Top 5 advantages of case-based screening

by Veronika Chriňáková | Jun 29, 2021 | Recruitment

The availability of the assessment tools is generally very broad. From the most common unstructured interviews and resumés to the job tryout procedures and work sample tests. It is not a surprise that the recruitment sphere is changing every year. Whether it is the recruitment or the candidates themselves. However, it is always a good tip to keep up with those changes to make your hiring process successful.

In a new Korn Ferry study that includes a sweeping country-by-country analysis, researchers found that by the year 2030, there will be a global human talent shortage of more than 85 million people. However, this does not mean that people don’t have talent. We know that everyone has talent, they just need a chance to show it.

Therefore, recruiters need to give everyone a chance to showcase their full potential. Choosing the right assessment tools is the key factor when it comes to the company’s prospects, employer brand, talent acquisition, overall candidate’s experience, and other factors that influence the company’s operations.

Case-based screening

As mentioned at the beginning of this blog, there is a lot of ways of assessing potential candidates. All screening methods dispose of different qualities, different abilities to predict future job performance, different levels of transparency, the diverse need for resources, and much more. Therefore, we can agree that all assessment methods have different perks and drawbacks. However, some of them have more pluses and some of them have more minuses.

In the previous blog post, we talked about the meta-analysis conducted by Schmidt & Hunter in 1998, where they looked through 85 years of research findings, evaluating the predictive validity of different assessment tools.

Work sample tests in the combination with the GMA (General mental ability test) obtained the best score in the conducted meta-analysis, with a score of 0.63 on the scale from zero to one. In other words, the ability of the cases to predict a candidate’s future job performance is quite high, which is one of the biggest advantages of the case-based screening itself. But let us talk about this later in the blog post.

What is the recruitment case?

So, before we dive more into the other perks of cases in recruitment. Let’s take a closer look at what exactly are those work sample tests or recruitment cases.

In 2006, Ployhart introduced a definition of the recruitment case which explains that it is “a test in which the applicant performs a selected set of actual tasks that are physically and psychologically similar to those performed on the job.”

So, what exactly does it mean? When you are hiring new employees, they will be introduced to a set of tasks that correspond to the tasks that are performed at the position they are applying for. For instance, a candidate applying for a sales assistant position will be asked to solve a case consisting of sales-related tasks.

The recruitment case usually consists of two – four tasks that will take 30-120 minutes for candidates to solve, depending on the complexity.

The top 5 advantages of Recruitment cases: Why use them?

As we mentioned before, one of the biggest advantages of using recruitment cases is their ability to predict how will the candidate perform in his/her future position. However, by using recruitment cases you can achieve even more than that. Let’s take a closer look at the different perks of this assessment method.

Predict not assume

As we mentioned above, the biggest advantage of case-based screening is the fact that this assessment tool used alongside the GMA (General mental ability test) is the most successful when it comes to the prediction of future job performance. (0.63 points on the scale from 0 to 1)

In comparison with the resumés, where the biggest aim is on previous experience and education, showed a correlation of 0.06 between previous experience and job performance.

It is crucially important to predict how well will the candidate perform the job in question, and that is where case-based screening comes to the game. Prediction based on showcased skill set, knowledge, and approach administrated directly on the tasks similar to the ones performed at the job will provide you with a better overview than just a piece of paper with the keywords and headline resumé.

This leads us to another advantage which is directly influenced by the predictive validity and that is avoided bad hires.

Avoid bad hire

The survey conducted by CareerBuilder shows that nearly three in four employers are affected by a bad hire. Did you know that the average cost of one bad hire is nearly 15,000$? However, 40% of the companies which participated in the mentioned survey admitted that they had spent at least 25,000$, and 25% of them had paid more than 50,000$ for poor hires. How come those payments are that high?

The reason is that employees with bad performance will affect the overall performance of the team which might lead to negative future results. An unhealthy working environment has a negative effect on innovation, employee motivation, results, etc.

And not only that, but bad hires might also increase employee turnover, cause the overall employer brand and morale to decline, and negatively affect organizational culture.

To avoid bad hires, recruiters should focus on having a broad talent pool for every job opening. As well as having a recruitment strategy that will provide them with a realistic preview of the candidate’s skill set, experience, and knowledge.

Keep the talent

As we mentioned before, the talent shortage is challenge companies have to deal with. Korn Ferry conducted another survey with 1,500 leaders around the world, and 66% of them said that there will be a shortage of talent by 2020. However, 95% of them are ensured that their company will not be experiencing any problems regarding the talent shortage.

Let’s use resumés as an example. A lot of people are familiar with the information that the majority of resumés are screened by ATS tools.

