Your Employee Selection Process
Can Enhance Employee Motivation

A robust employee selection process plays a critical role in building an accountable workplace that will inspire and motivate employees. Yet this critical function is often neglected or given scant attention. But your employee selection process is an essential component, not only with growth, but to the continued health and effectiveness of your firm.

When you think about it, none of us would probably buy a car without a careful review of features and options, examination of the warranty and dealer support, and probably a test drive. Likewise, we would be careful before we invested in a copier, let alone a big piece of equipment for our business, without careful review. Will it perform as expected? What’s the cost/benefit relationship? How much maintenance will it require?

Yet, when it comes to the employee selection process and hiring decisions – a relatively big investment – most hiring managers do not do the due diligence required. In fact, you may be surprised to learn that:

• 63% of all hiring decisions are made in the first 4.3 minutes of the interview.
• Two out of three new hires will disappoint the hiring manager in the first year.
• A vast majority of job candidates – 95% – say they would “exaggerate” to get a job.
• Two-thirds of employees say they would rather work somewhere else.
• One out of three businesses will be sued this year over an employment issue

These statistics from a Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) survey are sobering to say the least. What they suggest is that hiring decisions are often made in haste through a poorly designed employee selection process and with incomplete or incorrect information.

Get the Right People on Your Team

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, says that leading companies focus first on finding the right people and second on strategy. “We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy,” Collins writes. “We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus and the right people in the right seats – and then they figured out where to drive it.”

But getting the right people is not as easy as it sounds. Most employee selection processes are not fine-tuned enough to differentiate star performers from those who may be less than stellar. Think about it, with your current tools and methods, could you spot the $5M sales person from the $50K salesperson? Would it make a difference in your business if you could?

Issues With Traditional Employee Selection Processes

Several factors diminish the success rate of traditional hiring practices. Resumes often contain false information and leave out facts that would help the hiring manager make good decisions. Business references are of marginal value because most employers won’t provide much information beyond confirming that the person was an employee and verifying salary.

So, the most widely used and influential tool in the employee election process and in hiring and promotion decisions is the personal interview. Studies by Profiles International, Inc., however, peg the correlation between the ability to do well in an interview and to deliver good results on the job at only 14%. Companies that have wearily accepted these practices are on a rocky ride to high turnover, rampant absenteeism, and employees that fail on the job.

Don’t Give Up! Consider Using Employee Assessment Tools

Of the two areas generally measured in the job interview, competency and compatibility, most organizations focus on competency, the skills to perform the work. But for an employee to work well, they must:

1. Be able to perform the work required in the job;
2. Want to perform the work; and
3. Be able to perform the work in the context of the organization’s culture and value system.

If used to assess only potential job skills, the personal interview yields a success rate, as we saw above, of only 14%. Interestingly, if you add background checks, the success rate improves to 26%. However, this means only one of every four hires will likely be successful. If you also assess behavioral traits, the hiring success rate improves to 38%. When both thinking abilities and behavioral traits are assessed, the right people “get on the bus” 54% of the time. Add an assessment of occupational interests, and the results improve to 66%.

The most impressive results are achieved when integrated assessments are used. These twenty-first century instruments measure behavior traits, thinking, occupational interests, and “job match”, that is, the “fit” for the job including competency and compatibility. Data for the prospective recruit can be compared to employees in the same working environment who are performing comparable duties is an exemplary manner.

Integrated assessment tools get the right people “on the bus” more than 75% of the time. In addition, use of these assessment tools can help to pinpoint development needs, training needs and behavioral traits – all of which can provide a roadmap for managers as they seek to motivate individuals in their group.

Job Match Rules

In a well-documented study by the Harvard Business Review, job match was proven by far to be the most reliable predictor of success on the job. The study considered many factors, including the age, race, education, and experience of approximately 300,000 subjects. The study evaluated their job performance and found no statistical differences, except in the area of job match. The HBR conclusion: “It’s not experience that counts or college degrees or other accepted factors; success hinges on a fit with the job.”

Recent research has shown that organizations that use validated selection assessments as a part of their employee selection process outperform other businesses, experience lower turnover, and report four times the market to book value. Clearly, an essential ingredient for making decisions about hiring and promoting people has been missing from the average employee selection process. The use of assessments has become essential to employers who:

• Want to put the right people into the right jobs;
• Provide employees with effective training and development;
• Want to establish a coaching model to improve overall performance
• Help their managers to become more effective; and
• Promote people into positions where they will succeed.

The brain-behavior connection to employee motivation

Engage Employees to Foster Motivation