on-boarding tool. Usually when the new candidate starts their job, we give everyone the same on-boarding and won't follow them up until three months or six months later. This is a "mis-opportunity. As a matter of fact, through the selection, we already know the candidates and understand their strength and gaps. So, we can feed it back to them and treat the first interaction with the candidate as the performance management discussion. What do we try to achieve? Retention and performance. With the better on-boarding, people's development can be accelerated. It means that they can make the full contribution faster. A recent study shows that if people get the early on-boarding, they will be more individually focused, stay with the company longer, learn their job faster and perform it better. Think how prepared one is to learn when he gets a new job and how excited one is when he gets promoted. A person in this situation has so much energy; he is ready to pay attention to all the things about this job; he is eager to get all the cues to know how to perform at a high level quickly. We can take advantage of this opportunity and not leave it till it is too late.

In a word, the primary message in the presentation today is this: you can get better performance out of people, even more than the training department can by hiring a better person in the first place.

The author is the Senior Vice President of Selection Solutions, DDI. This article is adapted from the speech given by Dr. Scott Erker at the CEIBS Executive Forum on April 13, 2006, and has been reviewed and approved by the author.