Previously, I have seen a post on LinkedIn, from a girl who was applying for a position at Spotify. Therefore, she designed her resumé in a Spotify theme and many people advised her to redo the resumé because it will not make it through the ATS.

We can agree that by using ATS tools, recruiters can actually lose talented applicants. According to CareerBuilder, the average cost of losing a good hire is nearly 30,000$. And that is just because candidates chose a wrong selection of the keywords, or they have focused on the design rather than the keywords.

This is an example of how important it is to use appropriate screening methods that will give everyone a chance to unleash their full potential.

Candidate experience

Candidates preserve recruitment cases to be favourable in terms of fairness. In the two most extensive meta-analyses, recruitment cases, have been rated second overall in perceived fairness. How come? The reason is the information provided by the candidates and the company itself. Candidates will usually provide, before the actual solution, nothing but their email addresses. On the other hand, the company will provide candidates with a realistic job preview. That means a company is honest about the job in question as well as the challenges included.

This creates a fair and transparent recruitment process, which creates a foundation for a successful employer brand. And successful and well-managed employer brand is a key to attracting more and more applicants which also creates diversity within your workplace. So, let us dive more into that.

Strenghten your Employer brand

What is an employer brand? Employer brand or employer branding is the perception of your company as an employer between the job seekers, potential candidates, employees, and stakeholders. It is the process of managing and influencing your reputation between the mentioned parties and a picture of what kind of values the company gives to its employees.

According to LinkedIn, 75% of candidates will research a company’s reputation before applying for an open job position, and other researchers discovered that a strong employer brand reduces employee turnover by 28% and cost per hire by 50%.

There is a lot of ways how to build and strengthen your employer brand, however, the hiring process is one of the most important assets of employer branding. Do you wonder why?

The hiring process or recruitment is usually one of the first and most important professional encounters of potential candidates with your company, and it has a huge impact on your employer brand. Therefore, it is important to manage recruiting carefully and with respect. Studies suggest that 61% of employees over the age of 45 have either personally experienced or seen discrimination at work.

As mentioned before, case-based screening is a transparent and fair recruitment process that removes any type of bias from the hiring processes, meaning it eliminates the presence of discrimination. This is a huge asset to your employer brand, since people value and remembers the way how they were treated during the hiring process, despite the fact of they were hired or not.

As mentioned before, case-based screening brings along a lot of advantages. Building your employer brand is one of them, but don’t forget that one thing leads to another, and in the end, the case-based screening will create an actual chain that might result in the positive prospects of your company.

Bring your recruitment process into 21st century

by Veronika Chriňáková | Apr 9, 2021 | Recruitment

Did you know that the recruitment we know today was originated as a product of World War II? During such a period a lot can change, and recruitment is no exception. Whether it is the recruitment processes, tools, or employees themselves. With the modernized and advancing world digitalization. And a new Generation X which currently forms a large part of the people who constantly seek new job opportunities, change within hiring is gaining momentum. And we are here to help you bring your recruitment process into the 21^st century.

The history of the recruitment

As we mentioned before, recruitment we know nowadays was first established during World War II. There were a lot of free vacancies left behind by the departed soldiers, that needed to be fulfilled by the new workers. And this situation created a foundation for the “birth” of staffing agencies. But the staffing agencies did not end their operation after the War, they continued to find work for the men and women who were returning from their military service.

The beginning of resumés

The article by Perelson made it clear, the following decade belonged to the resumés. Recruiters were focusing on linking the right candidates with the right jobs. If we compare the process with the one, we have today, we can all imagine there was a huge difference. Before, staffing companies needed to follow job ads in the newspapers, and candidates needed to submit their resumés by hand or mail.

When it comes to recruiters, they needed to keep track of non-digital resumés. But there are several different recruitment methods that were used and popularized during the following decades. We created a blog post based on a meta-analysis by Schmidt & Hunter (1998), that talks about the recruitment methods and their ability to predict future job performance based on the 85 years of research.

The (new) era

As we mentioned at the beginning, the world started to change. The computers and applicant tracking systems (ATS) came into the game, and the hiring process suddenly became faster and easier.

The birth of Worldwide web and Social media

With the web that started to reach all possible corners of the world, recruiters were able to move from local recruitment to hiring employees worldwide. And of course, social media enabled them to widen their reach and target more and more possible employees, again on a worldwide scale.

The recruitment process became faster and easier for everybody, recruiters were using databases to find the right employees, and on the other hand, candidates were able to submit their resumés online from the comfort of their homes.

The change

We can all agree that the development of the recruitment sphere is a good thing. But there are other problems that emerge from this huge change. For instance, talent shortage, bad hires, and a highly competitive environment. Let us take a closer look.

