What if we hired the right person every time?
I know. I realise that selection methods are not 100% accurate. We can try our hardest, use our most reliable and valid tools and techniques, properly train our interviewers, use amazingly designed assessment centres, situational judgment tests, work sample tests, realistic job previews, presentations and psychometric testing, yet we still can’t be absolutely 100% sure that the candidate is right for our business. We are, after all, dealing with humans and all the psychological research in the world is not going to be able to predict human behaviour correctly all of the time as we are all incredibly unique!
Let’s imagine, (humour me) that we can select the right person for every role, every time. What would this mean for the rest of Human Resources?
Employee Engagement — there would be an assumption that people are already engaged, happy & fulfilled in their roles and already contribute massively to organisational objectives. So… would we need to spend £££s on Employee Engagement Surveys and have working parties trying to solve all the issues and concerns raised? Probably not!
Organisational Design & Development — the right type of people would have the right behaviours, skills and be able to perform. They would also have a high level of resilience and would be able to adapt quickly to changes in organisational strategy (taking out the need for massive change programmes). Also — they would be able to fit right into the culture, meaning that the culture would be already awesome! So… not a huge amount of work needed here.
Employee Relations — this is the big one… employees would be less likely to need to go through performance management, disciplinaries, grievances etc. (This assumes that as well as the new employee being wonderful, the employer needs to behave themselves too).
Performance & Reward — we’ve recruited brilliant people, being brilliant we assume they’ll be high performing (but it would be nice to reward them well and recognise them for the work they’ve done!)
Learning and Development — there would be less of a need for training interventions due to poor performance, but more on building additional capability, creating a learning culture and coaching. L&D budgets are the first to get chopped when times are less than great, which is sad, because opportunities for development are, in my humble opinion, crucial to attracting the right people to your organisation in the first place! *INSERT MORE MONEY HERE TOO PLEASE*
Recruitment & Talent Management — certainly there will be less recruitment, we would not need to replace people we have performance managed out, who have left as the role has not been right for them, etc etc. HOWEVER… more talent management would occur (this IS a good thing!) How do we develop the amazingly talented people we have, keep them, promote and keep them challenged.
Let’s get back to reality…
Well, that was all a lovely daydream. I could probably write a book (I hope to one day!) about how to make selecting the right people more reliable/accurate/fun etc. Selection is the most important part of the employee life cycle. If you get the right people in the front end, you’ll minimise the need for future interventions with that employee.
Recruiting the wrong person can be costly — it gets more impactful the more senior you recruit for in an organisation. Why is recruitment often see as the poor relation in the wider Human Resources team when maybe the rest of HR exists to mop up the ‘mess’ caused by ‘adequate’ recruitment.
Today I will leave you with one question… Why are so many organisations not investing money to get their recruitment and selection processes right?!
