You've likely heard the story about the boss pleading with his/her recruiters that the company needs to do a better job at recruiting and hiring round pegs to fill round holes. This analogy hangs right up there with putting the right people on the bus, made famous by Jim Collins in his book "Good to Great." Regardless of how a manager tells the story, the message is the same: hiring the right people the first time is gaining more importance.
Let's take a look at how companies can do a better job at identifying and hiring the "round pegs," the best candidates and then making sure they fit the "round holes," the job.
Before we start talking about resumes, interviews, personality tests, and hiring, the first thing that goes through my mind is this: are you sure the hole you want to fill is round? What if you're hiring a square peg and modified the hole, the hole being the job? Could this square peg you're hiring in a square hole perform the functions of the job as well, if not better than the round peg? In other words, is the hole really round? Or is it just that only round pegs have filled the position before and managers merely made the assumption when hiring that only round pegs could do the job?“
Lesson #1: Before hiring round pegs, you need to first be sure the hole needs to be round. You can do this by completing a job analysis to identify the essential functions of the job, the responsibilities of the people filling the position, and the skills and behaviors required to fulfill these responsibilities. To make the job analysis functional, managers hiring new employees must then identify how to measure performance - what are the expectations of the round peg and how well is it functioning?
For the purpose of this column, let's say we know for certain that the hole is round and therefore when hiring only round pegs will fit properly.
You advertise for the position and you are overwhelmed with pegs - you have big pegs and little pegs, square pegs and oblong pegs, rectangular pegs and triangular pegs. You even have a few rhomboidal
and octagonal pegs. And thankfully, a number of round pegs apply too.
Lesson #2: After completing the job analysis and determining the hole really is round the next step in the process is to begin identifying the round pegs. You begin the sifting process of hiring. Reading their resumes eliminates a few right away. Calling several more on the phone eliminates others.
This part of the process – identifying the pegs that don't fit – is called screening. Typically hiring screening tools include observation, resumes or job applications, education, work history and so on. The initial phone or face-to-face interview also is considered a screening tool or assessment.
This screening phase for many companies is becoming very costly and ineffective. The job market is so tight for many positions that hiring companies need to spread a wide net to find enough pegs to fill all
the holes. But when a company is looking specifically for a round peg, much time and resources are wasted sifting through all the non-round pegs who apply.
In search of a better system to screen, companies are now using sophisticated hiring "sieves" to separate out the round pegs from the non-round ones. (A sieve separates wanted/desired elements from unwanted material - you know draining the water from the spaghetti, coins from the sand, and for our purposes, weeding out the non-round pegs.)
Advancements in technology and employee assessments offer easy-to-implement, cost-effective hiring screening solutions. Applicant processing systems in the past were complex and costly to implement,
therefore excluding small and mid-sized businesses. But hiring systems like Total Application Processing System (Total-APS) or HR Clues are now affordable for even micro-businesses and for companies looking to fill one or one hundred positions. Applicants apply by submitting a resume and responding to an online interview. Hiring companies can customize the questions specific to the job and company culture requirements. Each question is rated and weighted allowing managers to quickly differentiate the perfectly round pegs from the almost round pegs to the not-at-all round pegs with little or no time expended on their part. Prompt response and focused attention can then be directed to only the round pegs.
"Personality tests" can be an additional hiring screening tool. It is important to note at this point that not all personality tests are hiring screening tests nor are all hiring screening tests predictive of job performance and competence. For instance a hiring assessment like CandidClues is excellent at predicting a candidate's attitude toward dependability, honesty and hostile tendencies but is not useful at all at assessing teamwork, problem solving, drive or persistence. JobClues on the other hand is a very reliable personality and cognitive test for teamwork, conscientiousness, detail-orientation and more when used as a hiring screening tool. And while the Clues assessments provide an excellent hiring screening tool, they are not recommended for selection. I reserve my hiring selection assessment recommendations to Prevue (formerly know as TotalView) and ASSESS.
Whatever method is used for sifting out the non-round pegs – resume, interview, APS, personality test – you should now have only round pegs left in the candidate pool.
Where managers go from here depends on how exact the fit of the round peg must be into the round hole.
Lesson #3: Let's say the diameter of the round hole is 3.25 inches. For a manager, this means the individual who fills this position must have specific skills and abilities, the motivation to do the job, the
behavioral style to fit with the rest of the team, and values that fit with the culture. Translation: only round pegs with a diameter equal to or less than 3.25 will fit into the hole. At this point the question that managers must ask when hiring is "how exact does the fit need to be?" Will a 2.5 inch or 3.75 inch round peg suffice or are the dimensions critical too?
An individual’s motivation, behavioral style, values, personality traits determine the roundness of the peg. Cognitive skills and job competence affect the size of the peg. For example – you could have a
perfectly round peg that has the essential qualifications to fit the hole: It’s round. But if the hole requires a 3.25 inch peg, a peg measuring 5 inches may be over-qualified and not challenged by the job
responsibilities. The peg has too much of something while a 2 inch peg would need a lot of filler to make it work.
If close is good enough, then a structured behavioral interview and a screening assessment such as Clues may be predictive enough when hiring the best fitting round peg. But if the margin of error is small, then hiring any peg smaller than 3.24 inches or larger than 3.26 inches could cause performance problems or disruptions on the team.
What if your job analysis showed that hiring only red pegs work and hiring blue pegs won't? What if you know that only pegs made out of specific materials work? When a job requires specific competencies, behavioral styles, or cognitive skills and the company culture requires certain values and motivations, then the use of selection assessments, not screening tests, are a must.
When essential functions are clearly identified and the skills and abilities to carry out these functions are fairly specific, then hiring selection tools, combined with a structured competency-based behavioral interview, create a sieve within a sieve. Once you have narrowed down the candidate pool to the round pegs that most closely fit the round hole, hiring selection tools identify all the essential characteristics for hiring in advance - how well can they perform the job, what potential does the candidate have to grow and learn, how well will they fit on the team, will he/she embrace the company culture, and so on.
Who are you hiring?
To get more information about hiring the right pegs for the right holes, visit www.super-solutions.com or call us at 717.291.4640 or 800.803.4303.
