The Selection Process

Whether your framework is personnel policies or software settings, the selection process involves moving candidates through the recruiting process and identifying the best candidates for the job. Along the way, screening and assessment techniques are used to eliminate candidates that either don’t meet the stated minimum requirements or aren’t a good fit for cultural or other (i.e., job requirements or salary expectations). The goal is to ensure that those candidates who are invited to participate in a face-to-face interview are, in fact, highly qualified and, ideally a promising fit from a cultural standpoint.

There are four primary techniques for evaluating potential candidates, that also represent phases in the selection process:

1. Evaluation by Association. Use the posting location—i.e., an industry or professional association-specific job site—as an initial screen.
2. Application. Conduct an initial assessment based on review of a candidate’s cover letter, resume and application. May also include review of a candidate’s business (i.e., LinkedIn) and/or social networking (i.e., Facebook or Twitter) profiles. To avoid investing time assessing a candidate that isn’t viable, incorporate pre-screening questions that require the candidate to attest that he or she meets the stated minimum criteria. In this phase, the objective is to eliminate candidates that don’t meet the basic requirements for the position based on fundamental factors including minimum experience and education, salary expectations and/or willingness to relocate or meet work schedule requirements, if applicable.
3. Assessment. Conduct a preliminary assessment of skills. This can be done in conjunction with or subsequent to the application review process. Depending on position requirements, a more in-depth assessment of a candidate’s level of skill and aptitude may be appropriate.
4. Screening Interview. An initial telephone interview is a second level of active screening that’s used to assess the candidate’s objective and motivation, relevant education and experience and to get a sense for the candidate as a person. In the course of approximately 20–30 minutes, an interviewer can confirm application and resume details and assess a range of soft skills—for example, active listening and communication—as well as engagement and overall level of poise and professionalism. The objective is to eliminate candidates that don’t warrant the time and cost of an in-person interview or in-depth skills assessment.
5. External Verification. Verify stated educational qualifications and check references.

many of these steps can be automated. HR infrastructure provider Ideal’s Head Data Scientist Ji-A Min notes that automating candidate screening can also solve the resume black hole or “ignore” problem, citing the statistic that, on average, 65% of resumes received for high-volume positions are never reviewed.^[1] Given labor shortages and the cost of recruiting, that’s a critical break-down in the system. Min highlights the following benefits of automated candidate screening:

• Reduced time to hire—which also reduces the likelihood of losing talent to faster-moving competitors
• Higher candidate quality—based on review & ranking of all resumes received
• Improved candidate experience—allows for rapid identification of and engagement with the most qualified candidates as well as timely feedback to those who are eliminated (but may be viable candidates for future opportunities)

As Workforce Management Principal Analyst Cliff Stevenson notes, the benefits of automation are not only time savings; human capital management systems “also allow for the type of data collection and analysis that is intrinsic to the legalities of modern HR.”^[2

Avoiding Bias in Selection

Avoiding Discrimination

The go-to reference for avoiding discrimination in the selection process is the EEOC’s Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures. In brief, the purpose of the Guidelines is “to aid in the achievement of our nation’s goal of equal employment opportunity without discrimination on the grounds of race, color, sex, religion or national origin.”^[1] The Guidelines constitute a uniform set of principles governing employee selection procedures that are consistent with applicable legal standards and validation standards generally accepted by the psychological profession.

The Guidelines apply to

• most private and public employers, including labor organizations, employment agencies, state and local governments, and federal government contractors and subcontractors
• all selection procedures used to make employment decisions, including interviews, review of experience or education from application forms, work samples, physical requirements, and evaluations of performance
• employee selection procedures used in making retention, promotion, transfer, demotion, or dismissal decisions

As an aside: the guidelines do not have bearing on recruiting procedures or practices—for example, practices designed to attract members of a particular race, sex, or ethnic group that are under-represented.

For a higher-level view, the following is a representative sample of the EEOC’s Employer Best Practices for Testing and Selection:^[4]

1. Employers should administer tests and other selection procedures without regard to race, color, national origin, sex, religion, age (40 or older), or disability.
2. Employers should ensure that employment tests and other selection procedures are properly validated for the positions and purposes for which they are used. The test or selection procedure must be job-related and its results appropriate for the employer’s purpose. While a test vendor’s documentation supporting the validity of a test may be helpful, the employer is still responsible for ensuring that its tests are valid under UGESP.
3. If a selection procedure screens out a protected group, the employer should determine whether there is an equally effective alternative selection procedure that has less adverse impact and, if so, adopt the alternative procedure.
4. To ensure that a test or selection procedure remains predictive of success in a job, employers should keep abreast of changes in job requirements and should update the test specifications or selection procedures accordingly.
5. No test or selection procedure should be implemented “casually”; that is, without an understanding of its effectiveness and limitations for the organization, its appropriateness for a specific job, and whether it can be appropriately administered and scored.

Avoiding Perceptual Errors

When reviewing a final slate of candidates, it’s important to be aware of the potential for perception errors and unconscious bias.

