Recruit right, avoid disappointment

Above: Managing director of SACS Consulting, Andrew Marty

By Yasmin Noone

Aged and community care employers can avoid hiring the wrong employees by using a scientific predictive measure of staff success or failure every time they recruit, an organisational psychology expert said.
 
Managing director of SACS Consulting, Andrew Marty, who spoke at the 20th Tri-State Conference in Albury this week, stressed that recruitment in all industries simply comes down to a lot of science, a little bit of art and touch of sensitivity.

“Has anyone made a bad hire?” he asked the audience. 

“If you make a bad hire, after a year the cost of this is about two to three times that person’s salary.

“Recruitment methods are measures. Measures should be valid and reliable…If we [interviewed] a person today, would we come up with the same evaluation about them in two months time?”

The answer, he said, is no — not if the prospective employee is simply recruited according to traditional recruitment methods alone, like interviewing and reference checking.

However, Mr Marty believes that employers can predict whether or not the person is likely to succeed before they hire or reject them by using a ‘league ladder’ of recruitment predictiveness.

“The most powerful and difficult to achieve form of validity is predictive validity. This is the one we should care about.”

The league ladder of recruitment features statistical measures which range from 0 (lowest predictor of success) to 1 (highest predictor of success).

For example, age ranks 0.01 on the table because “age is as a terrible predictor of success at work”.

Hand writing analysis scores 0.02 and reference checking, only rates 0.26.

“If you conduct a reference check the accuracy of predictiveness is about six to seven per cent. That’s not great to be honest.”

Mr Marty reasoned that the value of the reference checking lies in the relationship between the referee and the prospective employee. If the referee, for example, has just stepped into the job and, as a consequence, does not have a relationship with the prospective employee, then the reference will be of a diminished value.  

“I’m not suggesting that you don’t do reference checks. I think that you should do everything that you can. Six per cent is better than nothing. But its accuracy is moderate at best.”

Research evidence, he said, suggests that testing is significantly better than interviewing potential staff as the top five methods of recruitment all involve some form of testing.

Verbal reasoning— the ability to express abstract ideas simply — is important for most jobs as “it is a good indication of communication and sensitivity when it comes to words”. 

“It means they learn really quickly then there are other people who just need to be trained twice- morning and afternoon,” he said jokingly. 

“Numerical reasoning is next. It doesn’t matter nearly as much as verbal reasoning but it does matter more to certain types of jobs.”

This is followed by abstract reasoning — the capacity to solve problems — which is an excellent predictor of a person’s ability to develop long-term strategies and tactics.

Mr Marty listed integrity testing as a major predictor of success, which Australian employers do not often use.

“It assesses a person’s ethical values and their honesty. It you do nothing but integrity testing it rates 0.41 while if you combine it with cognitive ability it is 0.65. At best, a structured interview scores 0.51.”

Integrity testing aims to target candidates with positive characteristics and eliminate candidates with negative characteristics- up to 90 per cent in some cases. Now used by Walmart in the USA, it was originally developed to screen out employees with an inclination to steal.

Testing usually involves asking “rude questions” like; ‘Have you ever assisted someone in coming late to work?’ or ‘Have you ever helped someone to steal something?’

“Integrity is a very unusual psychological construct. If you don’t have it, you don’t get it…If the person doesn’t have integrity they don’t understand what the problem is.”

“If you are not using integrity testing in your line of work, you should seriously consider it.

Personality is also a major predictor of success, rating .040. Mr Marty recommended using behavioural questions when interviewing, as this method can often gauge an interviewee’s personality type.

Mr Marty said that psychological testing and behavioural interviewing make for a great combination. Therefore, he said, recruiters should email behavioural interview questions to the prospective staff member and get them to do a psychological test prior to meeting them.

“Use ‘PGAE’ – please give an example in interviews and always relate it back to behaviour.

“…Reference check but do not just ring a referee up and [check the reference]. Give the referee behavioural questions.” 

“The art is crucial in recruitment.  But I suggest that in the horse race of life, back the science all the time.”