THE 5BEST HIRING PRACTICES

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What do we know about hiring? Turns out a whole lot.

Decades of hiring research from top universities (Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, etc.) have concluded five key hiring practices consistently lead to better hires from a broader, more qualified pool of applicants. Unfortunately, research also reveals there is a startling gap between what we know leads to more successful hiring and what companies actually do daily.

This is your opportunity. Companies that implement five simple techniques along their hiring process see a dramatic improvement in finding people who better fit their company at every position. This has significant financial impact on your business (more on that later).

So what are the five? And how can you easily implement them? Let’s find out.

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Research finds when the hiring team decides in advance what job skills are key to success in a particular job, they are considerably more likely to stay focused and not be swayed by less important criteria or personal characteristics that are less predictive of job success.1

We all like when someone has gone to the same school as us or likes the same sports team, but research consistently shows that these personal characteristics have little to no correlation as to whether someone will be effective for your company.

Taking a few minutes to prioritize the list of job skills gets your team, HR, and recruiters instantly aligned on the essential job criteria needed to succeed at each job. Prioritizing skills also allows more effective job descriptions to be written.

And most importantly, mind-reading is no longer necessary to understand what the final hiring manager is seeking. Prioritizing job skills saves time screening candidates and leads to better hiring.

1 Levashina, Julia, et al. “The Structured Employment Interview: Narrative and Quantitative Review of The Research Literature.” Personnel Psychology 67.1 (2014): 241-293.

#1 Prioritize Job Skills

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Hiring for ValuesIt’s important to note that job skills aren’t just technical. They are also behavioral. Companies like Google, Amazon, and Netflix have learned that behavioral values like courage and collaboration can be more important than core technical skills for the long-term success of an employee.2

Taking the time to define the values that are the soul of your company and hiring for cultural fit has three main benefits. Research confirms that if a new hire’s values align with the organization’s values three things happen: 1) organizational goals are achieved faster, 2) job satisfaction of the entire team goes up and 3) retention goes up.3

Just as you prioritized technical skills, you also should rank how your company’s values manifest for each job. For example, consider if your company’s values are passion, innovation, and collaboration. For a VP of Marketing, passion should be weighted high, innovation is probably medium to low, and collaboration should be high. For an Administrative Assistant, passion can be weighted low, innovation can be weighted low, but collaboration should be weighted higher, comparatively. For the Head of Research, innovation would be most important.

2 Laszlo Bock, (2015). Work Rules! Insights from Inside Google that Will Transform How You Live and Lead.

3 Edwards, J. R., & Cable, D. M. (2009). “The Value Of Value Congruence.” Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(3), 654.

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There is an art to writing an effective job description that clearly recruits a qualified candidate that fits your company’s culture. And now, more than ever, companies have to learn the additional skill of writing job descriptions that appeal equally to women and men.

Why? Today, women comprise 47% of the workforce.4 This means if your company isn’t good at writing gender-balanced job descriptions, you could be missing out on your opportunity to recruit a significant portion of the qualified workforce.

Research finds that job descriptions that contain more stereotypically masculine words are perceived as less desirable by women. However, including terms in a job description that project a sense of belonging can balance the impact of male-themed language.5

Research also suggests that a shorter, well-defined list of job requirements broadens and improves the quality of the applicant pool as women tend to apply for a job only if they meet nearly all of the criteria while men will apply if they meet only some of the criteria.6

#2 Write Inclusive Job Descriptions

4 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015.

5 D. Gaucher, J. Friesen, and A. Kay. “Evidence That Gendered Wording in Job Advertisements Exists and Sustains Gender Inequality,“ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101.1 (2011): 109–128.

6 Reuben, Ernesto, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales. “How Stereotypes Impair Women’s Careers In Science.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111.12 (2014): 4403-4408.

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Research suggests identity-blind resume review and comparative evaluation lead to more qualified hires. Blind resume review also produces a workforce that is more inclusive of people from underrepresented backgrounds while simultaneously reducing the amount of hires who looked the part but were, in fact, less qualified.7

As an indication of how powerful this technique can be, professional orchestras increased the number of female musicians from 5% to 50% just by having candidates audition behind a blind.8

For corporate hiring, hiding the applicants’ name, gender, and other personal identifiers encourages evaluators to focus on the most relevant criteria for job success. This has proven to have dramatic effects on the quality of hires as well as the composition of the workforce.