Research has indicated that interviewers make decisions about candidates rapidly—within the first 30 seconds to 2 ½ minutes, to be precise.^[5] Unfortunately, we also tend to overrate our ability to evaluate others. In a study cited in Fundamentals of Human Resource Management, an algorithm that weighed several objective job-related criteria did a 25% better job of selecting successful candidates than experienced managers. A common mistake is judging candidates based on a first impression or “likeability.” As IBM Smarter Workforce business development executive Jason Berkowitz notes: “It’s so easy to assume that a firm handshake and good eye contact means someone is competent across the board.”^[6] Interview tip: Don’t use the interview to try to validate your initial judgment—positive or negative. Berkowitz’s recommendation: “Hiring managers should actually try to disprove their initial impression.”^[7]

Another common error is interviewer bias, where the interviewer allows information reviewed prior to the interview—resume, test scores, social media activity—to shape their perception of the candidate. In order to counter this and related judgement errors, interviewers should cultivate active listening skills and focus on evaluating each candidate relative to the same standards.

Another source of evaluation error is unconscious bias, which is “a prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another—usually in a way that’s considered to be unfair.”^[8] In a Fast Company article titled “How Unconscious Bias Affects Everything You Do,” author Howard Ross notes that “Over 1,000 studies in the past 10 years alone have conclusively shown that if you’re human, you have bias, and that it impacts almost every variation of human identity: Race, gender, sexual orientation, body size, religion, accent, height, hand dominance, etc.”^[9] His conclusion: “The question is not ‘do we have bias?’ but rather ‘which are ours?’” The implications for human resource management? How do we design selection processes that counter unconscious bias?

Unconscious bias can also be a factor in the pre-screening process. In an article titled “Can dogs help us avoid hiring bias?”^[11] BBC Senior Editor Meredith Turits describes TED director of research and development Aaron Weyenberg’s attempts to hack unconscious bias in the hiring process. One of the hiring policies he implemented was to conduct first-round interviews with audio-only telephone calls, to eliminate consideration of irrelevant information. However, he was aware that LinkedIn “often finds its way into the process before that. And what that does is expose to me to information I actually don’t want and doesn’t help me – like their appearance (and thereby their approximate age), name, et cetera.” To get around that, Weyenberg used the Profile of Dogs Chrome browser extension, which replaces a LinkedIn user’s profile picture with randomly assigned image of a dog’s face. The problem with that theory, as Princeton assistant chair of psychology Alexander Todorov explains, is that people make associations with all kinds of things. Even dogs. For instance, different dogs have different reputations and invoke different responses (think: pit bull versus golden retriever) and the viewer may transfer those associations to the candidate—even when they know the image is randomly generated. Turits notes that even if we are able to remove bias from an initial screening, it’s likely to slip back in at a later stage. As Todorov phrases it: “the mind is a big associative machine.” Inclusion consulting firm Jones Diversity CEO Sharon Jones notes that “Most people believe they are fair and support a meritocracy in hiring and in the workplace. What people don’t understand that wanting to be fair doesn’t make you fair.”^[12]

So if the goal is to neutralize unconscious bias and believing we’re fair doesn’t make it so, what does? Ross proposes two approaches: awareness and design. Specifically, he notes that “when we are aware of our biases and watch out for them, they are less likely to blindly dictate our decisions.”^[13] To the second point, he advocates for developing approaches that help us make decisions more consciously. One of the specific actions he recommends is priming, explaining that “by consciously priming people to pay attention to potential areas of bias, we have found that they can be encouraged to be more conscious of their decision-making processes.” Specifically, the goal is to help managers identify what they’re reacting to and refocus on information that’s relevant to the job.

Interview Approaches

The objective of the interview process is to identify the “right” person. Of course, what—or, rather, who—constitutes the “right” person depends on the organization. And the approach the organization takes to the interviewing process says as much about an organization’s culture and values as a candidate’s interactions say about him or her.

Traditional interview approaches include one-on-one, panel and series:

• The most common interview approach is a one-on-one interview, with the interview conducted by a Human Resource representative or the hiring manager.
• The panel interview is a standard practice in academia and fairly common in business. In a panel interview, a committee composed of several interviewers meets with the candidate at the same time. When using this format, interviewers generally ask an established set of questions in order, taking notes and, in some organizations, filling out a corresponding evaluation form.
• In a series interview, a candidate is evaluated in a series of one-on-one interviews with multiple interviewers. Different organizations and interviewers may also seek to stage the interview differently—creating, for example, a situation that may range from conversational to stressful.

Regardless of the format used, those involved in the interview process should be trained in effective interviewing techniques—for example, active listening—and, critically, what questions are prohibited. For best results—and to avoid litigation—interview questions should relevant to the position, consistent across candidates and reflect the realities of both the position and the business environment. To be specific, questions should focus on the job duties, relevant skills and qualifications and related success factors. As alluded to above, it’s important for the interviewer to recognize that her or she is not only discussing the position but representing the company.

An interview is a two-way assessment; the candidate is also making an assessment to determine credibility, desirability and culture “fit.” This is particularly true in our current labor market, which favors employees.