Articles
Cultural fit – next level of recruiting
Tuesday, April 28th 2009
by Irina Ivan
Amazon.com often asks recruitment agencies to send over the candidates that other companies rejected.1 It is probably one of the most inventive practices related to recruitment and it should give HR professionals a lot to think about. The moment Amazon.com takes this move, most certainly it is not interested in attracting what others have thrown away, but it rather has the intuition of the flaws of today's recruitment process. A lot have been said about the drawbacks of the recruitment and although it has been agreed that recruiting criteria should include besides knowledge, experience and skills on the job, also behavioral traits and values, for the last 20-30 years companies (with few exceptions) have been hiring people using the same pattern: posting ads, screening CVs, interviewing, creating a shortlist, second interviewing, final hiring decision. And although staff turnover became one of the main challenges over the years, too little have changed in the way companies hire their people. In an article called "Crisis hiring yet again", David S. Cohen points out that when it comes to taking decisions related to their human capital, companies are always focusing on the needs they have for that specific moment, keeping long term strategies on hold: "Organizations are always trying to solve the crisis of the moment, and the areas of human capital and talent management are no exception. We hire people who look exceptional because of some urgent skill need, even when those golden-haloed angels don't fit the organization very well. Or we downsize and shed ourselves of people who do fit the organization when we no longer need to fill their roles... All of this means we're not thinking of the future; we're just plugging the leaks of the moment. We're exhibiting pattern of crisis manipulation to solve problems instead of looking for lasting and sustainable results according to a plan." There are four aspects to take into consideration for a complete hiring process: candidate's knowledge, skills, behavior and values. Traditionally, companies focus on finding people with as much knowledge and good skills as possible; they hire for the job and for a short term. Companies which also include in the classical cycle assessment of their candidates ‘behavior and values hire for the organization and on long term. Microsoft is one of the few companies that realized the importance of organizational culture fit from the early 80's. In its first years of existence, Microsoft's favorite recruiting method was the selection of brilliant fresh graduates of the elite universities, with no prior experience, and therefore no formed working habits or internalized organizational values. The recruiters' focus was not on the technical skills, but on the candidates' ability to think "out of the box". Questions like "How many times does the average person use the word "the" in a day?" were part of the interviewing routine at Microsoft and were meant to test the person's deductive reasoning, creative problem solving and composure. If the candidate was taking more than 30 seconds to think of an answer and then said he did not know, he flunked. Or a candidate could have been asked to describe the ideal TV remote in order to assess his way of breaking down the problem. All these ingenious elements of the hiring methods were grounded on the company's desire to hire a lot more than just an adequate employee. Toby Marshall, one of the Australia's leading recruiters, finds it amazing that most companies hire on skill and fire on fit. The estimated cost of hiring a wrong person amounts to fifteen times an employee's base salary in hard costs and productivity loss. In spite of this, the core of the recruiting process has been, for decades, and still is the resume whose reliability was often questioned when it comes to offering info about the candidate's personality. A resume can only provide info on the candidate's fit with the job, "speaking" about his skills, knowledge, experience, while the organizational fit is left uncovered. Within a study conducted by M.J. Neeley School of Business and Auburn University, 244 recruiters were asked to make inferences on the candidates' personality based on their resumes, which were afterwards compared with the candidates' Big Five personality scores. It was shown that recruiters' inferences lacked validity and were objectively wrong. Furthermore, the study indicated that the recruiters' conclusions about the candidates' personality predicted their hiring preferences. Failure in hiring comes from using a tool to assess the less problematic people's traits. Skills on the job are easy to acquire through learning and their improvement is a matter of days or months, while behavior and skills are imprinted in the "professional" DNA and are very hard to change. Simpler said, job fit can be easy developed, while organizational fit is almost impossible to build. Jay Jordan, the CEO of Jordan company, speaks in "Who: The A method for Hiring" book about the experience of hiring a person who looked great on the paper, but failed in the role assigned to him. He recalls that on the termination day, the employee asked his feedback, and although he wanted to avoid offending him, finally he could not stop himself saying: "Look, I hired your resume. But unfortunately, what I got was you!". Jim Collins, author of „Good to great" said in its book that „the most important decisions that businesspeople make are not WHAT decisions, but WHO decisions". Successful WHO decisions start with taking the right hiring decisions, which implies going beyond the rooted formula of screening resumes, followed by interviews filled with standard questions or a friendly chat. Success of hiring does not come from matching job descriptions and profiles with resumes, but from getting an insight of what drives people at work and matching people's expectations with what the organization has to offer. _____________________________ 1 Jean V. Dickson, Creativity and the HR Department: Are Your HR Hiring Policies Strangling Your Company's Chances of Economic Survival?, http://www.jvdcreativity.com/article2.htm
Resources:
Jean V. Dickson, Creativity and the HR Department: Are Your HR Hiring Policies Strangling Your Company's Chances of Economic Survival?, http://www.jvdcreativity.com/article2.htm Geoff Smart and Randy Street, Who: The A method for Hiring (abstract), http://www.whothebook.com/files/who_ch1.pdf Christopher A. Bartlett, Microsoft: Competing on Talent (A), Harvard Business School (2001). Michael S. Cole, Hubert S. Field, William F. Giles, Stanley G. Harris, Recruiters' Inferences of Applicant Personality Based on Resume Screening: Do Paper People have a Personality? (2009), http://www.springerlink.com/content/233213n622535707/ Bruce Watt, How to hire for cultural fit, http://www.humanresourcesmagazine.com.au/articles/E6/0C02DBE6.asp?Type=60&Category=880 David S. Cohen, Crisis hiring yet again, http://www.workplace-mag.com/Crisis-hiring-yet-again.html How to fish better (CCH January 2006), http://www.abacusrecruit.com.au/abacus-in-the-media/37-abacus-media/64-how-to-fish-better
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