Successful Recruitment

How to Recruit the Right People For Your Business

Stephen Amos

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781948580649
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Successful Recruitment provides the practical guidance and knowledge needed to recruit the right people, avoiding the many pitfalls that can arise in the recruitment process.

It begins by identifying why recruitment is so often unsuccessful, leading to time, money, and energy being wasted in recruiting people who lack the attributes required to succeed in your organization. It then sets out how to put in place an effective recruitment process, by: Planning the process; Laying firm foundations, ensuring that job descriptions, person specifications, and application forms are fit for purpose; Ensuring that advertising is targeted to reach the right applicants; Sifting and shortlisting to ensure that the right candidates are selected for interview; Developing the knowledge, skills and processes to ensure that interviews enable you to accurately assess the candidate's ability to do the job; Effectively utilizing other assessment methods alongside the interview; Concluding the process properly and ensuring that the right candidate is appointed; Effectively inducting the successful candidate into your organization.

The author pays particular attention to the recruitment interview, explaining three different approaches to interviewing and the key skills required to conduct an effective interview, as well as considers some of the specific issues involved in recruiting internationally. The book concludes by considering the future trends and innovations which will affect how recruiting is handled over the next decade.

CHAPTER 1

Planning Recruitment

This chapter covers the importance of planning; including three approaches to interviewing: Behavior Description Interviewing, Model Answer-Based Interviewing, and Strengths-Based Interviewing. It also considers other assessment methods to use alongside the interview.

As I have highlighted in the Introduction, recruitment campaigns are often less successful than they should be. All too often organizations end up hiring the wrong person, for the wrong reasons, and end up spending time and money on managing a poor performer, instead of spending it on developing a talented new employee.

Like most things that go wrong, this is usually down to inadequate planning. All too often the plan for a recruitment campaign is presented as:

1. Write a job description
2. Advertise
3. Shortlist
4. Interview
5. Appoint

Looks simple, doesn’t it? And for a busy executive, simple is tempting. But in reality, this superficial approach to planning recruitment leads to poor decisions being made, at each stage of the process, and ultimately the wrong people being hired.

To recruit effectively, we need to think deeply about each stage of the process. We also need to plan the process holistically, so that each stage flows naturally into the next. I’ve encountered organizations where no thought is given to how interviews are to be structured, and what questions are to be asked, until the day before they take place. The risk of this last minute planning is that we fall back on the approaches we have always used—even if evidence suggests they have not been effective! The most common outcome of this is hiring candidates on the basis of their experience, because that is easy to test at interview, rather than their potential, which is much harder to test.

If interviews are to be effective, then we need to plan our approach to them right at the start of the recruitment campaign. We also need to recognize that an interview is not always the best way to test candidates’ full range of abilities. Indeed, relying on evidence from interviews alone often leads to poor recruitment decisions, because panels are seduced by candidates who talk persuasively and present themselves well. Sometimes there is little substance behind these positive first impressions—something it would be useful to identify before making the appointment.

So we’re going to start by considering three approaches you can take to conducting the interview, then identify the other selection methods you may wish to use alongside the interview. By planning ahead, and putting the right combination of processes in place, you give yourself the best chance of recruiting a candidate who will do a great job for your business.

Approaches to Interviewing

Three approaches to interviewing are:

• Behavior Description Interviewing
• Model Answer-Based Interviewing
• Strengths-Based Interviewing

Some organizations stick rigidly to one of these approaches, but over recent years it has become increasingly common to use a blended approach, combining these different approaches together in order to gain a full picture of the applicant’s suitability for the job.

Behavior Description Interviewing

Behavior Description Interviewing is based on the principle that the best guide to how someone will behave in the future is how they have behaved in the past. It is also sometimes known as

Evidence-based interviewing—because it involves obtaining evidence of what people have done.

Or

Competency-based interviewing—because it is used to test the applicant’s competence to do the job, often by asking questions derived from the organization’s competency framework.

The job interview is sometimes described as having been “born” in 1921, when Thomas Edison developed a standardized list of questions to ask job applicants. The list of 150 questions included:

• Where do we import cork from?
• How is sulfuric acid made?
• Who was Hannibal?

The questions were designed to test applicants’ levels of knowledge and education. While they are very different from the questions we would ask candidates today, the approach of asking the same set of questions to all applicants provided the origins of today’s recruitment interview.

The following year business psychologist H. L. Hollingsworth studied the rankings given to candidates applying for positions in the army. Several officers interviewed the same applicants, but Hollingsworth’s study revealed wide variations in their assessments. This was due to each interviewer adopting their own approach, with no consistency or standardization.

In response to such studies recruiters began adding more structure to interviews. Questions were drawn up in advance, so that each interviewer would ask the same set of questions to each interviewee. The results of this were greater consistency of approach and improved accuracy of results.

Job descriptions started to be used to clarify what successful applicants for a post would be required to do. One study revealed that managers assessing candidates against job descriptions were less likely to be influenced by irrelevant details, than managers assessing candidates in a less structured way.

In 1980 Latham, Saari, Pursell, and Campion developed the approach which became known as critical incident or situational interviewing. This involved describing a scenario to a candidate, then asking them questions to identify how they would respond. Interviewers were ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Abstract
• Contents
• Introduction
• 01_Chapter 1
• 02_Chapter 2
• 03_Chapter 3
• 04_Chapter 4
• 05_Chapter 5
• 06_Chapter 6
• 07_Chapter 7
• 08_Chapter 8
• 09_Chapter 9
• 10_Chapter 10
• 11_Chapter 11
• 12_Chapter 12
• 13_Conclusion
• 15_Appendix
• 14_Bibliography
• 16_ATA
• 17_Index
• 18_Adpage