How to hire the best and the brightest every time

If your job is finding and keeping the best and the brightest employees you possibly can, the best and brightest advice is to hire slowly. Take your time, be careful. As Steven S. Little, the business growth expert, quips, you're getting married?

What is an owner or human resources manager to do?

Use assessments, according to some of the happiest HR managers. A state-of-the-art selection testing system is worth more than its weight—in golden employees.

Why? Assessments do the inside work for you. Without x-ray vision or the ability to read minds, you can go only by outward appearances: a firm handshake or pleasant smile, for instance. We can easily be fooled by appearances. A fast-talking, gregarious person may seem intelligent and energetic. On the other hand, he may be simply nervous.

Assessments look beyond the quick smile, the firm handshake, the punctuality to reveal what you need to know about a job candidate: skills, knowledge, aptitude, and personality.

Assessments are also a shortcut. If you have ever hired the wrong person, didn’t you know it soon? Probably within a couple of weeks you recognised this candidate should have been shown the door instead of the cubicle. Although you took him round to meet everyone in person, you now realise you must fire him or her quickly, because it’s not fair to either of you for him to be in the wrong job. Then you have to start the candidate selection process again. Assessments improve your hiring decisions by letting you know now which candidate would be a risk.

To learn about hiring assessments, I interviewed representatives of several companies who were enthusiastic about their testing results, i.e., terrific employees.

A human resources researcher with a well-known major pharmaceutical company uses selection testing to hire their district sales managers. Since 2002 they have assessed between 1,200 and 1,300 candidates. He was particularly pleased to recommend the testing firm he used, Resource Associates (RA), a Knoxville, Tennessee company in business since 1980 that offers state-of-the art selection testing systems at a reasonable price. He would tell others they are an excellent company to work with, in part because they provide customised personality assessment. The client custom picks the dimensions they want to measure in a candidate.

In addition, all the testing can be done over the Internet, rather than face to face. Perhaps eliminating the outward-appearance factor is an additional advantage of RA’s online testing capabilities.

Russell Bearden is employment manager at DENSO Manufacturing, the world’s largest manufacturer of Japanese original equipment automotive parts. He has been using the testing services of Resource Associates for about ten years to fill their professional and production positions and estimates they have evaluated over 9,000 associates. Bearden stated that the assessments are “extremely predictive of a candidate’s behaviour and how they will work.”

He adds, “The tests now have enough weight with DENSO’s administration that they would not fail to hire an approved candidate. I highly recommend Resource Associates.”

Rick Penpek is owner and President of Strategic Employee Services, Inc., a Knoxville, Tennessee-based HR consulting company. He worked with a leading U.S.-based bellows manufacturer to meet their unique re-start need. They needed to staff over a hundred employees in a short time—a month. First they turned to the state employment office, who were willing but unable to process that many persons so quickly. They then found Resource Associates, who were willing and able to meet their needs and their timeframe.

Resource Associates analysed the manufacturer’s needs and customised their tests accordingly. Finally, RA conducted massive testing and hiring to find the right candidates. Penpek was more than satisfied that they ended the process with “a very educated, qualified, skilled, and knowledgeable work force.”

Later Penpek told Resource Associates’ Dr. Lucy Gibson that after start-up the new workforce was responsible for a 20 percent improvement in overall plant productivity.

Dr. Warren Bobrow is an industrial psychologist who, with his California company, All About Performance (www.allaboutperformance.biz), who helps his corporate clients through the effective use of human resources. He says each candidate brings her own success factors to the opportunity. Assessments find out which skills, aptitudes, and personality traits indicate her ability to do the job well.

He said, “Good, consistent predictors of job performance save time.” After sifting out the unsuitable candidates with testing, fewer people must be interviewed. In addition, hiring the right employee the first time means you need not spend time repeating the process.

Did you know it costs 40 percent of a person’s salary to let him go? Using assessments saves money and time, because you can hire the right person the first time. Dr. Bobrow stated that preliminary evaluations for the job are much less costly than hiring and firing the wrong person. He summarised, “Testing yields an excellent return on investment.”

Denise Sanchez, working for staffing agency Manpower, administers the Resource Associates job candidate testing for Mikron Industries, a designer of numerous products for the building industry. Sanchez says that only the best candidates go through the Resource Associates testing. They use the RA math test, inspection test, perpetual speed and accuracy test, the 3-D spatial test, and personal inventory and compile all five scores into an average. (Applause to the Manpower people for taking the tests themselves first and allowing the candidates a practice session.)

