Employee Selection in the New World of Work

A presentation by

Marlowe C. Embree, Ph.D.

President, Business Development Group

June 24, 2002

Does selection still matter?

According to a now classic joke, the workplace of the future will consist of a human being, a dog, and a computer.  The human's job will be to feed the dog.  The dog's job will be to bite the human if he (or she) tries to touch the computer.

Hopefully this is not exactly the truth, although jobs that only a decade ago were the exclusive province of human beings have now been successfully computerized or mechanized.  But even in an increasingly technological age, work is a human enterprise, which means that workplace failures are generally due to the same thing that causes most airline crashes -- human error. 

Paradoxically, there's another historical trend that suggests that selection is increasingly important in the new world of work, and that is the increasing social mobility of our society.  In only two generations, according to psychiatrist Mary Pipher, we have gone from a "neighborhood culture" to a "hotel culture".  In your grandparents' day, people usually hired people they already knew pretty well, and if you didn't know a job applicant, odds are you know someone who knew him or her very well.  Better yet, you could ask that person for the straight dope on that job candidate and get it!  The "good old boy" (or girl) network was alive and well.  Today, people shift about so much from job to job and from place to place -- for reasons we'll explore in passing later in this presentation -- that the average job candidate is a largely unknown quantity.  That means that hiring risks are heightened, and hence, the role of selection becomes exponentially more important.

Today, we'll be taking a whirlwind tour of the employment selection process and discussing strategies for optimizing that process in light of the brave new world of the 21st century economy.  In so doing, we'll be asking three questions that have been near and dear to the heart of journalists since the invention of the printing press:  What?  Why?  How?  That is, what qualities should you look for in a job candidate... why do those qualities (and the selection process that enables you to evaluate them) matter... and how exactly do you go about assessing those qualities without stubbing your toes in the process?

Question #1:  What?

Contrary to what some people think, technical competence isn't everything.  In fact, perhaps because most organizations do a more than adequate job of assessing the technical competence of new hires, it's very rare for a job failure to result from inability to do the technical components of the work.  Surveys indicate that over 90% of first-year job failures result from something totally different... more about that in a minute.

There are three major components that define success or failure at any job, and a rational selection process at any stage needs to address all three of them.  Not to keep you in suspense, they are:  skills, motivators, and temperament -- or, to put it differently, what you do well, why you do it, and how you do it.  The supplemental handout will provide some hands-on tools for assessing these components in yourself or in a job candidate.

Skills are the first and perhaps most obvious component.  It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand why skills matter, but let's take a few minutes to discuss the nature of skills and their relationship to the world of work. 

Tom Jackson, a nationally regarded career expert, likes to ask audiences, "Why do jobs exist?"  Often he gets nothing more than a sea of blank stares in return.  The answer, of course, is that jobs exist because unsolved problems exist, or to put it differently, because unmet needs exist.  A job is nothing more than a formal invitation, or formal opportunity, to solve a certain class of problems.  A world without problems would be a world without jobs.

Skills come in because they represent the means by which people solve problems, or the tools they apply to problems and needs in order to address them.  Hence, they are, again in Jackson's phrase, "the coin of the job realm".   By assessing skills as an employment selector, you are asking, in essence, "Can this person do this work?", that is, "Can s/he solve the kinds of problems that define this work?"

Skills come in two subvarieties, technical skills and transferable skills.  Again, many uninformed decision makers focus on the wrong side of the coin in evaluating candidates' skill levels.  

Technical skills are those that are learned -- either formally or informally, whether in school or on the job.  They must be acquired in some way, either by being passed on from expert to novice or from teacher to student, or through a time-consuming and costly process of trial and error.  More importantly, they are what career counselors call "domain-specific".  That is, they represent a form of highly job-specific or content-specific knowledge that may have little or no usefulness or applicability outside the framework of that job.  An example might be knowing how to perform neurosurgery -- a very useful skill if you happen to want to get a job as a neurosurgeon, but not much use in any other context.

