ray gibson - bringing personality to the hiring proces - ehrm conference 2015
TRANSCRIPT
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500 000 CVs
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“Bringing personality to the hiring process”
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$456 Billionin employer recruitment costs for 2015.
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How do you hire?
Personality first!
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RetailHospitality
Consulting
Sales & MarketingCustomer Service
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Trend: Social job search
70% found jobs
through friends
Personal recommendations!
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careerbuilder.com 2015 CANDIDATE BEHAVIOR U.S. JOB-SEEKER DATA
Insights: Company websites VERY important
7 people contacted for every 1.3 job boards
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careerbuilder.com 2015 CANDIDATE BEHAVIOR U.S. JOB-SEEKER DATA
Insights: •People are looking for a personal process
•Keep it simple
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90%of job seekers say they will use
mobile job search this year. (Glassdoor)
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careerbuilder.com 2015 CANDIDATE BEHAVIOR U.S. JOB-SEEKER DATA
Insights: • Make careers pages
responsive • Give users less to read/type • Allow job seekers to send
themselves job links • Test more great tools!
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Why do we value personality in hiring?We SAY:
• Cultural fit
• Fitness to job requirements
• Prediction of performance/reliability
We DO:
• Look for “spark” when we meet in person
• Notice enthusiasm
• Value creativity and individuality
The rise of online personality assessments
• Hiring managers are increasingly looking for ways to more precisely filter candidates - speed and precision
• Big Data and algorithmic matching are on the rise
• Skills and quantitative requirements can be matched - personality is tricky to automate
Personality testing• Many based on established academic
research that has been around for decades - "Big 5 Model”
• Assesses personality like a “skill”
• Aims to make personality objectively quantifiable
Personality testing• Often automated with web apps and forms
now, and deployed in volume
• To be accurate, test must be:
• Properly designed
• Properly administered
• Properly interpreted
Most implementations of HR personality tests are self-reported
• Candidates are highly incented to consciously or unconsciously provide false answers
• Internet forums exist where candidates share “correct” answers
• Repeat administrations of self-reported personality tests show extreme changes in answers, well beyond normal range of personality shift in adults in short timeframes (Cornell study)
Can be informative IF:• Careful selection of test questions is tailored to specific job
• Administration is under the guidance of testing professionals and not self-reported
• Self-reporting assessment is not tied to immediate hiring event
• Interpretation is very narrow and specific to job category, rather than generalized, and performed under professional guidance
• These conditions are rarely all met, however
Microexpressions and video analysis• Based on involuntary facial expressions
that reveal emotional state
• Regarded as more universal/cross-cultural than many test questionnaires
• We subconsciously detect many microexpressions in regular conversation - training required to identify systematically
• Far more difficult to fake - requires extensive training
Microexpressions and video analysis• Can be assessed from in-person contact or video
• Video interview tools are beginning to offer microexpression analysis
• Accuracy and usefulness for employment measures is still controversial
• Not all microexpression cues are relevant to hiring decision - e.g., “fear” microexpression can be ambiguous in interview situation
• Extremely difficult to automate - no reliable unsupervised microexpression analysis algorithms currently exist
Video intros and “cover letters”• Research indicates that accurate first impressions are formed in first
5-20 seconds - video intros accelerate first impressions
• Toledo study - untrained graders seeing only first 15 seconds of interview video correlated 90% with original 20-minute live interview by trained interviewers, using same 6-page questionnaire
• Harvard study - untrained graders watching 10-second video clips of teachers significantly correlated with course evaluations by students at the semester
• Parallels initial engagement interaction candidate will have with your customers
• Does not result in uniform objectively-quantified comparative measures
In-person and video interviews
• First-hand observation of personality
• Similar advantages to video intros
• Time-intensive for high-volume recruiting
• Video can be geography-independent
People are not PDFs
People are not PDFs• Would you want your next job decided on a
personality assessment?
• Which of you feel that a computer will make a fair judgment if it filters you out early?
• Hiring by assessment tests and algorithms will get you people who fit the algorithm
• Who defines your culture? Why shouldn’t it evolve?
• Would the most innovative people make it through your hiring process?
Summary• Use personality assessments with caution -
keep in mind it is not “one-size-fits-all-jobs” and can be faked by applicants. Don’t rely too much on single tools
• Maintain great personal contact in the process (especially when you’re trying out new things)
• Assess personality without being impersonal - don’t be afraid of your own intuition - science has proven it’s usually right!
“...personality tests used in employee selection account for approximately 5% of an employee’s job success…”- 2007 review paper