Women already comprise nearly half the workforce. The Bureau of Labor also reports that by 2022, minorities will comprise 40% of the workforce.9 These are both good reasons your company should be great at blind resume review to let the best candidate win.

7 Bertrand, Marianne, and Sendhil Mullainathan. “Are Emily and Brendan more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment On Labor Market Discrimination.” University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business Working Paper (2002).

8 Goldin, Claudia and Cecilia Rouse. “Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact Of ‘Blind’ Auditions On Female Musicians,” American Economic Review, 2000, v90(4,Sep), 715-741.

9 Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2022 Labor Force Participation. December 2013.

#3 Blind Resume Review

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Research finds structured interviews lead to more consistent and accurate candidate evaluations, resulting in more qualified hires. In fact, meta-studies find that structured interviews are two times more effective in identifying the most qualified candidate for a job.10

In a properly structured interview, the key questions that reveal a person’s actual job skills and core behavioral values are preplanned. These questions—that most determine whether someone can be effective in a particular job—are asked to all the candidates so answers can be consistently scored across all applicants.

Doing structured interviews is also easier on the interviewer. They don’t have to wing an interview or rely on their gut. They are able to provide a better, fairer interview experience that reassures each applicant they are being fairly considered by your company.

10 Schmidt, Frank L., and John E. Hunter. “The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods In Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years Of Research Findings.” Psychological Bulletin 124.2 (1998): 262.

#4 Structured Interviews

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Research finds when interviewers know their candidate evaluations are going to be shared with their peers, interviewers are more likely to focus on what is important for the role and less likely to fall back on personal biases. Combining interview scores from the entire team also results in more qualified hires by relying on the wisdom of the group to easily identify the highest-scoring candidates.

For data-driven hiring, interviewers should capture feedback and score interviews in real-time. Scoring can then be revealed after everyone provides their independent evaluations of a candidate.

11 Castilla Emilio J. 2015. Accounting for the Gap: A Firm Study Manipulating Organizational Accountability in Pay Decisions. Organization Science 26(2): 311–33.

#5 Data-Driven Hiring

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Technology Provides a Faster Path

Decades of hiring research precisely affirms what should be done to optimize a company’s hiring process. But how the heck are you going to get everyone to follow best practices?

We all know changing people’s habits can be extremely difficult. Even weeks of training can be ineffective and forgotten—no matter what the scientific research says.

Understanding the depth of the challenge, technologist Laura Mather, Ph.D. had a flash of insight that led her to create Talent Sonar: Don’t try to change people. Instead, give them a tool that changes the process.

Laura saw that by offering an easy-to-use cloud-based tool that automatically took people through the five best hiring practices, companies would naturally hire better candidates from a broader, more qualified talent pool. In short, companies could optimize their hiring without studying the research or undergoing extensive training. Further, by relying on scoring data, managers had greater confidence in each hiring decision.

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The results of bringing Talent Sonar into your company are instantaneous and obvious. HBO’s VP of Talent Acquisition, Stella Park, said, “What became clear to us while working with Talent Sonar was that assessing for ‘fit’ doesn’t have to be difficult. Our hiring managers can use this tool to augment a process that can all-too-often be a subjective assessment. The Talent Sonar tool reiterates the core principles of identifying a successful candidate through objective measures.”

Other executives noted how much easier Talent Sonar made their lives. HealthSherpa’s Chief Product Officer, Cat Perez, said, “Preparing for interviews can be time-consuming and frustrating, but Talent Sonar’s job description and interview question templates have made interviewing that much easier.”

Others realized that the right talent acquisition tool had the power to reshape the workforce. Aaron C. Kay, Ph.D., of Fuqua School of Business, Duke University said, “Decades of research in social cognition have shown that unconscious bias is systemic, trenchant and dramatically narrows the talent pipeline of today’s workforce. With the Talent Sonar software suite, I believe we’re seeing for the first time a tool powerful and pragmatic enough to counter this bias and increase the representation of women and minorities in the workforce.”