Talent shortage

Korn Ferry conducted a study, that shows that there will be a talent shortage of more than 85 million people by the year 2030. And why is that? It is important for companies to build their own talent pool, and as well as to give all candidates the opportunity to showcase their full potential and talents.

Some of the recruitment methods can limit your diversity and candidate pool. Using biases in recruitment is, unfortunately, a common thing and there is a lot of tools nowadays that will help you and your company to eliminate the usage of bias.

For instance, let’s talk about anonymous recruitment. Innoflow is a software company based on anonymous case-based recruitment. The thing is that candidates will submit nothing else, but their solution and they will be evaluated based on their current skills, abilities, and knowledge.

Some people simply do not have the skills for writing excellent resumés and some of them might include false information. As a result, your company might be losing a talented employee due to the resumés that do not match the requirements of the ATS tools being used.

Avoiding bad hire and keep the good one    

Did you know that the approximate cost of one bad hire is around 15,000$? According to the article by Career Builder, the cost of losing one good hire is up to 30,000$. Bringing your recruitment process into the 21^st century and using all the perks which this decade has to offer, you can target, reach, and test the right and qualified candidates for your open job position in order to avoid a bad hire.

Organizations which put a solid plan into development are likely not only to attract but also retain competent candidates. Candidates feel comfortable and safe where the organization supports them. (Holbeche, 2004)

Competitive environment

Lack of talent, the different mindsets of employees, etc., contribute to the growing competition in the recruitment market. Therefore, it is important for companies to attract and keep their talents and employees. And how can it be done? By building your employer brand and knowing your target group.

Why should you make your recruitment up to date?

As you can see, we named a few points that are the problems and challenges of the modern world recruitment. Your recruitment is more than a well-written job post. You need to focus on way more things than that.

Attracting the right candidates, avoiding bad hires, and avoiding losing the good ones is a product of continuous progress and work. Keeping your recruitment modern is a way how to do it. You need to consider how to target the candidates you need. For instance, there is a difference between how to approach the older generations and the modern generation X.

Why use what the 21^st century has to offer? The answer is simple. There is no quicker, easier, and impactful way to reach and attract many potential employees if you use the right methods and tools.

You need to keep up with the change in order to succeed.

How to bring your recruitment process into the 21^st century?

Use what the modern age has to offer. Let’s take a closer look at how to make the most out of it.

Understand and analyse your target group

As the blog post by Business stated, people who were not old enough to work ten years ago, now make up much of the workforce. Generation X are people under the age of 30. They are considered as “the first truly global generation”. What does it mean for recruiters?

This generation was introduced and exposed to a digital sphere from early childhood. The variety of the courses and information that have been accessible to them is incomparable to the generation before. Therefore, it is important for you to analyse the current workforce. Who do I want to target? Where are they active the most? Is it Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.? What wording should you use? How to attract them?

Writing a job post without digital visualizations, emojis or hashtags will not catch the eye of that many people. As well as posting into every possible channel if the right candidates you are looking for are not present on that concrete platform.

That moves us to another section about the usage of social media, and how to choose the right ones for you and your recruitment.

Use Social Media channels

The rise in technology and social media has made it easier and quicker to access a huge number of people. On the other hand, you need to make sure to target the candidates you want. And with this number of various social media sites, it might be harder for you to find and choose the sites you need.

While deciding which social media platforms to use, ask yourself the following questions:

How do you want to present yourself?

Using social media is one of the best ways how to showcase and promote your employer brand to the people. And what has employer brand to do with the recruitment? The answer is everything. Most of the candidates visit social media channels of the companies before applying for the job to find out more about their culture, values, office life, etc.

Using social media and building your employer brand is not a short-term commitment. Look at your long-term goals when it comes to building your employer brand. That will help you answer this question as well as the ones below.

Where can you find your target audience?

While looking at the variety of available social media sites, do not only pay attention to the number of active users. Why? For instance, According to the article by Hiring Workopolis, Facebook has more than 1.7 billion active users. But how many users come from your target group? As mentioned before, you need to know your target audience to be successful in your strategy.

What platforms are used by your competitors?

Learning about your competitors can bring a new perspective to your recruiting strategy. Knowing where and how they recruit may help you to find out more about your target audience. You will be able to see how they engage, react, respond, etc.

Which sites are best suited for the posts you want to make?

Firstly, every social media page has a different format when it comes to the “perfect” content. Secondly, you need to look into your content calendar. What kind of content are you planning to share? Is it links to webinars, podcasts? Photos from your everyday office life? Based on this you will be able to determine which direction to go.

And do not forget to be efficient. There are many available tools that will help you save your precious time. For instance, Buffer. Buffer allows you to connect your other social media sites to the platform, and it enables you to schedule and publishes your content automatically from one place.

