The Human Resources professional has endured quite a bit over the past decade. Do they bring value to the business? Should they have a seat at the table? They’ve heard it all.
Truth is, HR can be very strategic to an organization’s overall success – they just need to start hiring on purpose by adding talent data to the hiring decision making process. Not deciding solely based on the data, but letting it advise the decision.
Right now, a typical job candidate hiring process may involve multiple interviews. A highly qualified, driven candidate sends over her resume, someone in HR likes it (or knows them) and sends back an email to schedule an interview. This could be via the phone or in person, depending on the organization. Candidate comes in, meets separately with HR and then the hiring manager who is from the Engineering department. Interview goes well and the candidate leaves happy.
This is where the process breaks down. The hiring decision is made on purely subjective measures.
A few days later, the two interviewing managers get around to discussing the candidate and their impressions. Based on their impression from the interview, one liked the candidate and wanted to move forward, one didn’t, the latter being more senior. Turns out they were looking for two different things – one manager wanted to prioritize skills over personality, the other how the candidate would “fit” on the engineering team. The more senior hiring manager decides against moving forward and tells HR to bring more candidates in.
A second candidate interviews and it goes really well. Turns out he attended the same school and fraternity as the senior hiring manager. The candidate had the skills and while some discussion examples indicated previous conflict with managers, this was lost in the course of the personal connection. There was an urgent need to fill the position so a decision was made to hire the candidate regardless of whether it was the right candidate.
He starts the job, but it turns out his inability to collaborate results in frequent conflicts with his co-workers on his team. Things go sour quickly and due to continuous conflicts and an unwillingness to adapt, he gets fired after 2 months. The engineering department hiring managers tell HR to start the process all over again.
Now put this situation in context of any functional area – not just engineering.
Talent analytics would have helped to predict and potentially alleviate this problem by improving the effectiveness of the hiring process. Having data about the personality of the candidate ahead of time would have given the hiring managers the opportunity to better predict how the candidate may interact with the rest of their co-workers. They could then strategically align their talent on the right team.
Instead of relying on two separate impressions and subjectively discussing the candidate without knowing what they’re really looking for, the hiring managers could have set a hiring benchmark which would establish some common ground “must have” criteria based on data. Had they done this ahead of time, they may have hired the first candidate who turned out to be an ideal candidate with future leadership potential at a competitor. Instead of hiring on purpose by selecting the right candidate, a hiring decision relied on subjective measures resulting in HR repeating the hiring process at the expensive of time and cost to the organization.
Scenarios like this happen all the time in industries worldwide. Is it any wonder why line managers get frustrated with HR? Organizations need to start hiring on purpose; Talent Analytics can help.