Transferable skills, though they can be modified or improved by means of experience or practice, can be thought of as natural gifts, innate abilities, or built-in aptitudes.  The seeds from which adult-level transferable skills eventually sprout are usually quite evident as early as age five or six, and as a result, many people can get a good handle on what their best transferable skills by asking themselves what they did well in grade school:  were you the natural leader?  the good listener?  the class clown?  the athletic one?  the smart one?  the popular one?  These kinds of general skills are called "transferable" because they can easily be repackaged to fit a new and different work environment;  people carry these skills with them as they change from one job title or one job context to another.  For instance, I've had five "real" jobs in my professional life;  in only one of the five did my job title say "teacher" or "trainer", but in all of them, I've made good use of my transferable skill of teaching and training, that is, imparting information to others by means of the spoken word.  (See the supplemental handout for an easy way to identify and classify transferable skills.)

Here are four important pieces of information to keep in mind about these two kinds of skills.

First, while many employment decision makers place undue emphasis on technical skills, in my view that is a significant mistake.  Except in the most narrowly technical fields, these skills comprise no more than 25% of the competencies required for success on the job.  What's more, unlike transferable skills, they can easily be acquired by a person who has the right natural aptitude and an appropriate general background.  While no company wants to train a person from scratch or from the ground up, it's also true that many organizations vastly overemphasize the importance of domain-specific knowledge or inside information.  

Second, a person's career path may largely be a function of whether s/he emphasizes the development and use of technical or of transferable skills.  According to Harry S. Dent, Jr., the single most important career decision a person can make is to decide whether to become a specialist or a generalist.  Specialists, who emphasize the technical skill side of the coin, make a living by becoming expert at the 80% of domain-specific knowledge that most others can't be bothered to learn or don't care to know.  Because they may spend much of their time talking with other specialists, the danger for them is in becoming too narrow -- which can mean they lose touch with the ability to communicate effectively with nonspecialist types, or can specialize so narrowly that they become irrelevant or obsolete, learning more and more about less and less until finally they know everything about nothing.  Generalists, on the other hand, who emphasize the transferable skill side of the coin, make a living by communicating effectively across functional lines (both inside and outside of the boundaries of the employing organization) and by wearing different hats.  The danger for them is in becoming too shallow -- a jack (or jill) of all trades, but a master of none -- and confusing likeability (or relational skill in general) for competence.

Third, knowing the four subtypes of transferable skills is a useful way to size up yourself or someone else.  The four categories are skills with things, skills with ideas, skills with people, and skills with data/details.  Note the two dimensions or two polarities involved:  a preference for impersonal versus personal roles and tasks that may define whether one works best with things or with people, and a preference for abstract versus concrete roles and tasks that may define whether one works best with ideas or with details.  Most people, just listening to that description, can identify their strongest area of the four and their weakest area.  Can you?

Fourth, making an appropriate, balanced, and objective assessment of your best skills is important because of the difficulty most of us have in shoring up weak areas.  Peter Drucker -- still active as a management consultant at the age of 93 -- is famous for the saying, "It is much easier to move from competence to excellence than it is to move from mediocrity to competence."  The recent best seller Now, Discover Your Strengths has the same theme:  that all of us have no more than five core strengths around which we need (if we are wise) to build our career paths, because when it comes to transferable skills, these are generally hard-wired patterns that are impervious to dramatic change.

Motivators are the second general component of selection.  These provide the answer to the question, "Will this person do this work?", that is, "Does s/he have sufficient intrinsic motivation that the job will get done even when the boss isn't around?"  

From the standpoint of the individual employee and her/his career satisfaction, of course, motivators make all the difference in the world.  (The best jobs, as social psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi notes, are those in which work and play are indistinguishable, the only difference being that work comes with direct deposit.)   But employers need to care about motivators as well, because a host of variables from retention to productivity to customer service depend on having self-motivated employees who like what they do, are proud of what they do, and want to do lots more of it in the future.

Management expert Edgar Schein believes that there are eight basic motivators or "career anchors" around which people build their careers and base their career decisions.  If you pay a person in the wrong "psychological currency" for them, you may be very surprised when they quit a job precipitously, for "no apparent reason".  After all, you were rewarding them handsomely -- just not in the way they wanted.  Since we all take ourselves as benchmarks of normality, it's easy to reward others in the ways we ourselves would like to be rewarded, but that doesn't always work well.  (See the supplemental handout for information about what the eight categories are and how to assess them.)

