A famous executive reportedly used to take prospective new hires out to lunch. If the candidate salted his food before tasting it, the executive wouldn’t hire him.
This story has been attributed to Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Howard Hughes and J.C. Penny, among others. It’s really an urban legend, but there’s an interesting parallel between this story and what we have observed from hiring managers.
Some others think they have found a similarly clever shortcut.
- “I won’t hire anyone who ever worked for Company X.”
- “I won’t hire anyone who wears loafers to an interview.”
- “I won’t hire someone who won’t look me in the eye when answering my questions.”
These witticisms sound clever, especially coming from a person who’s confident and believes a particular method works. But they lack both reliability and validity. Does the type of shoes a person wears to an interview accurately predict how they might perform in the job? However, a scientist would not be able to prove a cause-and-effect relationship.
Interviews might also be reliable because companies consistently hire people that have strong interviewing skills. But they can also lack validity – good interviewing skills may not be a valid predictor of success in the roles they are hiring for.
Organizations that consistently make good hiring decisions try to increase the validity and reliability of the inputs in their decision making. Here’s what they do.
- They ask well-designed, open-ended interview questions that offer a peak at how the prospect will behave when faced with challenges similar to what they’ll face in this job.
- They utilize assessments that have been benchmarked to the job in advance, so they are not using intuition after-the-fact to interpret the assessment results.
- They look at the candidate’s previous work history based on the skills that those jobs required, not on their impression of the organization that they worked for.
So, don’t look for clever witticisms like, “did the candidate salt his lunch before tasting it?” to improve your good hire percentage. Build a system that gives you the best chance of hiring a winner based on reliable and valid inputs.
Contact the Davidson Group for a review of your hiring process.
