If you haven’t run into this new trend in hiring, you may find this interesting as a sign of things to come. If you have ever sat on a search committee, you know that sometimes some folks divert from the rest of the group in their assessment because they didn’t like something about the way a question was answered.
Apparently, other people recognize this situation as well and have sued companies suggesting that some committee members were prejudiced against them due to their appearance, the ethnicity suggested by their name, their voice, etc,.
To stave off any accusation of subjectivity in the hiring process, companies are trying to make committees stick to strict criteria in hiring. I recently had to adhere to these new standards in a search we did.
What the Human Resource office is having us do is not only submit questions for them to review but also the answers we expect. For each question we have to suggest a five point answer, a three point answer and a one point answer. This leaves a little bit of gray area between answers for people with experience sets you didn’t anticipate that fall somewhere in between.
Now I will admit, the Human Resource folks have been pretty good in the past with weeding out irrelevant questions. For example, if you are a rental house which has broadway shows, opera, ballet, rock and country concerts come through every year, where on your scale does person who likes broadway and rock, doesn’t care for opera and ballet and likes some country acts rate? Will these answers really offset years of intensive experience? And do you really think this answer will have any bearing on how good a job someone does focusing lights?
While it is annoying to have people scrutinizing your answers now as well, I guess it does help to clarify what you value in a candidate when you rate what answers make a person more valuable to your organization than others.
What this process doesn’t allow is the awarding of extra points to people for unanticipated answers that are discovered in the course of an interview. Most of the committee might ignore the mention of a kid friendly attitude, but the education director might latch on to it as a positive sign for a newly implemented mentoring program. The candidate is therefore more valuable to the education director and might rate higher if not for the rigid guidelines of scoring.
The other danger is that this process rewards having all the right answers. I was once on a search committee where I thought the most promising candidate was spouting a little too much of the latest jargon and theories, but was pretty good for the most part. Almost everyone rated him high based on his answers, but one guy was skeptical in the face of what he admitted were strong answers.
His suspicion lead to some specific questions of references and others that revealed a person who talked a good game but wasn’t very substantial (and perhaps a little deceitful) otherwise.
In a system that placed a heavy value on scores only in an attempt to be objective, I wonder if his intuition would have been heeded. If it hadn’t our company might have ended up trying to find a way to get rid of an undesirable employee which is a lot tougher than not hiring him.
