Hiring the best job candidates

Memory Nguwi Continued From Last Week

• In this article, you will get insights into what is wrong with the current leadership selection model and how to correct it. This article is based on scientific research, the advice is solid.

“The first solution is to follow the signs and look for the qualities that make people better leaders. There is a pathological mismatch between the attributes that seduce us in a leader and those that are needed to be an effective leader. If we want to improve the performance of our leaders, we should focus on the right traits. Instead of falling for people who are confident, narcissistic and charismatic, we should promote people because of competence, humility and integrity. Incidentally, this would also lead to a higher proportion of female than male leaders — large-scale scientific studies show that women score higher than men on measures of competence, humility and integrity. But the point is that we would significantly improve the quality of our leaders.”

• Want to improve recruiting? Start by learning from 100 years of research [Schmidt] by Itamar Goldminz

The research by Schmidt which is the basis of this article is seminal. It is a relook at 100 years of research on what predicts employee performance on the job.

“The clear ‘winner’ in its ability to predict job performance on a standalone basis according to Schmidt’s analysis is ‘General Mental Ability’. These are on average able to predict 65% of a candidate’s job performance. This represents a 14% increase in their predictive ability compared to the ’98 data, unseating ‘work-sample test’ (’98–54%, ’16–33%). The average here only tells part of the story as more refined analysis suggests a significant difference in its predictive ability depending on job type: 74% for professional and managerial jobs, and 39% for unskilled jobs.”

•  How to reduce gender bias in your hiring process by Emilia Wietrak

This article summarises credible research on gender bias in the recruitment and selection process. The good thing is that the article gives you more than five takeaways that can be implemented immediately to improve your hiring process.

“According to the meta-analysis, jobs, where males are the majority of the workforce, are especially prone to gender discrimination. In these roles, men are more than 65% of employees, for example, CEO, IT consultant or police officer (Kanter, 1977). The research confirms that we tend to select male applicants for these roles. In other words, female applicants have less chance of getting hired because of their gender. By contrast, gender preference seems not to occur for female-dominated (with the percentage of women higher than 65%, for example, journalist or nurse) or integrated jobs (with the percentage of women between 35% and 65%, for example, psychology professor). Although the size of the effect is small, its long term consequences may be large. ”

•  Emotional Intelligence can predict performance – but not as well as you might think  by Lorenzo Gallì

“The major findings presented in this article are that emotional intelligence does predict performance but not much. What is even more startling is the finding that emotional intelligence is no more than a facet of already well known personality traits.

“Dana Joseph along with Jing Jin, Daniel Newman and Hernest O’Boyle (2015) looked at the correlation between emotional intelligence and job performance, among other variables, through a meta-analysis of the data from 15 meticulously selected studies. Their study can be considered the most up-to-date and trustworthy source of information on the subject at the moment.”

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“They found that emotional intelligence correlates moderately (0.29) with job performance as evaluated by supervisors. This means that emotional intelligence can predict only 8,4% of your people’s performance.For example, in a review of six different emotional intelligence tests, content experts found that 42% of questions were direct measures of emotional stability, which is a different, well-known personality trait (De Raad, 2005). Emotional intelligence scales also strongly overlap with “self-control” and “industriousness”, which are parts of another personality trait, conscientiousness. Along with emotional stability and conscientiousness, five other factors are often indicated as constructs that emotional intelligence has “borrowed”.

What’s wrong with job interviews, and How to fix them by Adam Grant In this article, Adam Grant looks at the interview methods for selecting employees. As you may be aware, the interview is one of the most popular selection methods but it has terrible shortcomings, which are clearly articulated by here:

“Interviews are terrible predictors of job performance. Consider a rigorous, comprehensive analysis of hundreds of studies of more than 32,000 job applicants over 85 years by Frank Schmidt and Jack Hunter. They covered more than 500 different jobs—including salespeople, managers, engineers, teachers, lawyers, accountants, mechanics, reporters, farmers, pharmacists, electricians and musicians—and compared information gathered about applicants to the objective performance that they achieved in the job.”

To be continued next week

• Nguwi is an occupational psychologist, data scientist, speaker and managing consultant at Industrial Psychology Consultants (Pvt) Ltd, a management and HR consulting firm. — ipcconsultants.com