Robin McKay

The most popular tool for hiring new employees is the unstructured interview. It is highly unreliable and runs the risk of the interviewer asking questions that are not legally defensible. Unstructured interviews are not consistent and extremely open to personal bias leading to emotional or "gut feel" hirers. This article alerts the reader to those biases.

Most hiring managers rely on the CV as the primary source of candidate information. This is a dangerous practice given the amount to "untruths" in most CVs. A CV is a summary of what the candidate wants you to know about them. It's a candidate's own version of the positive aspects of their background, knowledge, skills and experience.

The scientific literature on selection is unanimous in the power of using cognitive (metal ability) testing for pre-screening job applicants. In fact, if you could use just one test, a test of mental ability (numerical, verbal and spatial ability) will have the highest predictive validity of around .56

Hiring Managers that are seeking to avoid hiring another "horror story" are increasingly turning to pre-employment testing to improve their decision making. The trouble is, many of these managers are blindly interpreting the results and drawing conclusions that are often based on their own schemas. This is very common when managers enter into the "psychometric world" for the first time.

I've sat in on a few employment interviews over the last 40 years – both as interviewer and interviewee. Couple this up with what science has taught me about the interview process and I think I can speak with some authority on the subject of employment interviews.

The Countdown supermarket chain is opening a new store in South Auckland. Prospective employees are asked to line up for a chance to be interviewed for the 150 job openings. This has to be the most insane recruiting process I have ever heard of, and I’ve heard a few! This is not about best practice employee selection, it’s about the random effects of a lottery.

On our ‘Tips for Hiring’ website we ask subscribers “What is the most burning question you have When Hiring New Employees?” In most cases the questions are very similar, however yesterday we got an interesting one that I would like to share with you. Diane du Preez from South Africa asked: “What are the top ten obvious things I should look out for to let me know the candidate is not right for me?”

Several years ago, two well respected organisational psychologists, Bartram and Lindley, conducted a survey of managers (n=875) and graduate students (n=150). The purpose was to measure the attributes that these people considered the most important when it comes to selecting new employees or applying for a new position - what attributes do these managers/graduates see as critical “must haves” to be successful in the role?

Why do employees - hired by the same methods, doing the same job, and managed by the same person - perform so differently? Dependency on the traditional one-on-one unstructured interview is a prime reason.

fter many years of research, social psychologist Robert Cialdini has identified six powerful and universal principles of persuasion. In nearly every influence situation we encounter there will be at least one of these six waiting for us to use.