Temperament -- also known as personality or style -- is the most neglected by decision makers who think of that as too subjective or too "touchy-feely" in nature.  But contrary to what these people may think, these issues aren't just the icing on the cake;  they're the biggest layer of the cake.  Personality mismatches are responsible for over 90% of those first-year job failures mentioned above.  Whether defined in terms of people skills, communication skills, culture fit, or something else, this component answers the question, "Will this person fit in here?" -- that is, "How does this person approach her/his work (and is that style and approach consistent with the culture of the organization)?"  While behaviors (including skills) can be learned, personality is more or less fixed.  A person can no more change his basic nature by willing to do so, as psychiatrist David Keirsey notes, than a snake could swallow itself.  Thus, a good fit is mission-critical.

There are five basic ways people differ in terms of their basic personality or style, the so-called Big Five personality dimensions.  See the supplemental handout for detailed information about what those five dimensions are and what difference they make in the areas of career choice, learning styles, work cultures, communication strategies, and more.

From a pie-chart or percentage of variance standpoint, overall skills account for about 25% of a rational, balanced employment decision;  motivators, about 35%;  and temperament, about 40%.  Since the standard job interview in America today focuses mostly on skills, and more narrowly still on the 1/4 of skills defined as technical, this means that 100% of time and effort is devoted to learn about 6% or 7% of what you really need to know about a job candidate!  Unless ineffective decision making is your hobby, this is not optimal.

Question #2:  Why?

The world of work has changed more in your lifetime than in the 150 years preceding your birth, but not everyone (especially in central Wisconsin) is as aware as they should be of how things have changed.  Here are a few wake-up statistics for you:

This has a number of significant implications for employment decision makers who are concerned about retention and job satisfaction.  Among the most important of them:

1. Generational differences in workplace expectations mean that today's up-and-coming employees bring a vastly different set of values to the workplace than their predecessors of only a generation ago.  For instance, the number of graduating college seniors who list "making a lot of money" as a primary goal tripled in the years from 1970 from 1990, but "making a solid contribution to my community or organization" is starting to edge out purely financial considerations among the very young now.  See the supplemental handout for detailed information about generational differences in work motivation.
2. Retention is now paradoxical in that the best way to keep good people is to make it easier for them to leave.  Since enhancement of marketability (not job security) is at the heart of rational career planning for people today, helping people to multiply their options is one of the best ways to keep the good ones around.
3. Organizational career development is now a growth industry as companies realize that they need to partner with employees to generate win-win scenarios for both.  The old conventional wisdom was that employees had to take care of themselves by themselves.  The new CW is that while they still have primary responsibility, smart companies will help them do it -- and enhance both retention and productivity in the process.

Question #3:  How?

In this section, we'll be looking at the before, during, and after of the selection process with more of a "nuts and bolts" or "hands on" emphasis... what to do and, just as important, what not to do.

Selection preplanning

By far the most important thing you can do in preparing for selection is to get specific about the nature of the position you are trying to fill.  Apart from a formal job description (one that emphasizes, not only duties to be performed, but -- the real point of any job -- results to be achieved), you'll want to state in clear, unambiguous terms the reason why this position exists in the first place, and/or (if it's not a new position) the reason a vacancy exists or will exist.  Then, make two lists:

Having made these lists honestly (if working as part of a team, have each team member make separate lists before combining them), you'll want to do two things with them:

Finally, check with legal counsel to make sure that you're not running afoul of employment discrimination laws in the selection of your criteria or in the means by which you plan to assess and evaluate them.  (But if you're told -- wrongly, to my knowledge -- that subjective or psychological characteristics can't be included, get a second opinion!  They can, if treated properly.)

This phase of the process is the single most important one.  Ninety percent of solving any problem is stating the problem clearly and correctly.

Selection interviewing

Like clothing styles, hair styles, and other matters of personal appearance, interview styles come and go.  For instance, 10 to 15 years ago, the "stress interview" was all the rage, the idea being that you'd try to bring out the candidate's dark side by alienating, challenging, and even insulting him or her.  Mercifully, that style has now largely been relegated to the dustbin of HR history.  About half as many years ago, "work simulations" and "leaderless work group simulations" were thought to be a substitute for traditional interviews, but their pitfalls have now become increasingly obvious.  Today, "structured interviews" are in vogue;  more about them in a minute.

