How to choose critical requirements for hiring?

Picture this:

You are a manager, someone in your team just left, and you got approval to hire a replacement.

So you meet with the recruiter and use the same job description from 3 years ago that was used to hire the person that just left.

This is a senior individual contributor role, so the requirements you set for the role are:

• 5 years of experience in an equivalent role (the recruiter suggested just 2 years, but you want to be on the safe side).
• At least a bachelor’s degree, of course. That’s the default, so you don’t even think about it.
• If the person comes from University XYZ or University ABC, even better. A lot of the people at the office went to those universities. - You don’t include this in the job advertisement, but you tell the recruiter anyway.
• A background in the same industry as the company. They are meant to be a senior, you don’t have the time to teach the industry to a newcomer.

Then the recruitment gets started and…

The recruiter has a hard time finding enough interested candidates that meet the joint criteria of years of experience + degree from specific universities + industry.

You think the recruiter isn’t very good at their job if they aren’t able to find enough people, until the recruiter shows you data of the size and behavior of the talent pool for this role.

So you agree to be a bit more flexible with your requirements, and end up hiring someone with “only” 3 years of experience in a similar role, from a university you don’t know about, and coming from another similar industry, but not exactly the same.

6 months pass by, and the new hire is performing ok. Not terrible, not great. And you think to yourself “if only this person had the extra 2 years of experience I wanted; or if only they were from university XYZ/ABC, or if only they came from the industry… then their performance would be great”.

But would it?

Then you remember that the person who had the role before and left…

• Was promoted internally into this role, with 0 years of experience in an equivalent role.
• Didn’t have a bachelor’s degree, only a high school degree.
• Had zero industry experience before coming to this company.

And yet they were a top performer, and left after 3 years in the role because they weren’t developing anymore and didn’t see a growth path forward in it.

And that’s when you start thinking that maybe the requirements you set weren’t the most relevant ones.

Data over assumptions

Many of us would find that situation to be very basic or obvious. “I would never set such outdated requirements”, or “I’ve hired a good number of people, and most of them have turned out to be good performers, so I know I have a good hunch for hiring the right talent.”

But the reality is that we are all subject to assumptions, bias, and subjectivity. It is easy for even the best judgement to be clouded. So what can we rely on to support us?

At Academic Work our recruitment methodology is based on evidence.

We correlate work-performance data with requirements data from thousands of recruitments to identify which requirements actually predict work performance the most for specific roles and contexts.

What might be a great requirement for a certain role, might be fully irrelevant for another.

So instead of relying on assumptions, we use data to inform our clients.

Many years of research

The field of Organizational Psychology has been studying for a long time the broad question of “what predicts work performance during the recruitment process?”, and by now there’s clear indicators:

On a general sense, the top 3 predictors are:

• Cognitive ability: influencing how fast someone learns, their ability to process and use information accurately, draw conclusions and spot patterns.
• Personality traits: affecting how someone behaves in certain situations, how they interact with others, how responsible they are, how resilient under stress,etc.
• Knowledge: their skills and subject matter expertise in a certain field.

All together, they account for around 75%~ of individual-related work performance variance, so these are the requirements we focus on the most. It doesn’t mean that others like years of experience or education don’t matter at all, just that in general they impact significantly less.

Remember the top performer who left the role in the situation from the beginning?

• They didn’t need years of experience in an equivalent position, because they had the right critical skills that were transferable from other previous positions.
• The lack of a bachelor degree didn’t matter, because besides already having the right critical skills, they learned the rest quickly thanks to the right cognitive level and personality traits.
• Likewise about not coming from the same industry beforehand: their ability to learn, adapt, build relationships, and earn trust made a much bigger difference.

Picking the right requirements

In the previous article of this series (How to define successful performance for a new hire?) we introduced the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) used in job analysis, and focused on the first three questions: defining the Purpose, Tasks and Behaviors of the role. 

Those are the key to set the first two requirements: cognitive ability and personality traits, often referred to as “traits” or “potential”.

• Cognitive ability: the level is picked based on the complexity of the role - pace, mandate, number of stakeholders, degree of supervision, need for learning and for adaptive problem-solving.
• Personality traits: picked based on the behaviors needed for the role and context, and adapted to the standardized 5 factor personality model.

Those two together set the right foundation to ensure the candidate has the potential to adapt and thrive in the specific context of the role.

We then focus on the last questions of the CIT:

4. Skills: To be able to perform these behaviors, which traits and skills are needed? (differentiate required vs preferred).

5. Proficiency: Which level of proficiency is needed for those skills?

With these two questions we map out the “knowledge” requirements, with an emphasis on applied skills, both “hard” (function-specific) and “soft” (interpersonal). The more specific, the better, because then we can assess concrete behavior. For example, instead of “new sales”, the focus is on “prospecting”, “cold calling”, “qualifying”, “pitching”, etc.

Basis for quantifying behavior

Choosing the right requirements is the cornerstone of the recruitment process: by knowing which traits & skills are the priority, we can focus on them in the job ad and attraction, in selecting the right assessment tools, having clear behavioral rubrics, and weighting the requirements accurately in the final scoring.

All of those become the basis for candidates’ scores in the different requirements, which when aggregated over thousands of candidates, allow us to build the predictive models that guide us in knowing which requirements better predict work performance for a specific role and context.

As we’ve talked about before, Evidence Based Recruitment (EBR) is characterized by a closed feedback loop, and the role requirements are the building blocks for that.

____

Want to learn more about the foundations of EBR? Read our first articles of this series: What truly is Evidence Based Recruitment?

If you want to deep-dive into the “closed feedback loop” point, our last article of this series focused on “validating performance” goes into detail.

And as always, if you’d like guidance on choosing the right critical requirements for your recruitments, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at Academic Work.