Make your process mobile-friendly

Did you know that, according to the article by Jobcast, 72% of active candidates say they have viewed a company career site on their mobile phone? And that, 30% of mobile users abandon sites after 6-10 seconds if they are not mobile friendly?

Imagine somebody who is seeing your job ad online. Ask yourself, what would they like to do with it?

Maybe they want to share the open job position with a friend or complete the application process, and they expect all of this to be done on their mobile device.

Make it visually appealing

As we mentioned at the beginning, a simple post without any visuals, emojis or other addons will hardly catch the eye of a browsing user. Use what the 21^st century has to offer, go with videos, photos, gifs, animated content, and other posts that will represent your company and your employer brand, and at the same time, catch the attention and create engagement.

There are many available tools that will help you create amazing content. For instance, Canva, where you can create everything from images, animated posts to videos, and much more.

Make it accessible to everyone

We all know that diversity of your workplace is one of the key factors of success. And to make it work, you need to make sure your recruitment is accessible to everyone. Think about screen reader compatibility, use video captions, include alt-text attributes to your content, think about colour contrast, etc.

By making your website and product accessible, you are widening your talent pool, and making sure that everybody will have a decent user experience. You can team up with third-party providers such as Equalweb, which is a world accessibility solution, that will help you implement Al solutions powering accessibility.

The world is changing, and so is recruitment. Keeping up with those changes and bringing your recruitment into the 21^st century brings many benefits to not only your recruitment but to your company in general. Finding the right candidates, building your talent pool, keeping the talent, building your employer brand, spreading awareness, all of those and much more are the perks modernization can bring to your business.

Everything starts with research and planning. Detailed mapping of your own strategy, target audience, competitors, etc., will help you set the foundation and determine the best direction for your 21^st centurial recruitment. Appreciate the offerings that the 21^st century has brought to us, and do not be afraid to make the most out of it.

Succeed with unbiased recruitment: don’t just blind the resumé, remove it completely

by Veronika Chriňáková | Mar 4, 2021 | Recruitment

Workplace diversity. Many companies are using this term as their mission and goal. Apart from a better company reputation, higher innovation, and faster problem-solving, diversity improves hiring results and reduces employee turnover. A report from McKinsey & Company shows that diverse organizations simply perform better. But also, a mission like this is threatened by other factors, such as biases. So, how can we overcome our biases and succeed with unbiased recruitment? Blinding assessment tools could be the first step, but does it really make our hiring process unbiased?

The way we think

Let’s start where it all begins – in our minds. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky conducted a groundbreaking work, where they explain how we make decisions. Their research shows, that our brain has two operating systems, which are referred to as System 1 and System 2. (Kahneman & Tversky, 1974).

“It is a commonplace observation that there seem to be two kinds of thinking. One fast and intuitive and the other slow and deliberative.” (Evans, 2011)

A: System 1

According to the reference page Suebehavioural design, system 1 makes 98% of all our thinking. Daniel Kahneman characterizes System 1 as a fast, automatic, habitual, and effortless type of thinking. So, what exactly happens in our brain? System 1 is influenced by experiences, emotions, and memories. As a result, most of our reasoning and judgments are unconscious and based on intuition. (Kahneman & Tversky, 1974).

“System 1 is essentially what automatically comes up in your memory. For instance, when I say 2+2, something will come to your mind.“ Says Daniel Kahneman in his video interview, where he explains his findings.

This type of thinking has a large capacity, which allows us to process large amounts of information in a short time. (Evans, 2011) On average we all have about 35,000 decisions to make each day. It could be a decision about whether you will take the stairs or elevator, use the blue or black pen, etc. Some of the decisions are more important, and some of them are more difficult.

The task of our System 1 is to take care of decisions that are more familiar, by turning them into routines and habits. In fact, our System 1 will go through the information, choices, and ideas. Sometimes without us even noticing and therefore, sometimes we make decisions without controlling them.

As the article by Scientific American stated, System 1 is superior in its ability to automatically and effortlessly direct everyday life. It is important to state that neither of the Systems is all bad or all good. System 2 helps us do more reasonable and logical decisions based on facts. And System 1 helps us to save our cognitive capacity by creating decision rules.

B: System 2

The reference page, Suebehavioural design based on the theory of Kahneman & Tversky, stated that System 2 makes 2% of all our thinking (Kahneman & Tversky, 1974). They described this type of thinking as slow, rational, conscious, effortful, and risk assessing. As a result, our judgments and decisions are based on examination which is influenced by facts, logic, and evidence.

“Sometimes System 2 enables us to see things that System 1 doesn’t.“- Daniel Kahneman.

