Your Employees are the Face of Your Business – Hire the Best

In the service industry, your employees are the face of your business. Good employees create positive customer experiences, generate repeat business, sell more, and influence positive behaviors in coworkers. Bad employees disrupt the work environment and cost the company money through turnover, inventory shrinkage, lost productivity and lost customers.

A study published in the Harvard Business Review* concluded that job match is the single most important component of job success. Our research has found this to be true of not only skilled professional and managerial roles, but of hourly level roles as well. From a selection perspective, if we can put the right people in the right role, we will maximize success. But how can we best evaluate this person-job fit?

All too many businesses rely on a simple interview to make the hiring decision. Yet, research shows that a traditional job interview is only slightly better than flipping a coin in predicting performance on the job. Much better decisions can be made using a comprehensive process including standardized application blanks, realistic job previews, prescreening, assessment testing, structured behavioral interviews, and background and reference checks. Modern technology allows you to use this type of process in an efficient and cost-effective way.

*Source: Herbert M. Greenberg and Jeanne Greenberg, “Job Matching for Better Sales Performance,” Harvard Business Review, Vol. 58, No. 5.)

Define Success

An integrated selection process starts by determining what success looks like in a specific job and then determining what attributes contribute to success. In defining the target ask the following questions:

• What are the critical outcomes or results someone in this position must produce to support the business objectives? (For example: sales, productivity, customer satisfaction, repeat business, referrals, etc.)
• What behaviors or competencies do our most successful people demonstrate when accomplishing these results?
• What is it about the successful performers that differentiate them from those that are poor or just satisfactory performers? Are their difference in their learned capabilities (knowledge, skills, work experiences, etc.) and/or in their innate capabilities (personality characteristics, motivations, etc.)?
• Which capabilities are “must haves” at job entry?

Hire the Best

Once the target has been defined, each component of the selection process should be designed to evaluate the candidate against this target. A well-designed and integrated selection process provides a number of data points or voices by which to evaluate a candidate. Each component of the process adds additional information. By standardizing the process, you can ensure that only legal and fair employment practices are used. Inconsistent selection criteria can be eliminated, and the impact of individual bias, assumptions or preconceptions can be reduced. Among the tools available for making a good hiring decision are realistic job previews, prescreens, a wide variety of pre-employment tests, structured behavioral interviews, and reference checks. Effective selection processes will contain most or all of these components.

Realistic Job Preview

A realistic job preview is designed to provide a complete and balanced view of the favorable and potentially unfavorable aspects of a given job. When constructed properly, the Realistic Job Preview forges an alliance with the candidate to make a successful hiring decision.

Realistic Job Previews may be as simple as a “card” that is provided to the applicant, or a tour of the work environment, or as complex as a scripted video.

It rests on the concept that the candidate, given good information and the opportunity, will help decide his/her own suitability and chance for success in the position before a costly hiring error is made. This allows the applicant to “quit before they are hired” and can decrease early job turnover based on unrealistic expectations. (For example, an applicant in a retail environment will need to know they will have to clean the store, stock shelves, etc., or a hospitality applicant might need to know that they will be faced with rude customers, tired travelers, cranky children, etc.)

Prescreen

The prescreen focuses on basic qualifications and helps to eliminate poorly suited candidates early, before a significant investment of time and money is made to take the candidate through the remainder of the process. Prescreen information might include the ability to work scheduled hours, having the required training or education, realistic salary expectations, prior work experience, etc. Placed early in the process the prescreen allows you to quickly screen out obviously unqualified individuals from the selection process.

When it comes to assessments, the exact types used will vary by the job. “One-size fits all” rarely works when it comes to hiring employees.

The truth is the person who makes a good reservationist might be very different from the one who is good at retail sales and the person who is good at sales, might be very different from the one who is a good wait staff member.

Pre-employment Testing

Cost effective, objective pre-employment tests are used to measure the skills, competencies and personality desired in the job.

Skills tests might include a retail math test, a sales skills knowledge test or a computer typing test. Your goal is to know if the potential applicant has the basic skill requirements for the job. Skills test results let you know if the person “can” do the job.

The other important consideration is the potential candidate’s work personality – are they naturally well suited for the job or are there aspects of their basic nature that will conflict with good job performance? For example, some service representatives simply don’t like customers! These are people who feel demeaned by serving others, who can’t handle the “slings and arrows” of front line customer contact, who crack under the pressure of demanding customers, etc. These characteristics are hard to identify in an interview, but can be surfaced through testing for service personality. Similar issues apply to many other job situations such as being a member of a team or working in a highly structured work role.

Structured, Behaviorally-based Interview

Many interviewers think they have good instincts about candidates and can use them to make good hiring decisions. These interviewers tend to reach their decision about the applicant in the first 3 to 5 minutes and spend the remaining interview time rationalizing their decision. But they don’t always have the best instincts. A well developed, structured interview will greatly improve the odds of making the right decision. By asking all applicants a series of job-related, behaviorally-based questions, interviewers will be better able to make objective comparisons between candidates rather than relying on intuition or partial information. And never underestimate the importance of training and guidance. Assist hiring managers in identifying good and poor responses to your interview questions.

A good interview process will:

• Focus the interview on the relevant job behaviors
• Encourage the applicant to describe their typical behavior rather than providing rehearsed answers
• Provide consistency (all applicants are asked the same questions)
• Help you to avoid asking illegal or inappropriate questions
• Allow you to objectively compare candidates

Background Verification and Reference Checks

Studies show that between 30-80% of job seekers exaggerate or lie on their employment materials. Thus, it is important to verify the work experience, training and educational that a candidate lists. There is much discussion today as to the benefits of reference checking. In today’s litigious environment, getting an HR person to share information is very difficult.

We have found though that the most effective reference checking occurs when you ask specifics about the individual’s past job performance. For example: “How effective were they in solving customer problems? Did they overreact under pressure?” “How did they work with others? Were they overly competitive?” These are the types of things assessment tests and behavioral interviews will flag as potential problems that can be confirmed and disconfirmed by specific questions when reference checking.

Making the Hiring Decision

Taken together this choir of voices should help you to identify candidates who have a high probability of success in your organization and to avoid those that are a poor fit. Encourage hiring managers to utilize all of the available information, to evaluate it carefully and to remain as objective as possible.

The Business Case for a Hire the Best Program

In principle most managers will readily agree that hiring the right employees is critical to business success, but at the same time they argue that the practical day-to-day challenges of operating the business provides them with little time and resource to take a disciplined approach. Remember, under pressure the hiring manager will settle for average in order to “fill the seat.” This reactive approach can cause more harm than good and will not move the business forward.

One of our clients enlisted the help of their hiring managers in determining whether a new selection process would increase their hiring effectiveness without putting undue strain on their time. A representative sample of districts (approximately 250 stores) were selected to launch a pilot of a new selection process which included a realistic job preview video, pre-screen interview, our Select for Retail Sales Associate test, a structured behavioral interview and a final background/reference check. At the same time the remaining districts continued with the current selection process which consisted of in-store recruitment, job ads, manager interviews and a final background/reference check.

Performance of new hires was tracked over the first three months of employment. They found that those hired as part of the new, integrated selection process outperformed their counterparts month after month (4-10% difference in sales per hour). Managers in the pilot districts gave strong endorsements for the new program, finding that the discipline they applied to the process yielded much better results and actually took less time than their old process because they built a pool of readily qualified candidates. Based on success of the pilot, the program was implemented nationwide.