Client Briefing Project: Talent Management

Abstract

Selection processes are meant to offer a small number of job applications to the potential employee’s bosses to make their hiring decision easier to do so; an assessment form might be utilized at each stage of the selection process to reduce the number of remaining candidates by eliminating those who do not meet the job requirements. Furthermore, it gives a holistic view of the recruitment process while minimizing the subjective parts of the final hiring choice. A company’s employee selection process is a sequence of activities it takes to recruit the best staffs. Effective selection can recruit individuals who will increase business morale, add to your corporate culture, and keep turnover low by matching the proper abilities to the open roles. It’s important to differentiate between personnel selection and employment. Each stage is different from the others. Recruitment occurs initially, then selection follows once you have an appropriate set of candidates to select from. Contemplate selection to be the phase in the employment process when the process narrows intensely, and the most favourable candidates is realised. In this paper, we shall look at setting up a talent selection program from the job analysis stage to implementing and applying appropriate selection methods.

Executive Summary

Personnel recruitment is evolving. While traditional face-to-face interviews are still widespread, the breadth of assessment processes used to inform applicant selection is growing, taking advantage of new technologies and new approaches and strategies, such as assessment centers and personality tests. This new collection examines the most pressing issues in recruiting, selection, and assessment today, presenting the most recent research from both the recruiter’s and applicant’s perspectives. Not every company will approach the selection process in the same manner. Before hiring, every business should aim to document its process. You gain better employees and reinforce your brand to the public by laying down the necessary steps and giving your candidates a reliable and enjoyable hiring experience. Receiving a good repute as a fair company involves a substantial employee selection procedure. Having a straightforward, professional selection procedure may encourage job searchers to choose you over other companies in the same industry. Identifying key result areas that are typical of the role and flexible enough to change with the job or be transferred to other parts of the organization is critical during the selection process. It is more important for the new employee to grasp what they are expected to accomplish (Farr et al., 2017).

Importance of Employee Selection Process

The excellence of your fresh hires is determined by your business’s staff selection procedure, which can impact both everyday tasks and long-term success. Selecting the wrong staff can reduce output, diminish quality, reduce customer contentment, and cause financial losses. Choosing the proper people, on the other hand, can improve self-esteem and business performance, as well as give your company a tactical advantage. Considering the significance of selection and its part in Human Resource Management will help you make improved recruiting choices. The selection process has both short-term and long-term impacts on a business. In the selection process, recruits understand their expected roles more than it is to comprehend the duties they will be performing. This process leads to practical goal-setting, which has been shown to improve job satisfaction and involvement in work (Ekuma, 2012). Because it is best practice to assess applicants against whether they have the knowledge, abilities, and traits to achieve the role’s results, the position description may include the selected job outcomes or key result areas. The advantage of mentioning important outcome areas in the job description is that it guarantees that applicants know the role’s success metrics.

Short-Term Impacts of Employee Selection

Employee selection is critical since the decisions taken will significantly impact day-to-day operations in terms of efficiency and quality. If you hire somebody only based on their credentials and talents on their qualifications and don’t get a good understanding of how they operate, you risk employing somebody who isn’t quick enough to hold onto the rest of the group or who chooses to relax back and give work to other people. Worse, your selection decision may not select generating high-quality work output, creating in extra costs and missed production. You can assist protect your business by carefully hiring employees.

Long-Term Impacts of Employee Selection

Employees you hire decide how your company runs daily and whether you’ll be competitive in the long run. If your organization needs to adjust job assignments in response to industry innovation, selecting workers who can simply accomplish the jobs needed today may limit you. Your chosen workforce should be adaptive enough to take on new responsibilities and master new technologies as needed. Otherwise, your organization may fall behind its competitors, resulting in negative financial and reputational consequences.