So, how do those two types of thinking function in our brain? Our system 1 serves as a shield for our system 2. Imagine, that every decision you make has to be consciously processed by your brain. The consequence of this would be cognitive overload. Therefore, System 1 is sorting and prioritizing our decisions. This type of thinking generates shortcuts, also referred to as heuristics, which take care of the less important and habitual decisions.

As a result, the most important ones are then sent and processed by System 2. What are those heuristics which process the majority of our decisions? Let’s find out.

Heuristics – our automated brain work

We are always trying to preserve energy and cognitive resources. Therefore we try to make decisions as easy as possible by using System 1 first. As mentioned before, our System 1 generates shortcuts, which Daniel Kahneman called heuristics, to save mental energy for our deliberate brain (System 2). These heuristics are characterized as fast and intuitive, we sometimes refer to them as our common sense or intuition.

So, as mentioned before, System 1 helps to prevent our brain from cognitive overload. By using shortcuts that take care of habitual and less difficult decisions.

Suebehavioral design provided a concrete definition of heuristics:” Any approach to problem-solving that employs a practical method, not guaranteed to be perfect or rational. But instead sufficient for reaching an immediate goal.”

Let’s look at their work in practice.

Anchor heuristics

One of the examples could be the anchor heuristics. People tend to perceive the first available piece of information they have received as a reference point and unconsciously use it to “anchor“ or build their decision-making process on that piece of information. And we use it even if the initial information is incorrect or incomplete (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) To explain how this works in practice, we will take a look at an example.

You want to buy a car and therefore checks the average price online, which is 100.000,- kr. You go to a dealership where you are offered a price of 90.000,- kr., you quickly accept the price because it is below your expectation, i.e. your anchor. The problem is, however, that your swift decision to purchase ruled out the possibility to check out a different dealership, which offers the car for 85.000,- kr. Instead of searching for every available information, we tend to favor the initial information provided to us.

Biases – the wrong heuristics

The issue with heuristics is that they might be potentially wrong. Heuristics are decisions made without complete information. Therefore, we have to have in mind that they are just mental shortcuts of which purpose is to find a solution as fast as possible while ignoring other aspects of the problem. As a result, heuristics affect our decision making and they could lead to a systematic deviation from rational behavior – called biases.

Cognitive biases

Do we really use biases while we think? The answer is yes. First, we need to explain what exactly are those biases. According to the article by Psychology Today: “Cognitive biases are repeated patterns of thinking that can lead to inaccurate or unreasonable conclusions.“ A bias can be described as a tendency or prejudice against someone or something. But the thing is that biases are often based on stereotypes, rather than actual knowledge.

Bias – the challenge of a transparent recruitment

Think about recruitment. When a recruiter is having an interview with an applicant, the decision of whether the person will be hired can be made in the first 10 minutes. And why is that? Because of our heuristics and biases. As soon as the person enters the room, our system 1 makes a first mostly unconscious judgment based on our heuristics. This decision then leads to a certain bias, for instance, it could be a stereotyping bias (person wears glasses, so we think he/she is smart) or liking bias.

Now that we understand how we think and how we make decisions, we can move forward and talk about recruitment biases in depth. How do biases affect the impartial recruitment process and what actions could be taken in order to prevent their use?

At the beginning of this blog post, we talked about how important workplace diversity is for every company. The article by Crowdstaffing made it clear: “The hidden danger in the form of recruiting bias means that you are limiting your candidate selection during the hiring process.“ To say it differently, you are limiting your workplace diversity.

So, what kind of biases do we use when we assess applicants?

Similarity bias

Similarity bias also referred to as Ingroup bias, means you will hire those applicants who are more similar to you. For instance, you have similar hobbies, interests or you attended the same high school, etc. Making friends is one thing, but making sure that you will create a successful environment by diversifying the workplace is something else. You need to have in mind that all positions have different competencies and hobbies are not the right factor to predict how good will the person perform in their future position.

Halo effect

The halo effect can be observed when a positive first impression of an applicant influences the overall perception of them. Basically, if you know the person is good at A. You automatically assume she or he is good at B, C, and D. For example, a good-looking person will be automatically considered to be an overall good human being who is intelligent and funny.

Attribution error

According to Simply Psychology: “Attribution error is a tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional or personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing situational explanations.“

In other words, people have a cognitive bias to attribute other people’s actions to their personality. Rather than taking into consideration environmental and social forces that might be influencing the person’s behavior.

For instance, a person could be late for a job interview due to a car accident or an unexpected family emergency. The recruiter will automatically think the person is irresponsible and not capable of time management.

