in addition to ensuring that the selection tools that you utilize have comparable pass rates for minority and majority group candidates.

Posted by  TraceyTafero, Ph.D.

The people you hire into your organization shape the company and drive the success of your business.  Hiring the right people into the right jobs can provide a tremendous amount of benefits to your organization, including improved business decisions, improved quality of products and services, increased levels of customer satisfaction and greater levels of employee retention -- just to name a few.  When it comes down to it, every single decision or output from your company starts with the decisions and actions of the people within your organization.

So, what better to focus on in the New Year than your hiring practices?  The following are a few tips to improve your hiring practices in the New Year:

·         Ensure Job Relevance- Ensure that your hiring tools are aligned with the competencies necessary for effective performance in the target positions.  Designing an effective hiring system should begin with a job analysis to determine what knowledge, skills, and abilities are most important for successful performance for the target position.

·         Incorporate Selection Tools that are the Most Predictive- Once you’ve determined what the most important competencies are for the target position, incorporate selection tools and methods that measure those competencies and have a proven track record in predicting actual job performance.  There are a number of different selection methods that you can incorporate to measure important competencies for a target role, including online testing or assessments, job simulations, in-basket exercises, and behaviorally based interviews, just to name a few.

·         Streamline your Selection Process- Look for steps in your selection process that may be redundant and not providing extra value and streamline them.  It’s helpful to take step back and look at the entire selection process in terms of what competencies you’re measuring within each step and across the entire selection process.  While it is often helpful to measure critical competencies multiple times in your selection process, sometimes there are redundancies in measurement that don’t provide extra value.

·         Improve your Interviewing Practices- Your interviewing practices are an ideal place to focus on improvement.  You can make a broad-based impact on hiring across your organization by tightening up your interviewing practices and providing behaviorally-based interviewer training to those conducting interviews within your company.

·         Create a Positive Candidate Experience- Take a look at your selection process from the viewpoint of a candidate.  Is the process a positive experience for your candidates and are they coming away with a favorable impression of your company regardless of whether or not they are hired?

·         Ensure Legal Defensibility- Ensure that all steps in your selection process are in compliance with legal guidelines and are fair in terms of providing equal opportunities for all candidates.  While this is an area that you should evaluate regularly, the turn of the New Year is a good time to do a review of the legal defensibility of your hiring practices.  Following the tips provided in a few of the bullet points in this blog will help in terms of providing legal defensibility, in addition to ensuring that the selection tools that you utilize have comparable pass rates for minority and majority group candidates.