What's the "AHA!" REPORT all about?

This series of newsletters contains AHA! information to help people and organizations hire the best employees, make the best promotion decisions, retain the most qualified people, maintain the widest applicant pool, follow best practices, and (if you are subject to US law) remain aware of EEOC hot-spots.

In the News
Library
ERE articles
Media Kit

America learned a new word last year. That word is "vetting," and it's been the hot topic of the political season. First potential nominees (remember all those guys?), then vice-presidential candidates, and now a dazzling range of appointees are being subjected to this mysterious process.

In case you're wondering, the term does indeed come from "veterinarian," and was originally a slangy expression for the expert evaluation or treatment of a horse before a race. I find this charmingly appropriate for politics -- and it means the only appointee who's sure to get a true application of the concept will be the new First Puppy.

In all seriousness, however, an election cycle is a fascinating time for those interested in selection processes of other kinds. But one key aspect of decision-making isn't on the committee table. It's not on TV, in the public record, in a resume or tax return, or on display in an interview. It's inside the head of the person making the decision. And it involves a tricky piece of psychology that rarely gets the attention it deserves.  

Hiring is an highly personal issue. Whether we admit it or not, use tests or not, or use a professional recruiter or not, we all go through a multi-step psychological decision process to decide who gets hired. It generally looks something like this:

• Do we clearly know what we are looking for?
• Does this person have skills that match what we are looking for?
• Is this person the best choice among all possible candidates?
• Will this person be the best for the future?

Why is it important to know what's happening inside our psyches? Because more understanding equals better decisions. Conversely, the less we understand about our decision-making processing and the job, the more foolish and self-serving we appear to clients, employers, and candidates -- not to mention the EEOC. So let's take a moment to unveil the inner workings of this process, and see how easily the can become dysfunctional.

1. Do we clearly know what we are looking for?
You know you're stuck not knowing whether the applicant has the "right skills" when, after reviewing all candidates, the decision-makers have trouble coming to an agreement about what the job requires, or if during the search stage job requirements keep floating. Recruiters often experience this when they play "pin the tail on the applicant" with hiring managers: "Is this the guy? What about now? What about this one? What? You are changing the specs mid-stream? Can you hear me now?"

Identifying the right person with the right skills under these conditions is like being blindfolded, spun around until dizzy, and then swinging a garden hose to break a fiberglass-reinforced pinata dangled by a cackling hiring manager. The solution? Do your homework. Get a grip on the fact that managers (unless they are also doing the exact same job) are usually clueless about what the job takes. Sure, they know what the job is supposed to produce, but they seldom have any idea how the work is really done. And if they don't know how the work is done, the best any recruiter can hope for is finding someone who is merely likeable.

Who knows the most about the job? The one person who is generally taken for granted: the lowly incumbent. Now, some folks are going to get all bent out of shape when I don't tell them how to do a job analysis in a short article. The reason I won't is because job analysis is part experience and part art. It may be written about in books, but it takes highly experienced people years to learn to do well. I once worked in a large consulting firm that only hired Ph.D.s to do their job analyses. Many of them knew the theory, but never learned the art. Bottom line? Get a true professional. It will pay off handsomely.

2. Does this person have skills that match what we are looking for?
Of course, we all are highly "objective" and "rational" decision makers. We know this because we tend to buy cars the size of subdivisions and purchase over-priced underwear because it makes a "statement" (let's hope our chatty underwear knows when to be discreet). When we apply our finely honed decision-making skills to hiring, we pick people whom we like, who fit our culture, who have similar backgrounds and experience to us, who look like us, who are tall or attractive who attended the same schools, or who know someone we like personally. We even admit to "fudging" tests to make ourselves look good while concurrently arguing that other people would never do the same thing.

Yes. We are all highly rational. Even when we are not, we'll defend decisions to the death (of memory, at least). My point? Stop using personal standards. Learn exactly which tests measure the few critical competencies required for the job. Make sure they work by doing some high-quality studies. Abandon the misguided notion that anyone can "break into the business" without so much as cracking a book. Silly test practices hurt the organization, hurt applicants, and hurt our professional credibility. If you are especially unlucky, silly tests get you "up close and personal" with the EEOC.

3. Is this person the best choice among all possible candidates?
This is the fallback position after everything else goes haywire. In the absence of knowing what to look for or how to evaluate an individual candidate, we naturally shift to comparing one applicant to another. The decision-makers are lost and have no compass to point them in the right direction. Like all logical human beings, even decision-makers forget about comparing applicants to job requirements and instead start comparing them to one another.

The only time we can compare one candidate to another is when we have: 1) clear job analysis data, and 2) objective data on each candidate. Data allows us to examine which candidate looks best when compared with the job, not the other applicants. If our candidates aren't perfect and we don't want to restart the whole search process, we can evaluate who has the most strengths, who is coachable, or who has the fewest weaknesses. The evaluation process becomes much more accurate.

4. Will this person be the best for the future?
People often fail to consider the future when making hiring decisions. Will the job become more or less demanding? Will the requirements involve more customer interaction? Will employees be facing greater decision challenges, or taking on more workload? If we hire too "high" we run the risk of over qualification. If we hire too low, we run the risk of under qualification.

Not hiring for the future creates major problems for organizations when they: 1) try to push decision making downward (among people who were not hired for their decision-making skills), 2) expect people to work in teams (when these people were not hired for their ability to get along with others), or 3) expect employees to interact with customers (when they were not hired for their ability to resolve customer problems).

Frequently, the only group with much insight into the organization's future, and therefore its future job requirements, is senior management. Did I mention that they should be involved in setting job standards? When management speaks it is a good idea to accommodate their plans. Just keep it within a two- year horizon or so. Beyond that, nobody has any clue what might happen.

Human decision making is (and will always be) an area filled with confusion and uncertainty. One way we can hope to control it is to be aware of self-imposed issues that can derail the orderly process of the hiring decision: knowing clearly what we are looking for, being able to accurately evaluate applicant skills, being able to objectively compare candidates to the job (not to each other), and incorporating future changes into the job search.

At the risk of sounding like that other kind of psychologist, all it takes is a little self-knowledge.