Dr Sandra Matz takes us through Hatch's approach to finding the right hiring match
Team update: A lot has happened since this blog - all great things! We’re now in the United States and our new product launched in November 2021, helping teams in fast-growing organisations find and hire their best-fit junior and mid-level talent in Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Customer Success. Try it here for free. This means some of our articles before this date may have product shots that look a little different. That’s all from us, enjoy the blog.
It is a well-known secret that businesses today revolve more around people than capital or tangible resources. Hiring and retaining the right people is a crucial driver of short-term and long-term business success. Motivated and skilled employees create value by going the extra mile, driving innovation, and representing the organisation to stakeholders. In contrast, hiring the wrong people is often extremely costly. But how do you hire the right person for a job?
As a psychometrician, Business School professor and academic advisor to Hatch, I think about this question pretty much every day. And as with all decisions as complex and multifaceted as hiring, the answer is complicated and –in part– depends on your unique hiring situation. However, there are some key principles that are critically important when it comes to hiring the right person:
Use validated assessments (not just your gut feeling)
Make it easy for applicants to decide whether the job is right for them
It's not about finding the best person out there; it's about finding the best person for you
To illustrate how each of these principles helps you identify the right candidate, let's take a look at the potential outcomes of a hiring process in the 2-by-2 framework below. There are two categories of candidates; those suited to the job and those who are not.
In this example, let's assume you:
Want to hire 50 people
Have a basic recruiting process that helps you make somewhat accurate predictions of a candidate's actual person
Have received 100 applications
Of those 100 applications, 50 come from people who are suited, and 50 from people who are not. But you will only know whether a person is well-suited after you have hired them. All you can do in the hiring process is make an educated guess – a prediction – of which candidates are suited and based on that, decide who you want to hire.
Not ideal, right?
The distribution of people in each quadrant might look something like the above. If you were merely flipping coins about whether a candidate is suited or not, you would get a perfect circle with 25 people in each quadrant.
As you can see, there are two quadrants in which you have made the right hiring decision; The bottom-left quadrant (they are not suited, and you didn't hire them), and the top-right quadrant (they are suited, and you hired them).
The remaining two quadrants are hiring errors of different kinds. The top-left quadrant represents a scenario in which you rejected a suited candidate, and incurred in an opportunity cost (I call this the "Cinderella" error). The bottom-left quadrant represents a scenario in which you hired an unsuited candidate (I call this the "Trojan horse" error).
You might place different weight on the two mistakes, but both mistakes are costly to make. Given the current accuracy of your hiring procedure, you are more likely than not to make the right choice (31 to 19). However, you are still hiring a considerable number of unsuited candidates.
Now let's see how the three principles change this example.
Use validated assessments (not just your gut feeling)
Businesses all too often rely exclusively on their managers' gut feeling and experience to predict whether a candidate is suited or not. Don't get me wrong; interpersonal dynamics certainly play a role in hiring (as we'll explore in more detail in principle 3). Whether or not a person is going to perform well in your organization, in part, depends on whether they get along with you and your colleagues. However, our gut feeling can often lead us astray and result in predictions that are far less accurate than they could be.
Validated psychometric assessments such as job simulation tasks, cognitive ability tests, personality surveys or structured interviews are your best shot at improving the accuracy of your predictions.
Returning to our example from before, increasing the accuracy of your prediction reduces the likelihood of both the Cinderella and the Trojan horse error, by aligning your predicted performance more closely with the actual performance of candidates. The better your assessments, the more this elliptical shape turns into a single line, which would represent a perfect prediction.
We start moving away from a random, coin-flip circle towards a slim, elliptical shape
The emphasis here is on validated assessments. There are way too many assessments out there that claim to predict pretty much anything you would want to know about a candidate. They're often also packaged into aesthetically appealing products with intuitive feedback that everybody loves (hint: everybody loves the feedback because it's designed to state what people want to hear and, much like a horoscope, so generic that everybody can find some "truth" in it). However, many commercial assessments are poorly validated, and will not necessarily help you improve the accuracy of prediction.
Before deciding on an assessment, make sure to check the scientific credentials of the company offering these tests. This goes far beyond just looking for reputable academic institutions that the companies' employees might have attended, or relying on the glowing endorsements of previous customers. They might be relevant, sure! But don't stop there, look for scientific evidence such as:
What is the predictive accuracy of assessments when it comes to job performance?