Before going further, take a minute or two to think of two or three interview questions that are your favorites, that you most like to ask candidates, those that you think are most likely to get past the canned answers and get to something authentic and useful.  Here are my personal favorites:

1. What made the difference between your biggest success and your biggest failure?
2. Tell me about a time you lied.
3. Tell me about a famous person you admire, or whom you have tried to model your life after.
4. What is the biggest mistake you ever made?
5. What do you enjoy doing so much that you'd do it for free?
6. How many barbers are there in Chicago?

We'll be examining interview questions in a few minutes, but first, let's consider the purposes and structure of the typical interview.  Interviews are like a dance, in at least two ways:  first, they tend to be tightly scripted maneuvers in which the same "steps" have to be followed each time (at least on the part of you, the interviewer);  second, both parties are trying to put their "best foot forward".  Consequently, the real purpose of the interview -- getting behind the mask, the public persona, the polished self-presentation, to get at the real person and predict what s/he will be like on the job -- can easily be obscured.  To make matters worse, the most effective communicators are not always the best candidates for the job.

Exactly what is it that interviewers need to know about an candidate?  The three basics, of course:

1. Can s/he do the job?
2. Will s/he do the job?
3. Will s/he fit in here?

So you naturally have to ask about skills (and accomplishments as a way of learning about the effective application of skills in the real world), about motivations, and about style or personality.  Along the way you'll want to ask about the flip side or dark side of each of these:  about areas of incompetence, about failures, about demotivators, about personality or relationship flaws:  in other words, about weaknesses.  And naturally you'll want the kind of information that can be used to verify a candidate's veracity, such as, "Why are you on the job market?"

Fortunately, variations on a few basic questions can get at all of the above, if you're careful in your approach.  Here are five "questions behind the questions" you will be asking.

1.  Who are you?

"Tell me about yourself" is still the most statistically frequent and popular way to begin an interview.  True, it's dangerously open-ended, but it sets the stage for the rest of the discussion, it puts candidates at ease, it (normally) gives you access to a quick overview of the candidate's career history, and (most important) it lets you in on the candidate's mindset and her/his idea of how to put "the best foot forward".  The answer you get should be focused, relevant to the job and to the organization, appropriately but not excessively detailed, well rehearsed but not canned or memorized, and authentic.  It should be organized around a set of no more than two or three basic "selling points" that represent structural themes of the candidate's self-presentation.  If any of these elements are missing, odds are you have an underprepared or unmotivated candidate or a poor communicator who doesn't know how to be analytical or proactive.

2.  Why are you here?

That is, why are you on the job market at all;  and given that you are, why are you interviewing with us specifically for this job in particular?  Of course you're looking to screen out people who provide clear evidence of being "a problem" (that is, they're job hoppers, or they're on the market because they couldn't get along with their former employer and -- by extension -- probably with you either, or a nasty habit like heroin addiction or embezzlement impedes their career effectiveness).  You're also trying to weed out people who lack a clear career focus and objective;  interviews aren't career counseling sessions, and a person who is still trying to figure out what s/he wants shouldn't be interviewing (yet).  Since this is a stressful question for many people, be on the alert for the overly canned, cliche-ridden, or not-quite-believable answer.  Also beware of the person whose real reason for interviewing with you is sheer desperation:  "I'm here because I love a challenge, because your company has such a positive reputation, and because my car is about to be repossessed."

3.  What can you do for us?

Please remember that while we all have many strengths, a strength is of value to an employer only if it is relevant as a means by which the kinds of problems that company faces can be solved (in whole or in part) by the application of that strength.  Anything else is icing on the cake -- interesting, possibly impressive, but really beside the point.  Look for candidates who understand that jobs = unsolved problems, and who can present a clear pattern of relevant skills and capabilities.  Does the candidate have a realistic idea of what the job is all about, that is, the kinds of problems s/he will be paid to address day by day?  Can s/he offer clear, specific, credible evidence of having solved similar or analogous problems in the past, by telling stories (perhaps using the C-A-R or Challenge-Action-Result model) about that?  "Why should we hire you and not someone else?" should yield information about specific value-added unique strengths, but without trashing the competition or betraying either arrogance or shaky self-esteem.

