Several recruitment processes were put on hold during the COVID crisis. Gradually, companies will resume their recruitment activities but it will be imperative to adapt their process to respect the new rules of social distance.
As in-person interviews will be less frequent or later in the recruitment process, your criteria for evaluating applications will no longer be the same, but it may allow you to make a more factual and robust selection.
Recruitment biases
Interviewing in person is often the defining step in a process, but it is also the one that exposes you the most to recruitment bias, as intuition often tends to take precedence over factual assessment.
For this purpose, science identifies several types of cognitive biases, the best known of which are the Halo effect, the Dunning-Kruger effect, mental anchoring and confirmation biases.
Whatever you think about it, your intuition is more often fallible than infallible. The scientific literature also tells us that the predictability rate of an interview is low, because relying on your intuition is a source of bias and the chances of making a mistake are over 70%!
In fact, hiring processes are often at the heart of the problem of turnover and performance problems. One good selection is the key to the stability and performance of your teams!
Why not take advantage of the distance constraints imposed by the current crisis in order to adopt a robust recruitment process that will limit your perception biases?
To do this, you will need to conduct an assessment based on facts and the right assessment tools.
The order in which the tools are used is important. Indeed, each tool must make it possible to confirm the predictability of the previous tool. So there is a gradual deterioration in predictability as the recruitment process progresses.
1st recruitment tool: Job description
The job description is the basic tool for a good evaluation. It lists the roles, tasks, responsibilities, and key competencies required. It should also provide the salary scale and total compensation, although this information may not be on your public postings.
2nd recruitment tool: the CV
After defining a job description and posting it, you will receive your first applications and will need to assess the resumes received based on various criteria:
- Relevance work experiences, business environments, and skills developed in relation to the job description
- Coherence career path and consistency with the level of position to be filled.
- Job stability, an indicator that the candidate developed his skills over time, that he liked the tasks and the business environment in which he worked.
The resume is definitely the cornerstone of the application evaluation process. After an initial screening, you will need to organize telephone interviews with the selected candidates in order to validate the elements of the resume.
3rd recruitment tool: Telephone interview
After confirming the candidate's relevance, consistency, and job stability from the resume, the telephone interview will allow you to confirm the following:
- The interest of the candidate in relation to the position, the company, the location and the schedule.
- Basic information such as the level of bilingualism and salary expectations.
- Basic questions about the information in the resume that makes one's profile interesting or not.
- Any other information relevant to planning your next virtual interview.
4th recruitment tool: Virtual interviews
The telephone interview is the starting point for the virtual interview. From the information obtained, you will be able to deepen certain aspects of the application, but also address aspects that are not found on the resume, such as the aspirations, expectations and behaviors of the candidate.
Virtual interviews will allow you to:
- Validate the work experiences shown on the resume.
- Analyze the coherence and the differences with the position to be filled in order to establish the degree of relevance.
- Validate the reasons for the departure of the employee from previous jobs in order to establish the coherence between the position and the aspirations of the candidate.
- Validate working conditions and analyze differences or consistency.
- Validate the technical elements related to the knowledge required by the position.
- Present the position and raise the main issues.
5th recruitment tool: the second interview
During the second interview, the objective will be to ensure that the goals and expectations of the position are clear to the candidate. You will also be able to come back to the issues related to the position and the organization and propose behavioral scenarios.
It is also important to give a realistic overview of the position and to highlight the positive aspects, but also the aspects that could be problematic or less appealing. This will avoid unpleasant surprises and misunderstandings when the candidate takes office.
At the end of the second interview, confirm with the candidate if he has any areas of doubt and specify them with him. You can validate (or invalidate) the elements it raises.
6th recruitment tool: psychometric tests and references
In order to avoid perception biases as much as possible, it is recommended to use additional tools such as psychometric tests and taking professional references in order to confirm or refute your perception of the candidate.
The references:
The objective of the reference check is to validate whether the opinion of a former immediate supervisor corresponds to the information collected during the recruitment process. If you get feedback that's consistent with your candidate observations throughout the process, predictability increases.
Psychometric tests:
Les psychometric tests make it possible to define the personality traits of the candidate, but also his ability to learn, his motivations and his strengths. Be sure to select a scientifically validated test in order to get reliable results.
Even if your psychometric test is scientifically validated, its predictability rate is low, like most of the tools listed above.
So how do you ensure a sufficient level of predictability to make a sound selection?
The key to a good selection lies in the use of a multitude of tools. As these tools are interdependent, the information obtained through their use must be analyzed as a whole and not in a compartmentalized manner.
A tool should therefore not, by itself, determine the fate of a candidate, because individually, each tool has a low level of predictability.
In conclusion, it should be noted that a recruitment process, no matter how robust, can never 100% predict the success of a hire. However, the more you limit your perception biases by relying on factual information that you validate through the use of a variety of tools, the more you will increase your predictability and your success rate in hiring.
Thorens — Executive Search Specialists on LinkedIn:
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