Selecting the "Right Fit" Employee

Selection of good fit for a future candidate is becoming tougher by the day in India. One of the biggest issue facing managers in India is the 'Right' fit of a potential candidate with the job. Managers are looking for magic wands to find the 'Right' candidate and get them to perform in their team.




Selection process needs a serious overhaul and as serious HR professionals we should work on creating a better selection process rather than depending on the legacy 30 - 60 minutes interviews. It is a known fact and proven science that interviews are the poorest ways of selecting candidate (0.2 correlation with success on the job), yet they are the most popular. The answer is simple, they are the quickest, they give managers the power to play God and they are easy since someone else is on the mat. Good selection takes a lot of work and managers have to work hard at it, not many of us like to work hard at something when we know our judgement can not be questioned and we have the upper hand in the game anyway.

It took me a while to realise all this and I started doing something about it, with the help and buy in of my business colleagues we introduced a mini assessment centre way to hire the "Right" fit for the company and we implemented it for the most critical job of the organisation, the frontline employee.

We developed a "Push" and "Pull" approach to go along with a mini Assessment Centre for selection in the most critical roles of the organisation (hired large numbers too). Let me share my experience: 

We developed a simple demographic (filled by HR) & skills "go" , "no go" test taking less than 15 minutes of candidates time. Very useful for screening! This was done after examining past 3 years data matching the high performing current employee with her demographic profile borrowing from the CRM tools deployed by Marketing.

Underlying Belief in selection is that more data points help you know the candidate better and hence help in selection (recently read Daniel Kahneman's, Thinking Fast & Slow, he endorses the view) - hence a candidate should meet more people preferably 3-4 different interviewers in the organisation, go through an assessment test (controversial perspectives on the same but generates helpful data points) and a live job project/situation. I have tried this technique and it brought a better correlation between selection & retention. Effectiveness in job parameters could not be proven at that time but I am sure we can build that too. 


In the interview we checked for Values, done by all the 3-4 interviewers by asking her a set of questions pertaining to organisational values and her views on the same. We generated different questions on testing these out and also her personal values and watched for common data points. 

For all of the above to happen the candidate usually have to have 3-4 touch points with the organisations and all the above is a "push" technique since he is being tested time and again. If the candidate is serious s/he will keep coming back to do this (helped me understand his seriousness for THIS job and company). 

We pulled him by showing him the company, explaining more than what is available on website, shared profiles and traits of successful employees in the company. let him talk to current employees and know the "Real" organisation with its positives and negatives. 



This push and pull combined help us take calls which were better than taking gut decisions and 30 minute interviews. The managers were trained and became better and better at selection just like any other skills which becomes sharper with high usage.

Happy Selecting!!