How reliable are the assessments? If you were to administer the same test twice to the same person, would the two scores agree with each other?
Have the assessments been shown to be unbiased against certain groups of individuals (e.g. women, or other minorities)?
Assessments can be extremely valuable in helping you elevate your best guess, but make sure you bet your money on the right ones.
Make it easy for applicants to decide whether the job is right for them
We dedicate much of the recruiting process to finding out who the candidates are. Do they have the skills they need to execute their jobs? Do they have the experience they need to hit the ground running? Do they have the resilience to prevail in the face of challenges? This preoccupation with a candidate's characteristics is understandable.
Knowing your candidate is the foundation of your educated guess in the first principle. However, it is equally important to help candidates understand who you are. What is the organisational culture that you try to promote? What would the candidate's day-to-day experience look like? Who would they be working with?
Helping potential applicants better understand the nature of the job does not change the shape of the prediction in our example. But it improves the quality of your applicant pool. Prospective applicants who understand what the job offers and what is expected of them will be able to self-select roles they are genuinely suited to. What this means for your business is that you will receive a much higher proportion of applications from people who are well-suited in the first place. This will often dramatically decrease the likelihood of making the Trojan horse error.
For this principle to work, you need to know yourself. As much as "knowing thy candidate" will help increase the accuracy of your prediction, "knowing thyself" is vital to raise the baseline of suitable candidates.
A thorough job description that makes it clear to potential applicants what you are looking for is crucial. The more you can communicate the nuances of the role (e.g. this is a job in which you will have to work independently and with little guidance), will help them make the right decision of whether to apply for your position or not.
It's not about finding the best person out there; it's about finding the best person for you
The final principle challenges our notion of what the "right" candidate looks like. Most assessments and recruiting procedures aim to identify the "best" candidate by measuring several characteristics that are known to predict performance such as cognitive ability, extraversion and conscientiousness. The candidate with the highest scores across these assessments is identified as the best candidate and eventually hired.
Such assessments operate under the assumption that the criteria for what makes a person a suitable candidate are universal; for instance, it's always desirable to be social and outgoing. According to this assessment maxim, all jobs are created equal.
But they are not. Being extremely outgoing and social might be an excellent quality for a salesperson, but it might not make for the best team member in a highly introverted group where people mostly work by themselves.
Yes, all of these characteristics might be positively related to job performance. But only on average and when studied across a range of different jobs. And, of course, there is no such thing as the "average job" when it comes to hiring for a single position.
So, the question you need to answer is not "is this the best candidate out there?", but instead "is this the best candidate for the specific role we are hiring for?" Fit matters! We all subscribe to this notion in the context of dating, and yet, we rarely follow it in the context of hiring. Moving away from a "one-size-fits-all" approach allows you to not only identify well-suited candidates (top-right quadrant), but those candidates that will go the extra mile for you and be great representatives of your business (see the red circle below!).
Red circle = what we're aiming for
Hiring based on fit will not only make candidates better suited for the job, but it will also improve their experience and job satisfaction. Imagine how a highly extraverted person would feel if they were suddenly stuck in a role that required them to work independently and without much social contact for most of the time. If they are smart and have the skills, they certainly would be able to get the job done. But they wouldn't necessarily enjoy it. And if they don't enjoy it, they're less likely to deliver their best performance.
This brings us back to the second principle. You need to know your job, work environment and the team that the new person will be working in – to identify the criteria for what the "right" person looks like in your search. Doing so will not only help you find the best candidates, but it will also help you boost employee satisfaction in your organization. Win-win!
How does Hatch integrate these principles?
The Hatch recruiting process is designed specifically around these 3 principles to help you make the right choice when hiring:
We use validated psychometric tests to assess a student's general ability, their personality as well as their job-specific and transferrable skills.
We help you describe your roles in a way that makes it easy for students to decide whether they might be a good fit or not – both on a professional and personal level.
We live and breathe the fit-maxim of "for each job, there's the perfect student". Our matching algorithms are designed to optimise the fit between your role and the student, helping you to maximise your team's and the student's performance and satisfaction.
By the time you see the shortlist of students, we have already worked towards hitting the red circle for you! All you have to do is choose your personal favourite among the best of the best.