The Talent Sonar ExperienceSo now that you know the five best hiring practices let’s look at how easily Talent Sonar streamlines these hiring best practices throughout your organization. Imagine that you head a hiring team inside a department.

TRY TALENT SONAR FOR FREETalent Sonar is a cloud-based application you can try for free at: www.talentsonar.com

With a simple web-browser sign-up and log-in, up to 20 people within your company (including outside recruiters) can use Talent Sonar for free—indefinitely.

Paid plans begin for broader company rollout, integration with a company’s Applicant Tracking System (like Taleo), or for additional support and training if your company so desires.

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STEP #1

Prioritize Job SkillsWhen you first create a job, Talent Sonar invites you to prioritize your job requirements in a sortable, stackable list. There are two sections: technical skills and values. Companies that already have a set of pre-determined company values usually pre-populate the values section in order to preserve company culture.

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STEP #2

Write Inclusive Job DescriptionsAs you write your job description, Talent Sonar leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to help you choose words that appeal to all applicants. This way, Talent Sonar’s real-time feedback helps you create more balanced job listings that equally attract both male and female candidates.

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STEP #3

Blind Resume ReviewWhen you review resumes, Talent Sonar hides applicants’ names, gender, and other personal identifiers to encourage evaluators to focus on the most relevant criteria for job success.

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STEP #4

Structured InterviewsTalent Sonar helps hiring teams pre-plan interviews with questions that best predict job success. Talent Sonar makes it easy for executive teams of interviewers to conduct an effective, professional interview with no prep time. Also, by collecting all the data in one place, you don’t have to waste time tracking down feedback.

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STEP #5

Data-Driven HiringWhen it comes time to hire, using data and the collective wisdom of the team leads to selecting the best candidate.

With Talent Sonar, evaluators easily capture feedback and score interviews in real-time. The scoring is then revealed after everyone provides an independent evaluation of a candidate. All data is shared, and the highest-scoring candidates are effortlessly identified.

With more data points from resume review and interview evaluations, Talent Acquisition and recruiters can also understand the nuanced preferences of each hiring manager. Over time, your team can rely on data to understand what skills, values, and specific interview questions predict successful hires.

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Avoiding the Cost of a Bad Hire

In 2013, CEB Global, formerly Corporate Executive Board asked thousands of hiring managers around the world: what percentage of people on your team shouldn’t have been hired in the first place? Their answer? A staggering 20%.12

That’s a big number, but it may not be big enough. Over a period of three years, Mark Murphy, the founder of Leadership IQ, surveyed 5,247 hiring managers from 312 public and private organizations. These hiring managers recruited 20,000 people over the course of the study. Murphy found that 46% of newly-hired employees fail within 18 months, according to the people who hired them. In other words, between a fifth and almost half of all new hires are bad.13

Aware of the bad hire problem, in 2015, Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) economist David Rosnick joined with the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) to create a turnover calculator. The CLASP-CEPR turnover calculator estimates it costs organizations $26,830 to replace an employee on a $100,000 salary.14 This is primarily due to recruiting costs as well as

12 “CEB Blogs.” CEB Blogs 1 in 5 Employees Should Never Have Been Hired.

13 “Why New Hires Fail (Emotional Intelligence Vs. Skills).” Leadership IQ.

14 “CLASP-CEPR Turnover Calculator.” CEPR.

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interviewing and training hours that sap company productivity. Based on this estimate, 100 bad hires can cost an organization $2.6 million.

Now that Talent Sonar makes it so easy to optimize your company’s hiring — and even try Talent Sonar for free — there has never been a better time to implement the five best hiring practices in your company. Further, the cost of bad hires so impacts a company’s bottom that few companies can afford not to action.

We invite you to optimize your company’s hiring by trying Talent Sonar for free today at www.talentsonar.com.

If you have any questions about Talent Sonar or would like to further discuss the best practices in hiring, contact us at:

info@talentsonar.com 650.260.4476