Effective Employee Selection Methods

General Mental Ability (GMA)/ Cognitive Ability

GMA, or cognitive ability, is maybe the most successful selection tool. This method can predict future success in any position, at any level (from entry-level to the top management positions), and in all businesses. Cognitive ability assessments are a type of pre-employment analysis that assesses how to fit candidates using a variety of rational functions such as math, abstract intelligence, problem-solving abilities, reading ability, and learning agility. GMA can be measured in various ways, ranging from quick paper-and-pencil examinations like the Wonderlic to additional costly online computer-adaptive assessments. Both computer and paper and pencil assessments are similarly practical, permitting businesses to choose the method that best suits their needs. The cognitive skills evaluation is a highly operative method for forecasting work achievement when adequately developed and performed. The risk of adverse effect, which is the detrimental influence of an unfair selection process on an endangered group of people, is one potential hazard.

Strengths of General Mental Ability (GMA)/ Cognitive Ability

1. From industrial to executive guiding, cognitive capacity is universally associated with performance across all vocations and levels.
2. When utilized for various jobs, GMA tests require little to no adjustment.
3. Tests are inexpensive, quick, and simple.
4. Although professional guidance (Opens in a new window) is usually necessary to integrate GMA testing into an administration’s selection structure, no specific training is required to administer tests.

Weaknesses of General Mental Ability (GMA)/ Cognitive Ability

Because GMA testing can harm the selection of some groups, it’s critical to keep track of demographics, scores, and employment decisions. When a selection technique results in a significant disadvantage for members of a minority group, this is known as adverse impact. Make it an argument to regularly monitor the negative effect of your cognitive ability assessments to avoid it hurting your recruitment efforts. However, these adverse effects can be prevented by;

1. Merging GMA tests with other selection methods
2. Avoiding assessment methods that require advanced English language abilities
3. Using “banding” to create scoring bands (Baykal, 2020).
4. Using assessments that have been shown to have lower adverse effects, such as the Wonderlic Progressive Matrices.

Structured Interviews

These aren’t your representative interviews when you’re inquired, “So tell me about yourself…” Candidates are tested with a sequence of separate, predefined job-related interrogations in structured or behaviorally-structured interviews. Their answers are evaluated using comprehensive standards (often accessible on a scoring scheme that provides full accounts of what establishes each score). A “panel” method is frequently employed, in which 2-3 qualified executives ask the questions and results each answer individually. After the interview, their evaluations are related to assess the reliability or integrate consistency. When interviewers differ in how to rate answers, they talk about it and agree (Harrison and Hartwell, 2020).

Strengths of Structured Interviews

1. When used properly, structured interviews are extremely effective at forecasting performance.
2. Individual prejudices from interviewing executives are minimized using scoring monitors.
3. Organizational/cultural and job-specific issues might be used to assess applicants.
4. Structured interviews can include current abilities.
5. They can be utilized for any occupation and at every level of work.
6. They can easily take the role of formal interviews as the ending selection hurdle (and are almost twice as effective at recognizing top candidates)
7. Once you’ve const8ructed an efficient interview procedure, you may use it repeatedly.

Weaknesses of Structured Interviews

1. A selection specialist’s help is essential when emerging interview questions and evaluation procedures, for instance, conducting job analyses and interviewing present job officials to categorizing important events.
2. Interviewing supervisors need to first thoroughly understand the structured interviewing procedure, which may demand a half-day preparation session.

Situational Judgment Tests (SJT)

The multiple-choice equivalent of organized interviews has been defined as these tests. In SJTs, candidates are asked to select how they would handle several theoretical events related to the desired job. The results show how that individual candidate will act in specific scenarios and make judgments. SJTs are one of the most acceptable ways for administrative and practical positions since they can forecast how applicants will respond to challenging issues (Georgiou, Gouras and Nikolaou, 2019).

Strengths of Situational Judgment Tests (SJT)

1. SJTs are more correct than any other measure for forecasting future performance among managerial roles.
2. It’s simple to administer and can be done with paper and pencil or on a computer.
3. The responses offer you a decent indication of how applicants might react in specific scenarios.
4. Interview questions can be tailored based on responses (for applicants)
5. The outcomes can help recognize areas for improvement (when given to existing employees)
6. A single SJT can be used over again for candidates in a similar position once it has been prepared.

