Text Box: Text Box: In an opinion piece published in his online newsletter, “Just my E-pinion,” Bob Brady discusses the observation that we often “hire in haste, regret at leisure.” As the founder of Business & Legal Reports, Inc., and its online site, BLR.com, Bob has had plenty of personal experience on which to reflect and has heard from hundreds of businesses on this topic over the last 40 years. He reflects on the maxim “hire people for what they know” and “fire them for who they are.” He says, “Getting a fix on ‘who people are’ is the hallmark of an HR professional.” Reading this, I began to get excited. I thought, “He really gets it!” Then came the summary page, where he lists eight things he does in the interview to “create scenarios that look for evidence of ‘life skills.’” Bob, it’s just not that easy! All of the things research has shown about the predictive shortcomings of interviews (14 percent predictive validity, one-in-eight chance of catching a candidate’s lie or error of fact, decisions made in less than five minutes…) offer little hope we can overcome those shortcomings with a simple shift of focus to looking for “evidence of life skills.” If we’re going to find out Text Box: Quick to Hire? Getting it Right Is Just Not that Easy — opinion Text Box: No matter how much data accumulates demonstrating the many shortcomings of the hiring interview process, we persist in trying to rely on interviews to improve our hiring success. By now, we should know better and devote our resources to something actually likely to work. Anything but more interviews! —Editor Text Box: “who they are” in any sense predictive of future job success, Harvard’s research makes it clear, we need to measure job fit. And it’s not that easy. The legal and ethical considerations of the current employment scene also require us to do it with measures that are both reliable and valid. The difficulty of the task might be reflected in how often we ask the relevant questions in seeking guidance. A Google search of “job fit” yielded 161,000,000 hits. Add “assessment” and you reduce the field to 33,000,000. When you add “online,” you cut the number by about half. Add “reliability” or “validity,” and you’re down to about 2 percent of the original result, and all the search engine tells you is that they used the words (a “lip service” measure)! This process seems to indicate there’s a lot of interest in the topic, in measuring it and doing it easily (online) but a small percentage of ways to do it legally, ethically and accurately. If you’ve read this newsletter in the past, obviously we have our own biases about how it can be done without compromising those legal/ethical/accuracy standards: Text Box: Find job-fit measures built on research with large, real-world samples; make sure they meet the Department of Labor’s guidelines on validity and reliability; and make sure they comply with standards for non-discriminatory effect. Once you have met those critical guidelines, you can look at ease of administration and analysis; time factors in reporting results; cost and expected returns on investment over time; and evidence they have worked for other users in similar situations. Finally, look at the organization that is producing and supporting the instruments. Do they have a track record? Are they likely to be around to support you next year? Are they actively carrying out research to improve and expand the capabilities of their products? If they operate online, what’s their documented uptime? Do they have sufficient bandwidth to support their workload? Finally, look at their professional associations and award history. Do they belong to the Association of Test Publishers? Do their measures pass peer review standards of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology? Does it seem like a lot to consider? Remember, we warned you, “It’s just not that easy” — but it’s worth it! —John W. Howard, Ph.D. Text Box: In this issue: Better Hiring Warning on Employee Referral Programs Tracking Turnover and Better Alternatives Medical Lab/Strategic Hiring The Importance of Hiring

Volume 4, Issue  3

Edited by John W. Howard, Ph.D.                                                              Annual Subscription Rate  $ 36.00

 ©2006, Performance Resources, LLC,  and Profiles International
Text Box: Just When You Thought it was Safe EEOC has issued a new compliance manual that specifically warns that word-of-mouth recruiting (read: Employee Referral Programs) “may generate applicant pools that do not reflect diversity in the labor market.” With this new guidance and expected focus of enforcement programs, you might look closely at your own referral programs and applicant tracking data.

Tracking Turnover — An Insufficient Metric — and Some Alternatives

Volume 4, Issue 3
Text Box: First-year failures have declined from their base rate of 33 percent to only 15 percent in FY 2005...