Finally, I spoke with Drs. Gibson and Lounsbury of Resource Associates, Inc. (www.resourceassociates.com). John Lounsbury, Ph.D., President of Resource Associates, Inc., Professor, Fellow in the American Psychological Association, and author of over 100 scholarly research articles, explained that their state-of-the art selection testing systems are probably the single best, most cost-effective and predictive means of identifying people who will fit in best at a company and therefore use your personnel dollars wisely.

“That is our company's goal,” Lounsbury said, “To help companies enhance their workforce and thereby increase their productivity. We have been in business since 1980, providing cutting-edge testing products, first-rate customer service, and professional advice from industrial psychologists.”

Dr. Lucy Gibson, Vice President and licensed Industrial-Organisational Psychologist at Resource Associates, added, “A company's investment in human intellectual capital is probably the single most important component of long-term profitability. Information on mental aptitudes—one of the strongest predictors of long-term success on the job—is very difficult to obtain except through standardised means.

“Testing can provide additional information far beyond other selection tools. The insights you can gain about job candidates are often the crucial factors in making the right hiring decisions. And scores from a personality test can give you critical insights about applicants that can be used to probe the most relevant topics during the final interview.

“After our clients start using testing as part of their hiring process, we find that several things typically happen: New employees ramp up more quickly to full productive capacity. Not only do fewer employees present problems of not being able to do the job, they actually make fewer errors. People get along better in their work groups, and it follows that attendance improves, while turnover decreases.

“Evidence shows without doubt that standardised selection testing improves upon what companies are already doing in their selection. Typically, testing is an additional component of an otherwise comprehensive selection process. We hear time and again from our clients that it adds vital information to the selection process and helps the HR professionals focus attention on the most promising candidates. While testing initially looks like more time and work, people say it saves them time in the long run with higher-calibre workers and lower turnover.”

Drs. Lounsbury and Gibson related three examples of selection testing paying off:

1. In a retail-clothing store, Resource Associates tests identified that superior sales people produce on average 500 percent more sales than the average worker.
2. Test results at client companies often show turnover can be cut by half or more.
3. A large convenience store chain realised over 3000 percent return on investment (ROI) on testing their store managers.

Senior management in a company listens when you say you know how to dramatically increase the percent of superior workers. Everyone knows the difficulties and the enormous costs associated with hiring "bad apples" -- additional training and supervision time required, mediocre performance, bad work habits, etc. -- but not everyone knows how valuable superior workers are to a company. Published research shows that the value of an average worker is approximately two times his annual salary. If you could minimise the chance of hiring one "bad apple" per year, that could more than justify the cost of the selection testing program for one year.

If the jobs at your company require a high-calibre person, just add up all the ways that superior workers save your company money:

• Superior workers profit easily from instruction, so your investment in training dollars is spent wisely.
• Superior workers get up to full production quicker, which means a shorter, less expensive orientation phase.
• Superior workers make fewer errors, so they are more efficient in their everyday work, cut materials waste, and reduce equipment breakdowns.
• Superior workers are observant and thoughtful about their work, so they help you improve the processes and save even more money in the long run.
• Superior workers are dependable and reliable, so you can count on them.
• Superior workers make better team members, because they fit in well with other people on the job.

In short, superior workers are an excellent investment of company resources.

It's simple! An investment in selection testing reaps tremendous financial benefits year after year. Most companies find that Resource Associates selection tests are most cost-effective if used early in the selection process. Information on cognitive ability and personality can help you identify those people on whom you should focus most of your time with reference checking, interviewing, providing a tour, and so forth. Likewise, this information gives you valuable clues to help you probe into potential problem areas during other contacts with the candidates.

Dr. Gibson added, “Studies published in leading scholarly journals support what we see repeatedly with our own clients: Standardised testing is more reliable, accurate, and cost-effective than other selection tools. Compared to interviews, testing is more reliable and accurate by far, and it eliminates the personal biases of the interviewer. Compared to well-developed and comprehensive assessment centres, testing is somewhat more accurate, but it is vastly less expensive and time-consuming.”

So you want the brightest and the best employees, do you? It sounds like job selection testing is the way to go in the 21st Century.