Intuition – the tool of recruiters

Highouse (2008) wrote an interesting article about how recruiters believe that the prediction of human behavior can be improved through experience and that recruiters to some degree relied on intuition (System 1) in decision-making.

“Perhaps the greatest technological achievement in organizational psychology over the past year is the development of decision aids (tests, cases, structured interviews) that substantially reduce error in the prediction of employee performance (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). Arguably, the greatest failure of organizational psychology has been the inability to convince employers to use them.“ (Highhouse, 2008).

Even though we have access to alternative selection tools, recruiters still tend to favor resumés and unstructured interviews which obtained lower scoring in the conducted meta-analysis by Schmidt & Hunter in 1998. We have written a blog post aimed at assessing tools and their ability to predict future job performance. And for instance, unstructured interviews obtained a score of 0.38 on the scale from 0 to 1 in the conducted meta-analysis.

Blinded resumé, will the bias disappear?

Behaghel (2014) analyzed the experiment on the effects of anonymous applications. Recruiters couldn’t read names, addresses, nationality, or other identifying indicators which are usually included in the resumés. The results showed that some of the applicants were actually harmed by using anonymous applications.

“The interview rate worsens by 10 percentage points between minority and majority of candidates when resumés are made anonymous. The effect could be also seen beyond resumés screening, where the hiring gap differs by 4 points.“

In the previous article, we talked about assessment tools and their ability to predict future job performance. When it comes to resumés, work experience and educational background are the most observed and assessed sections.

But is the resumé the best way how to predict whether is the candidate a good fit? Can we limit biases while using this assessment tool?

The starting point is awareness

We can see clearly that the combination of biases and resumés is quite a common thing. Whether is it a good resumé or the hobbies which are included match one of yours. That is the thing about biases. Even though we feel confident about not having them, it is a commonplace observation that everybody has biases, whether they are conscious or unconscious. The good thing is that we can limit our biases if we are aware of having them. But blinding the assessment tools might not be the most effective solution. Therefore the best solution would be to use completely unbiased assessment tools such as case-based screening.

Conducted survey shows that by a factor of more than 3 to 1, HR professionals agreed that using tests was an effective way how to evaluate a candidate’s suitability. He also explained that the same professionals agreed by the factor of more than 3 to 1, you can learn more about candidates when you are “reading between the lines” while interviewing them. (Highhouse, 2008)

This created a common belief that a matter of experience and intuition (System 1) is a way how to do a good hire. But is it really so? Will we rely on predicting a candidate’s likelihood of success based on the ability “to read between the lines”? The research on predicting human behavior shows that experience does not improve predictions. (Highhouse, 2008)

The bias impact on recruitment

First of all, we need to say that Heuristics aren’t necessarily bad – we can make good decisions using heuristics. But biases are always bad and they lead to systematic errors. Let’s take a look at the possible consequences of making biased decisions.

Bertrand & Mullainathan performed a field experiment to measure racial discrimination in 2003. They responded to help-wanted ads in newspapers in Boston and Chicago with fake resumés. Some of the resumés had better quality (more experience, etc.), and some of them disposed of with lower quality (less experience, no higher education, etc). They randomly assigned either a very African American sounded name or a very White sounded name to each resumé. The results show that African-American names received 50% fewer callbacks than the resumés with other names. (Betrand & Mullainathan, 2003) We can clearly see how important it is to make biases disappear from the hiring process.

The blog post from Forbes also talks about a study, conducted by Yale University, that found that female scientists, both trained to be objective, also used biases while recruiting. Even though they were both trained to be objective, they were more likely to hire men and consider them more competent than women.

Be unbiased

As we can see biases are part of us even though we don’t know about them. But the knowledge that we have them can lead to their successful limitation. Blinding of the resumés and other assessment tools might be the option. But is blindness a 100% reliable factor to overcome our biases? As we mentioned before. Anonymously made resumés could actually harm some of the applicants. There is a lot of assessment tools to choose from, and some of them can provide you with a totally unbiased hiring process. Think about cases, case-based screening will include nothing but the solution which is based on the questions built on the job or task in question.

As we mentioned at the beginning, diversity is a driving factor to achieve positive future prospects and results. Don’t let biased recruitment influence your firm’s outlook. And give people the opportunity to showcase their talent with a fair and transparent recruitment process.

*The article was based on a conducted meta-analysis by Schmidt & Hunter (1998), where they looked through 85 years of research findings.

Case-based screening: Why replacing the resumé and cover letter is the way to recruit in 2021

by Veronika Chriňáková | Feb 10, 2021 | Recruitment

The world is changing and so is recruitment. Many progressive companies have decided to replace resumés and cover letters in their recruitment process. And instead, they decided to apply other innovative ways such as case-based screening to recruit in 2021, but why?