4.  What liabilities come with you?

Since, in hiring someone, you'll end up having to take the bitter with the sweet, it's important to know up front what baggage the candidate brings along with her/himself.  Of course, knowing that you want to know, and knowing that it can be to her/his disadvantage to tell you, the typical candidate will have various creative ways to sidestep questions about flaws and weaknesses.  Avoid people who are too evasive, or who appear to think that they have no flaws, remembering that Adolf Hitler thought he was perfect.  Aim instead for people who know their weaknesses, but also know how to manage them -- and can prove it by telling stories about that.  Look for people who understand that weaknesses are strengths in disguise, strengths taken to excess -- and who can use that knowledge to self-manage their weak suits.  While lack of direct experience is not always a serious weakness, do bear in mind that you have to recoup your sunk costs in hiring;  there's a big difference between someone who claims in vague terms to be a quick learner and someone who can prove it by talking about how they did so in the past -- and who is being proactive about lifelong learning in the present moment.

5.  What do you want from us?

Not just money, of course;  naturally you don't want to discuss that too soon, since the party who mentions money first loses.  But assuming that a meeting of the minds regarding compensation can eventually be arranged, what else does this candidate want from the job and from the organization?  For instance, what are her/his long-range career aspirations, goals, and expectations?  What does s/he look for in terms of an ideal work culture?  What kinds of problems does s/he most enjoy solving?  What gets this candidate out of bed in the morning, besides an alarm clock?  Avoid people with an entitlement mentality or an unrealistic expectation about fast-track careering, but also people who have vague, ill-defined goals, or whose life revolves around the viewing of Mannix reruns.

The key to conducting structured interviews is that you don't ask for generic, abstract self-assessment statements ("Are you an organized person?"), but instead, for specific examples of how a given skill was used, a given situation handled, or a given problem solved ("Tell me about a time when your organizational skills benefited your employer.")  In this way you can pose specific situations, with a focus either on the past:

Or the present:

Or the future:

Obviously, to maintain objectivity and consistency in evaluating candidates, you (as an individual or as part of an evaluation team) will have to determine, up front and in advance, the answer to three very important questions:

If you're careful, structured interviewing is a great technique.  It gets to the heart of the matter, and allows you to treat all candidates equally (although if taken to extremes, it can lead to a rather stilted, formal, overly scripted interview style that prevents candidates from being themselves, and thus prevents you from evaluating the communication-relational style or "natural give and take" of the candidate;  thus, what you get from the candidate is less of a slice of her/his realistic behavior than you might get from less formal styles).  

Selection cross-validation

Even if you're the trusting type, assuming that everything a candidate tells you is the unvarnished truth is a good way to diminish your own job security.  One of your fundamental responsibilities is to "triangulate" on the truth, on the assumption that even if a candidate is being as honest and upfront as s/he knows how, others' perspectives are equally important.

As a provider of psychological assessment services (personality and skill testing), I naturally believe strongly in the power of an objective approach that allows you to directly compare candidates' strengths and weaknesses, motivational patterns, style, personality, and the like to established norms.  In most cases, occupation-specific norms are available that allow you to benchmark the candidate relative to others who are working in a given profession or field.

Not only does the use of such instruments help shield you from legal liability to some extent, as long as you measure defined job-essential characteristics, but they sharpen your sense of when to trust your gut reaction... and when not to.  In my experience, about 75% to 80% of the time, assessment data verify and confirm interview impressions, making you, in essence, twice as sure as you were before that you've correctly sized up the candidate.  But in that 20% to 25% of cases when there's a mismatch, you can then go back and do some more digging -- via reference checks or in a second round interview.  Early, real-time assessment feedback can include suggested interview probes to guide the final interview process.

