Hiring and retaining talent

• Cydney Dupree, PhD, prepared insights on how to hire and retain the best people.

Organisational Needs Analysis

• Organisational needs analysis stems from problems like low productivity or turnover or shifts in the organization's goals.
• A key consideration at this stage is whether hiring practices contribute to these issues.
• Productivity problems can stem from poor training, organizational policies, ineffective leadership, nature of tasks, job design, and employee satisfaction.
• It is important to determine if changing hiring practices can tackle the organisation's issues.

Conducting Job Analysis

• To design a selection system, the first step is to conduct a job analysis.
• Job analysis involves gathering data on the tasks and activities of the job, along with the qualities needed to perform them.
• Job analysis is essential to understand the job requirements to predict who will do well in the role.
• Job analysis is legally encouraged.
• It provides a benchmark for assessing the effectiveness of hiring decisions.
• Job analysis can serve as a foundation for organizational practices like performance appraisals.

Methods of Job Analysis

• Job analysis is observing what is visible and questioning what is not.
• A job analyst summarizes information about a job to produce a job description by watching, questioning, and understanding.

Defining Performance

• Performance, a measurable construct, is work-related activity.
• Performance is the effectiveness and value of work behavior and outcomes.
• Performance is multidimensional, where ranking employees on one dimension may not align with their ranking on another.

Task Performance vs. Contextual Performance

• Contextual performance includes performance aspects unrelated to specific tasks.
• Contextual performance activities aim to improve the interpersonal and psychological work environment facilitating task completion.
• Contextual performance incudes organizational citizenship behavior, emotional helping, advice sharing, and altruism.
• Task activities contribute directly to the core of an organization, whereas contextual activities contribute to the social environment.
• Task activities differ across jobs, while contextual activities are common across many jobs.
• Task activities involve skills or abilities, compared to contextual activities which rely on motivational or personality variables.
• Task activities is what people are hired to do, while contextual activities are desirable, but less likely to be demanded.

Principles of Effective Hiring Approaches

• There are five key principles of effective hiring approaches: Reliability, Validity, Fairness, Cost, Transparency and Applicant Reactions.

Principle #1: Reliability

• Reliability means consistency.
• Interview scores, personality measures, and assessment center ratings must yield consistent (reliable) information.
• If the hiring process provides unreliable information, it will not be valid, meaning accurate or predictive.

Principle #2: Validity

• Validity equals accuracy.
• Hiring decisions must be based on valid, relevant, and predictive information of performance.
• Validity is confirming that hiring information correlates with actual job requirements.
• It predicts job performance or other job-related aspects.
• Hiring must be based on relevant, performance-related information.

Principle #3: Fairness

• Legal issues in recruitment and hiring in the relevant country are an important consideration.
• Hiring information should be based on business necessity.
• Business necessity means that a selection procedure must be related to job behavior or performance.
• The selection procedure must be a valid predictor of an important criterion.
• The selection procedure must serve a business purpose not as well served by a known alternative with less adverse impact.
• Adverse Impact exists if the selection ratio in one (usually marginalized) group is less than 80% of the selection ratio in the other (usually advantaged) group.
• An example of adverse impact is if a company has 80 White and 20 Black applicants and if the company hires 25% of the White applicants (20 of them), one should expect 20% (four-fifths of 25%) of Black applicants to be hired (four of them).
• Result of less than 80% considered evidence of adverse impact.
• Th 80% rule used to evaluate discrimination claims.

Principle #4: Cost

• Assessments can be expensive.
• Consider cost in terms of effort and opportunity, looking at how much effort is required to gather the information (interviews or situational judgment tests) and how predictive the data is.

Principle #5: Transparency and Applicant Reactions

• Make the hiring processes transparent as possible so potential candidates understand how they are being evaluated and what is required to get hired.
• Unclear hiring practices can create negative reactions from applicants.
• Replace unpopular tests or hiring procedures with comparable, more favorable ones.

Interviews

• Interviews are the second most common assessment method after the application blank.
• Interviews are a method that can assess personality and situational judgment.

Worst Job Interview Ever

• Terrible interviews can be irrelevant to the job description.
• Asking different questions to different participants is bad practice in interviews.
• Interviews can be too short.
• Emphasizing unnecessary information is bad interview practice.
• Candidates should be allowed to ask questions during the interview.
• Answers that candidates provide should be scored.
• Notes should be taken during interviews.
• There should be more than one interviewer for each interview.
• Interviewers should receive the proper training.
• Treat applicants with respect.
• Treat colleagues with respect, since applicants might not accept the offer if they get it.

How Interviews Vary

• Some interviews are conducted by skilled interviewers, while others are conducted by untrained people.
• Interviewers are sometimes not standardized.
• Same questions can be asked in different ways by different interviewers.
• Critically, structured interviews ask all candidates the same questions.
• Structured interviews collect the same information.
• Structured interviews uses predefined scoring to assess answers.
• Others are unstructured, where different questions are asked across candidates.
• Structured interviews enhance predictive validity.

Validity of Interviews

• A validity study revealed that the rank order of 57 candidates interviewed by 12 different sales managers showed no agreement.
• 20 years of research identified unreliability as a major problem.
• Interviews were being lumped together from different skill and experience levels on the part of the interviewers.
• Interviews were both unstructured and structured.
• Informal conversations labeled as interviews.
• Improving reliability leads to gains in predictive validity.
• Interviews, if well-structured, can be valid predictors of job performance.

Interviewer and Interviewee Characteristics

• Differences between interviewers are how they use information to reach overall judgments and the predictive validity of those judgments.
• Experiencing breeds confidence hindered insight.
• Different interviewees affect the type of information provided in the interview.
• Interviewees used ingratiation tactics more when answering situational questions.
• Interviewees used self-promotion tactics more when they answered experience-based questions.
• Extraverted individuals tend to engage in more self-promotion.
• Agreeable individuals tend to engage in more ingratiation.
• Interviewers prefer candidates similar to themselves.
• Interviewers prefer candidates who fit the "prototypical” ideal for the job in question.