An extensive Korn Ferry report shows that by the year 2030, many industries can record a talent shortage of up to 85 million people. Resulting in about $8.5 trillion in unrealized annual revenues. “The lack of skilled workers needed to drive business strategy could be the defining issue of the age. Threatening the GDP of nations as well as the profitability of organizations,” says Alan Guarino, vice chairman of Korn Ferry’s CEO and Board Services practice.

As a result, finding a skilled and talented employee for your company can be a continuous challenge in the upcoming decades. In an effort to avoid this scenario, hiring managers must find the best way to generate and detect the talent nets.

“Governments and organizations must make talent strategy a key priority and take steps now to educate, train, and upskill their existing workforces,” says Yannick Binvel, president of Korn Ferry’s Global Industrial Markets practice.

Selection methods throughout the years

Let’s look at it from the ground up. Companies are using many ways to assess future employees. For instance, by employer interviews asking about previous job experience, education, and interests, job tryout procedure, work sample tests, etc. The purpose of all is to predict future job performance, also referred to as predictive validity. Schmidt & Hunter (1998) conducted an impressive meta-analysis where they looked through 85 years of research findings, evaluating the predictive validity of different assessment tools. Screening methods were evaluated on a scale from 0 to 1. The highest score received, the higher is the ability to predict future job performance.

Why is predictive validity so important? “Use of hiring methods with increased predictive validity leads to substantial increases in employee performance. As measured in percentage increases in output, the increased monetary value of output, and increased learning of job-related skills.“ (Hunter, Schmidt, & Judiesch, 1990)

One of the most common: the employment interview

In fact, the ability of the structured employment interviews to predict a future job performance scored 0.51 in conducted meta-analysis. The interviewer is usually asking questions substantiated by a careful analysis of the job in question. However the employment interviews could also be unstructured, and their predictive validity is only 0.38. The reason is that the interviewer is often asking every different applicant different questions.

In addition, applicants are not sure about the assessment process. Furthermore, employment interviews measure a combination of previous job experience, educational background, interest, etc. Let’s take a closer look at the analysis of those factors.

A) Job experience

The predictive validity of previous job experience is 0.18. Five years of experience may be good. But are we talking about 5 years of continuous progress? Or 1 year of experience that has been repeated 5 times?

Apparently, during the first 5 years of these (mid-level, medium complexity) jobs, workers continually acquired additional work knowledge and skills that improved their job performance. But this transition was almost complete by the end of five years. And further improvements in job experience led to little increase in job knowledge and skills (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). These results indicate that work experience at the start of a career would predict job performance only for the first 5 years on the job. Even under ideal circumstances.

B) Educational background

The ability to predict job performance by analyzing educational background scored 0.10, in the conducted meta-analysis by Schmidt & Hunter (1998). It is important to remember that education is undeniably an inseparable determinant of the level of work that can be done by the individual.

For example, the study shows that for the standard semi-skilled job, the length of obtained education may vary from 9 to 12 years. The results showed that the job performance of those with 12 years is only slightly better than those who took the education of 9 or 10 years. (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998).

C) Interests

Many recruiters believe that interest is an important indicator of one’s level of job performance. But is it really so? Likewise, in education, the predictive validity of the interests is also 0.10. The habit is to think that people whose interests match their profession are believed to perform better. The validity of 0.10 shows this is considered to be true to a limited extent. The study shows, that interests usually influence which jobs people will be interested in and for which job they will apply.

Job tryout procedure

Another screening tool is the job tryout procedure. The predictive validity of this screening method scored 0.44 in the conducted analysis. (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998) The process of this concrete screening method is to observe and evaluate the applicant’s performance while performing the work tasks.

Usually, the applicant is being observed for a certain period of time, for instance from 6 to 8 months. (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998) However, hiring people who are minimally screened can lead to unrealized revenues and further economic losses, resulting from low job performance. In addition to that, this screening method is expensive in itself.

Work sample tests

Work sample tests also referred to as Cases, provided the best assessment in a conducted meta-analysis by Schmidt & Hunter in 1998. The predictive validity of Case-based screening is 0.54. The combination of both, the work sample test and the GMA (General mental ability tests), obtained a score of 0.63!

So, what is the work sample test? Work sample tests, or Cases, are models of the job that must be performed by the applicants. The matter of the case is designed to match the tasks that are similar to those that are undertaken at the job.

For example, a candidate who is applying for a sales-related work position will be solving the case based on the sales-oriented business problem. As well as the person applying for the open marketing position, who will be solving a marketing-oriented business case. Another example could be presented when hiring skilled workers for more technical positions. For instance, an applicant must repair a series of defective electric motors.