Weaknesses of Situational Judgment Tests (SJT)

1. SJTs can be expensive and time-consuming to construct because they must be established after a comprehensive work analysis.
2. SJTs are rarely ubiquitous and are regularly unique to one job; for instance, an SJT established for a branch manager may not be effective for other positions)

Recommendations

Take notes the next time you hire if you don’t have a recorded personnel selection process. Examine what works and what doesn’t when it comes to hiring. Add any metrics you learned from this paper to your evaluation. Include it in your final, documented assessment plan if a step proves helpful. Good preparation also has a favourable impact on candidates’ perceptions of the organization and their experience with the recruiting selection process. Thinking about the processes in the recruiting selection process early and organizing the activity, resources, and time are all part of upfront planning. It is a crucial part of the recruitment selection process since it guarantees that the best approach is followed, helps to manage time restrictions, and streamlines the process for both the organization and the candidate. As a result, their likelihood of completing the recruitment process and accepting an offer of employment is influenced (Abbasi et al., 2020).

The administrative operations underpinning the recruitment selection process, applicant care management, and selection process evaluation are referred to as “planning” and “the process” in this toolset. This part should provide planning and evaluation templates to aid in thinking about and planning for the detailed phases involved in the recruiting selection process. The planning and assessment templates refer to other relevant procedures and templates in the tool kit for more detailed information. Working off a mental checklist is inferior to having a well-organized checklist that all members of the hiring team can follow. It also reduces the chances of you treating each application differently. An employee selection process can help you hire better people, and it’s also a sound legal strategy to protect your firm in the long run. For smaller businesses and start-ups aiming to scale rapidly, working with a recruitment partner that can help you develop a framework and aid with talent acquisition can save time and money.

Conclusion

Making successful selection decisions requires various tools, methods, and tactics. However, years of practical administrative research has revealed that the methods stated above are the most operational and manageable for realising hidden abilities. It’s worth observing that the use of more than one method or approach might significantly enhance your hiring practice’s analytical legitimacy. Given the benefits of high predictive validity selection methods for businesses, it’s reasonable to argue that maximizing predictive validity in selection should be a top priority for HR professionals (Woods et al., 2019). However, several assessment methods can be combined to achieve better results. For instance, combining GMA tests with structured interviews will be far more useful than using each of them individually. Also, any of these three methods would be better to use in analysing resumes and conducting unstructured interviews or administering non-validated off-the-shelf assessments. It’s worth remarking that extra viable choices were kept out on purpose: Assessment Centres were not stated because they are inappropriate for many occupations and organizations.

Reference list

Abbasi, S.G., Tahir, M.S., Abbas, M. and Shabbir, M.S. (2020). Examining the relationship between recruitment & selection practices and business growth: An exploratory study. Journal of Public Affairs. [online] doi:10.1002/pa.2438.

Baykal, E. (2020). Digital Era and New Methods for Employee Recruitment. Handbook of Research on Strategic Fit and Design in Business Ecosystems, pp.412–430. doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-1125-1.ch018.

Ekuma, K.J. (2012). The Importance of Predictive and Face Validity in Employee Selection and Ways of Maximizing Them: An Assessment of Three Selection Methods. International Journal of Business and Management, 7(22). doi:10.5539/ijbm.v7n22p115.

Farr, J.L., Tippins, N.T., Borman, W.C., Chan, D., Coovert, M.D., Jacobs, R., P Richard Jeanneret, Kehoe, J.F., Filip Lievens, S Morton Mcphail, Murphy, K.R., Ployhart, R.E., Pulakos, E.D., Reynolds, D.H., Ann Marie Ryan, Schmitt, N. and Schneider, B. (2017). Handbook of Employee Selection. Second Edition. | New York, NY: Routledge, Routledge.

Georgiou, K., Gouras, A. and Nikolaou, I. (2019). Gamification in employee selection: The development of a gamified assessment. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 27(2), pp.91–103. doi:10.1111/ijsa.12240.

Harrison, J. and Hartwell, C. (2020). Structuring the Social Media Assessment During the Hiring Process. Curiosity, [online] 1(1). https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/curiosity/vol1/iss1/1

Woods, S.A., Ahmed, S., Nikolaou, I., Costa, A.C. and Anderson, N.R. (2019). Personnel selection in the digital age: a review of validity and applicant reactions, and future research challenges. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 29(1), pp.64–77. doi:10.1080/1359432x.2019.1681401.