The High Costs of Turnover

• Turnover incurs substantial financial costs, about 90-200% of annual pay to recruit and train replacements.
• Turnover disrupts operations.
• Turnover increases accident rates.
• Turnover decreases customer service.
• Turnover hurts more when it is voluntary or part of a reduction-in-force.

Theories of Turnover

• Most turnover research follows a model: Distal antecedents leading to attitudes then leading to the intention to quit or the actual turnover.
• Distal antecedents include job characteristics and personality.
• Attitudes include job satisfaction.
• Measuring intentions to quit are often measures of turnover.
• Intentions only predict 25% of actual turnover.
• Intentions are better predictors when highly specific, assessed close in time to turnover, and drawn from active job seekers.
• March and Simon (1958) presented an early formal model of withdrawal.
• Main components consist of movement ease (aka alternative job availability) and movement desirability (aka job dissatisfaction).
• Dissatisfaction precipitates a search for alternatives with comparing them via rational decision making, and turnover ensues if a superior job is found.
• Employees exit their jobs for reasons other than dissatisfaction or jobs elsewhere
• The Unfolding Model claims that people quit due to shocks.
• Shocks are jarring events precipitating deliberations about leaving
• Examples of shocks are a spouse relocates or needing to be in a better school district.
• Leavers largely quit due to shocks, explaining most of turnover in excess of 60%.
• The psychology of staying differs from leaving and involves different motives.
• Job embeddedness has three parts: Fit, Links, Sacrifices.

1. Fit is how closely incumbents match the job community.
2. Links are work and outside ties.
3. Sacrifices consider on- and off-the-job benefits given up upon leaving.

• Job embeddedness explains why people stay in their job.

Turnover Criterion Problem

• Everyone eventually leaves their organisation.
• Defining and measuring turnover can limit and define why people leave and where they go.
• Three critical components to consider in turnover: Voluntariness, Functionality, and Avoidability.

1. Voluntariness is whether the decision to leave was volitional.
2. Functionality is whether the people quitting are good or bad performers.
3. Avoidability is whether the cause of turnover was organisationally avoidable or not.

Emotions in the Workplace

• When nothing in particular is going on, most people have a tendency to experience a mildly positive mood.
• This is called a positivity offset.
• Employees think about events that created strong negative emotions five times as long as positive ones.

Affective Events Theory

• Work events cause emotional reactions, affecting performance and satisfaction.
• Work environment characteristics alongside work and personal events lead to emotional reactions, which in turn, affect job satisfaction and performance.

Job Satisfaction

• Job satisfaction is a positive feeling about one's job based on its evaluation.
• Satisfaction can be measured using a single item.
• A correlation of 0.63 exists between single- and multi-item job satisfaction measures; however, information about specific facets associated with low satisfaction are lost.
• People systematically overestimate the duration of their unhappiness following negative events.
• As an example predicted drop in happiness for a negative event is 2.10 points, while the actual drop in happiness only amounts to 0.68 points.
• Lyubomirsky studied whether there is a point at which people declare their current salary is enough.
• For example, if you are currently earning £30,000, you believe you will need to be happy with ~ £50,000.
• If you are currently earning £100,000, you think you will need to be happy with ~ £250,000.
• The salary people say they need to be happy jumps up every time they are making more.
• A Gallup poll of 450,000 Americans in 2009 looked at life evaluation with Cantril's Self-Anchoring Scale (the ladder), worded as “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top.
• Survey result found that lack of money brings both emotional misery and low life evaluation.
• Beyond ~$75,000 in the contemporary United States, higher income is neither the road to experienced happiness nor the relief of unhappiness or stress.
• Higher incomes continue to improve life evaluations.
• $75,000 in 2009 is equivalent to ~$104,000 today.
• 30 is the meta-analytic relationship between job satisfaction and job performance based on 312 studies involving 54,417 respondents.
• Older employees report higher job satisfaction, but evidence shows a U-shaped relationship.
• Job satisfaction with coworkers tends to be higher than satisfaction with pay and promotions across all ages.
• Availability of better alternatives also affects job satisfaction.
• Employees experience honeymoons and hangovers when starting a new job, a period of positive attitude, followed by a decline.
• Organisational commitment declines over time.
• The characteristics of a job affect psychological states, which can lead to work outcomes.
• “Growth need strength” was theorized to strengthen relationships.
• Employees with higher growth needs are more affected by the core dimensions of a job.
• Job characteristics and job satisfaction has a moderate relationship.

Social and Leadership Aspects of Job Satisfaction

• Relationships matter.
• Believing you had the support of your coworkers influences your job satisfaction, regardless of the nature of the job.
• Coworker support bolsters satisfaction and commitment more than coworker antagonism.
• Supportive social relationships matter more than irritating coworkers.
• People typically quit their supervisors instead of their jobs.
• A considerate leader is a powerful predictor of employee satisfaction.
• Leader consideration entails showing concern, respecting others, looking out for welfare, and express appreciation.
• Quality relationships with a leader increase job satisfaction.

Fairness and Job Satisfaction

• Adams' Equity Theory of Fairness states that the person’s outcomes relative to inputs is equal to the referent(s) outcomes relevant to inputs.
• Distributive justice asks if outcomes (e.g. pay levels) are fair.
• Procedural justice looks at processes through which outcomes are obtained fairly.
• Interactional justice is whether people are treated with respect and kindness in interpersonal interactions.
• Informational justice evaluates if all employees receive the same information.