To Get To The Best You Have To Test

The fatal flaw in most hiring procedures is an over-reliance on the value of the interview. This puzzles me. We have such a left-brained, logical culture – except when it comes to hiring. We want as many facts as possible to make most other business decisions. Why do we go with intuition when it’s time to decide who to hire?

A study conducted by the University of Chicago measured the reliability of each of the following as predictors of job success:

What’s painfully obvious from this chart is that interviewing – which takes the most of your time – cannot be counted on for reliable results. When every step in your hiring process is a progressively more difficult test, however, you spend your interviewing time with only the most highly qualified applicants – those most likely to succeed.

You should look at every step in the hiring process as a test and only go on to the next step as an applicant passes each one. View the completed employment application as a test. If it’s not neat, clean, logical, and completely filled out, the applicant didn’t really try to make a good first impression and may not deserve any more of your time.

The next test is a short pre-screen by phone to make sure each applicant you’re considering meets your basic requirements. Call and ask if they have reliable transportation, if there are any hours or days they prefer not to work, and if the hours and salary you’re offering meet their needs. A short phone call ensures you don’t waste time with people who have to depend on friends for a ride, who won’t like working your busiest day of the week, or will quit as soon as a better paying job comes along. Make appointments for those who pass the phone screen to come in to "complete some additional paperwork." (It doesn’t sound as scary as asking them to come in for testing.)

CAPS is a useful acronym to sum up the kind of person you need to hire. It stands for: Capacities, Attitudes, Personality, and Skills. For every job, applicants must have the mental and physical capacities needed. For most jobs, including all those in the service sector, the right attitudes are important. Personality characteristics are important in many professions and skills are important when you don’t have time to train. Let’s take them one at a time.

Every applicant must have the physical and mental capacities needed to do the job. Do you need someone more powerful than a locomotive? Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound? Then test for those attributes. More practical capacity requirements are things like the ability to stand for long periods of time, to lift and carry boxes, or the mental capacity to take inventory and complete reports.

Next, you need to make sure the applicant is smart enough to do the job. The most widely-used test for mental capacity is the Wonderlic. It’s a very inexpensive, paper-and-pencil, twelve minute exam that measures problem-solving ability. Like all the best hiring tools, it uses the applicant’s time, not yours.

Once you know a person can physically and mentally do the job, you need to see if the person has the kind of attitudes you need. Customer-orientation, safety, compliance to structure, emotional stability, honesty, dependability, and attention to detail are but a few of the attitudes you can test for in any number of ways.

If you need someone to start at 4:30 a.m., schedule the interview at 4:30 a.m. If the person shows up, that’s dependability. If he or she doesn’t show, even though you’re mad and aggravated, congratulate yourself for screening out someone who would have let you down.

Another way to test for dependability is to ask how many times the applicant was late for school or work in the past year and then verify what they tell you by checking the information.

The most efficient way to tell if an applicant has the attitudes you need is by testing. These tools ask a battery of true/false attitude questions. When applicants take these tests, they are really interviewing themselves for you. An added bonus is that many of these tests ask questions you might be uncomfortable asking face-to-face – especially those about drug use and honesty. Most of them measure the specific attitudes you need and have a validity check built in.

Personality is the third component of the CAPS acronym. You should try to get as good a fit as possible between the personality of the applicant, the personality of the job, the personality of the manager, and the personality of the organization (your corporate culture).

You’d hire a very different personality for the school district than you’d hire for Microsoft. You wouldn’t hire the same kind of person for a small, start-up company as you would for a job with the U.S. Postal Service.

Personality traits include introverted/extroverted, methodical, goal setting, dominance, competitiveness, and sociability. Personality tests are most widely used to screen for sales and administrative positions and there are a number of good ones on the market. If you use personality testing, always remember that people with good attitudes will manage their personalities in order to do the best job possible.

Finally, when you need particular skills and don’t have time to train, skills testing ensures you get what you need. I still recommend you hire for attitude and train for skills, but when there’s not time, hire for attitude and test for skills. You wouldn’t hire a welder without asking him to run a bead. You wouldn’t hire a chef without asking her to cook. Never hire for skills based only on what the applicant tells you or what their past experience leads you to believe. Many honestly feel they have better skills than they actually do, so test.

No matter what you are looking for, whatever capacities, attitudes, personality, or skills, you can develop the questions and create or buy tests for them. For legal protection, ensure any tests you purchase are validated and measure what they say they’ll measure. I’m sure you’ll find that no matter what test you use, it will be a much better predictor of success than an interview alone.