The point of this mini course is to encourage you into systemising your hiring process. The selection of new employees are about legal discrimination. Firstly, we start with a large group of applicants who are then filtered based on the Knowledge, Skills, Attitudes, Mental ability and Experience (KSAMEs) required for the job. We then end up with what we ‘hope’ is the right person for the job. From experience, most hiring managers do just that, rely on ‘hope’.

If choosing a new employee is about discrimination, then it is absolutely necessary that we discriminate fairly. A way to ensure this is to systemise your hiring process so that all applicants are treated identically and fairly. For example, all applicants are faced with the exact same interview questions, the same interview panel and the same psychometric assessments. This provides you with better hiring decisions as the process is standardised or comparing “apples with apples” if you will.

A good analogy of the selection process is to visualize an iceberg. A third of the iceberg is visible above the waterline. This depicts the Knowledge, Skills and Experience (KSE’s) that are observable of the candidate and whether or not they can do the job. This kind of information can be teased out through CV’s, Resumes or application forms as well as interviews and referencing. KSE’s are learned behaviours, thus they can be trained and coached.

It’s the two thirds that sit under the waterline that most hiring managers fail to assess – “will”, or “how” they will do the job? This represents the candidate’s innate personality characteristics, mental abilities, motives and values – In simple terms their attitude. This can only be assessed through psychological profiling. More about this in Tip 5.

Most managers hire on KSEs, but will usually terminate, or end up having problem employees, because of their personality, attitude and mental ability.

Having the right mix of personality traits and mental ability applicable to the job will insure the candidate applies their knowledge, skills and experience in the most productive way to the benefit of both the organisation and themselves.

As a note of caution, the selection process can be systemised in various ways which are dependent on the job position. These tips below are generalised and purely designed to get the ball rolling for you in terms of what elements you need to concentrate on when creating your own bullet-proof selection system.

What are the problems with the traditional selection process?

1. Poor/Lack of planning. Has a job analysis been done? Do you have a printed/written list of the Knowledge, personal Attributes and Skills required for this job?

2. Most managers hire on emotion. They are very good at hiring people on what they can do and poor at assessing who they are. Gut feeling and emotional judgement tend to rule – managers like and hire people who are like themselves.

3. Most managers hire based on experience instead of ability. For example, you could teach someone how to sell, how you can’t teach optimism, motivation and resilience to persuade.

4. Interviews are nothing more than unstructured one-on-one chats.

5. The interviewer does most of the talking.

6. The interviewer is not trained.

7. Seldom are the candidates’ personal characteristics tested through personality and critical reasoning tests.

8. No thorough referencing and/or background checking.

There are more; but the issues listed above are some of the main areas we would like to cover in this report.