But what about the Resumé?

We can’t forget about resumés. We probably agree that previous job experience and educational background are the parts of resumés, which recruiters care about the most. As mentioned before, the predictive validity of previous work experience is 0.18. In addition, the amount of education has an even lower ability to predict future job performance. Scoring the number 0.10 in conducted meta-analysis.

But let’s take a closer look at the job experience once again. According to the article by Talents unlimited, the overall result across the studies was a correlation of 0.06 between experience and job performance. “In short, this means that it has almost no significance in the big picture whether you have experience from the same industry or similar positions.“*

We agree that time is valuable itself, but can we really predict future job performance due to the time factor? Everybody has different ways of learning and different ways of using their skills. The time spent in previous work is not evidence of what kind of experience, knowledge, and skills we have gained during that time.

But what does all this mean? When there is a moderate complexity in the position you are trying to fill, the experience is not the parameter you should seek as a recruiter in the recruitment process.

But there is an exception when it comes to repetitive work or very specialized (high complexity) positions. For example, lawyers, special technicians, accountants, etc. The previous experience is equally important in both mentioned instances.

Why is Case-based screening the way to recruit in 2021?

As mentioned before, work sample tests performed the best in the conducted meta-analysis, based on the 85 years of research findings, by Schmidt & Hunter in 1998. But why is that? In the following section, we will take a closer look at the use of cases as an unbiased recruitment process.

The talent shortage is the No. 1 hiring challenge today. A study by the National Federation of Independent Business has found that 87% of HR professionals reported “few or no qualified applicants” for the positions they were trying to fill. Furthermore, Korn Ferry estimates that the global talent shortage could inflate salaries by $2.5 trillion by 2030.

1. Tackle the lack of talent

What is the meaning of those numbers? Firstly, the competition in the recruitment market will increase rapidly. Finding a talented and skilled employee for your company will become a challenge as we mentioned at the beginning of this blog post. Secondly, increase in salary spending. The talent shortage will result in a more competitive environment in terms of recruitment. Even though you will find the right applicant, be prepared to pay more money in order to afford them. 

As a result, if you want to find talented candidates, you need to apply advanced talent search strategies and find an alternative way to recruit. The findings of the 85-year research made it clear, case-based recruitment is the best assessment tool to predict future job performance. But that is not the only advantage. By solving cases, related to the job they are applying for, candidates have the unique opportunity to showcase and apply their talents. Some may show off talents they were unsure of. A resumé, for example, could not give candidates the place to show their talents – just to describe them.

2. Do the right hire

According to Career Builder research, 74% of employers admit they’ve hired the wrong person for a position. Unfortunately, a bad hire can cost a company upwards of $50,000, as reported by Career Builder. And why is that? Resumés are just a piece of paper. Some applicants simply don’t have writing skills to make their resumé stand out, some are just not sure about what information to include, and some of the applicants could include information that is not true to the whole extent.

According to the article by Innoflow:” This is absolutely critical for any organization because choosing the wrong person not only wastes valuable resources such as time, personnel, and money, but it can potentially have an impact on the long-term growth and expansion of a company if an employee is not an adequate fit for the role or for their colleagues.”

It is time to put resumés and cover letters on the shelf and start using case-screening methods with the long-run perspective. Candidates value the opportunity to showcase their preferences and talents. As well as they value screening without conscious or unconscious biases from the HR managers. Moreover, according to the article by Hr-guide, examinees further claim that the work sample tests are more favorable in their eyes, due to the relationship they possess to the job they are applying for.

The best option to avoid a bad hire is a screening method that will actually show you what skills and knowledge applicants possess in a fair unbiased hiring process. Give them a chance to show what they are capable of. As a result, it will be easier for you, as a recruiter, to see if they are the right fit.

3. See the fit

According to an annual recruitment analysis of the Danish job market conducted by Ballisager, 75 % of hiring managers and HR personnel think that the applicant showing how their competencies fit within the company is the most important thing in a cover letter. In fact, the cover letter just describes how applicants fit into your company. On the other hand, the case is the actual opportunity for them to showcase and prove their fit.

Employers must constantly make unbiased hiring decisions, but it is up to them to choose which methods to use in making them. We pointed out various methods as well as their most important goal, which is predictive validity. 85 years of studies indicate that case recruitment is the most accurate one bringing along several other benefits. And therefore, we think case-based screening is the way to recruit not only in 2021 but in years to come.

*(The blogpost from talents unlimited is based on a research article: Van Iddekinge, C., Arnold, J., Frieder, R. & Roth, P. (2019):” A meta-analysis of the criterion-related validity of prehire work experiences” Personnel Psychology, 72, 571-598″).