You are a hiring manager and the recruitment process that’s been running for the open role in your team is almost over now.
The top 3 candidates have finished all assessments, and now you have to make the decision of who’s getting the offer.
It all boils down to this. This is the most important decision in the process, so how do you make sure you get it right?
Remembering the purpose and logic of recruitment
The purpose of recruitment is to find the candidate who’ll be the best performer in your specific role, within the specific context of your organization.
The logic of recruitment is to separate signal from noise: to measure which candidates have the right skills & traits, in the right proficiency levels, needed to be a top performer.
That’s why in our previous articles we’ve gone into detail about how to define top performance, how to choose critical requirements, and how to assess them accurately.
All of that with the intent of identifying the right hiring signal: the skills and traits, in a way that’s as objective as possible, reducing the noise (bias, subjectivity, pedigree, etc.)
Using a match score and scorecard to guide you
If you’ve structured the recruitment process well, you’ll have a clear list of requirements needed for the role, in the form of skills & traits, with predefined weights, and candidates scored for each of them with a standardized scale based on an evaluation rubric. Altogether, they form a scorecard.
You might have it embedded in your ATS, or in something as simple as a spreadsheet, following this logic:
The scorecard itself (based on the list of requirements and their individual weights, to ensure proper accuracy) should have been defined in the very beginning of the process, while the individual scores of each candidate for each requirement are continuously filled through the accurate application of the various assessment methods.
The outcome of the scorecard is the match score of each candidate, a percentage rating of how well a candidate stacks against the requirements set for the role.
Although the match scores automatically rank candidates, it doesn’t mean that the hiring offer should blindly go to the candidate with the highest score. The score itself isn’t meant to replace or automate your decision making, but instead support your own.
Both the match score and the scorecard serve as a visual aid to capture in a glimpse the most important requirements across all candidates, while ignoring everything else. This helps to compare in a fair, objective way, reducing the bias and subjectivity that often happen in this step of the process.
Use the data in the scorecard the same way you’d use data and a dashboard to facilitate any other business decision (eg: financial, operational, performance-wise, etc): to inform and guide you, but never to replace your own judgment.
Having conversations with the hiring committee
Maybe as the hiring manager you make the decision on your own, but most likely there’s others involved in the process whose input is important for your decision: your own manager, colleagues who conducted functional assessments, teammates, a whole hiring panel or committee, etc.
When having those conversations, the best starting point is always to open and look together at the dashboard and match scores and discuss them.
Make sure that you, and them, have a very clear understanding of what the score means for each skill and trait. Eg: what does it mean for a candidate to have a 3 vs a 5 in “Negotiation” as a skill? Refer back to the assessment rubrics of each evaluation for that.
Then, make sure there’s a clear understanding of why a candidate was scored the way they were for each requirement. Where did they fall short? Why? Is the gap big/meaningful, or something that can be learned relatively quickly?
Zooming in and out in each candidate and comparing their skills & traits is what allows for a productive and objective discussion.
Additionally, make sure that the goalpost isn’t moved during the conversation. This means that the focus of the discussion should remain on the candidate’s proficiency in the skills and traits. Other aspects of the candidates might be discussed as inputs to the overall consideration (eg: previous experience, proficiency in other skills that aren’t the focus in the scoreboard, etc.) but they shouldn't sway the decision making since that’s not the criteria defined for high performance in the role, otherwise we risk bias and subjectivity.
Rely on your recruiter for support
Your recruiter who led the whole process isn’t there just as an operator, they are a talent advisor. They’ve likely led hundreds of recruitment processes, and facilitated those hiring decisions. They understand skills & traits deeply, know how talent was assessed, they’ve engaged with the candidates and built relationships, so have a clear understanding of their engagement and motivation. The recruiter also has a firm pulse on the pipeline for this role and broader talent market, so they have a strong sense of how the finalists fare against other potential candidates, besides against the scorecard itself.
All of this means that your recruiter can help lay out the facts clarily, bring back the things you said were important early in the intake meeting, and help you make sense of the data with a holistic view. Trust them and make use of their expertise to guide you, so you can make the best decision for your team.
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It’s impossible to be 100% certain in any hiring decision. Recruitment is inherently a human process, as is work performance, so it’s impossible to capture all the nuances of human behavior and the changing context.
That’s why we focus on the things that are most likely to predict work performance, not because they are failproof, but because statistically they matter most. After all, evidence based recruitment only has an estimated success rate of 70 to 80%[1], but it certainly is better than the 19% success rate of traditional recruitment[2].
(Success rate defined as a hired candidate considered a high performer after a year and a half on the job).
So when it’s time to make your next hiring decision don’t stress about trying to get it perfect, but rather focus on being well informed by data, objective and certain to have a clear rationale based on the aggregated outcome of assessments.
And if you’d like support not only in the hiring decision, but across the whole recruitment process, we at AW are here for you.
References
1. Estimating Evidence based recruitment success:
- Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2022) Revisiting Meta-Analytic Estimates of Validity in Personnel Selection: Addressing Systematic Overcorrection for Restriction of Range. Journal of Applied Psychology
- Sjöberg, S. (2014) Utilizing research in the practice of personnel selection: General mental ability, personality, and job performance. Doctoral thesis. Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Sweden
- Kuncel, N. R., Connelly, B. S., Klieger, D. M., & Ones, D. S. (2013) Mechanical versus Clinical data combination in Selection and Admissions Decisions: A MetaAnalysis, Journal of Applied Psychology.
2. Estimating Traditional recruitment success:
- Murphy, M. (2011). Hiring for attitude, McGraw-Hill. Education, Leadership IQ study.