Reference checking is, of course, an important part of the employment decisionmaker's arsenal, but in our increasingly litigious climate (the Wall Street Journal recently featured an article by an economist who argued that the attorney-to-general-population ratio in the U.S. is about 5 times what it optimally should be for the efficient conduct of business relations in society), you're likely to get a lot of nonresponses from the individuals you poll -- "name, rank, and serial number" responses that verify employment dates and job titles, but little else.  A high degree of creativity is needed to get past that protective shield.  "Would you hire this person again?" is an old chestnut that HR folks use to try to pierce the veil, but of course, many companies now have a blanket policy against rehiring any terminated individual, mostly to allow them to sidestep that question.

In checking with the references that the candidate her/himself has provided, you're naturally working with people who are on the opposing team and who are well coached (which means that if you do get a negative reply, take it very seriously because it means that something is very wrong).  But if you're clever in the questions you ask, you can sometimes find out the dark side.  You can ask questions that would be inappropriate in other kinds of reference checks;  after all, a candidate-supplied reference can't, and shouldn't, stonewall or sidestep a question.  "We all have faults.  Tell me about one of X's" is a good one to start with;  it's hard for the candidate's reference to dispute the premise of the question, and if s/he offers a pseudo-weakness like "X works too hard", of course you follow up with, "Tell me how that is detrimental to the company X works for" and keep probing until you get a weakness that fits those parameters.  Or try terms like "developmental area" (hey, none of us has completely arrived yet) rather than the scarier "weakness" or "flaw" or "problem".

Selection aftercare

Having collected as much data from as many different sources as you can, it's time to decide.  (Remember that the purpose of having different sources of data is to "triangulate" on a consensual picture of the candidate in question, to factor out sources of bias.  If one person calls you a jackass, forget it;  but if ten people do, buy a saddle.)  Here are some thoughts about how to integrate information in the decision-making process, and what to do once you've decided.

1. Be aware of your own proclivity for decision-making.  Are you more deliberate or more impulsive in your decision approach?  Do you decide off the cuff or analyze things to death?  Do you decide more with your heart or your head?  Do you focus more on the short-term or on the long-term?  Be sure (especially if you're making a solo decision) that you don't neglect the sides of the decision equation that are foreign to you.  Don't forget to use both sides of your brain -- your left-hemisphere "accountant" and your right-hemisphere "poet".  See the supplemental handout for more about that.
2. In group decisions, aim for a process that legitimates everyone's viewpoint before moving to closure.  Not everyone has to agree with the decision (usually, since most companies can't afford to give veto power to each member of the decision team), but everyone has to have a chance to be heard.  Remember, the voice you don't want to hear is almost always the voice you most need.  Try working with the liberating assumption, "What if I were completely wrong?" or at least "What if I've overlooked something important?"  It can help to appoint one person to play devil's advocate;  some people (especially if they have a contrary streak) take to that role as a duck to water.  Let them;  most bad collective decisions are due to groupthink and me-too-ism.  Here's where an objective external viewpoint (e.g., assessment data) can help;  sometimes it's important for someone to make clear that the emperor has no clothes.
3. Clarify ambiguous data before deciding.  If assessment data are involved and you don't understand the assessment report, ask the assessment expert (provider)!  If reference checks have yielded nebulous results, a follow-up call may be in order.  If a candidate's answer to a particular question seems fuzzy, ask each team member what her/his interpretation is.
4. Use your preselection criteria as a primary guide to decision making.  For one thing, that's how you mount a successful legal defense in the rare event that a candidate who didn't get the nod questions your choice in court.  Besides, it makes for consistency and improves your batting average.
5. Before making a final decision, ask, "What have we overlooked?"  Often the answer is "nothing", but at least you asked!  Most people (and most teams) don't.

Concluding unscientific postscript

According to a no doubt apocryphal story, an admirer of the famous statue David once asked Michelangelo how he ever managed to create such a compelling masterpiece.  "Easy," the artist replied without missing a beat.  "I just got a block of marble and a chisel, and cut away everything that didn't look like a shepherd."

The moral of that story?  Employee selection (like sculpture) is as much of an art as a science.  If the guidelines above have given both the analytical and the intuitive parts of you some new ideas with which to do your job, I've done mine.  Thanks for inviting me. 

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Copyright (c) 2002 -- Marlowe C. Embree, Ph.D.

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