Relying on traditional interviewing techniques alone is flawed for many reasons, the most common being:
• The interviewer suffers “the halo effect” where they’re overly impressed by one or more personal characteristics and therefore assume that everything else must be perfect;
• Depending on their personality, sometimes interviewers are looking for a reason to reject a candidate. I’ve seen negative responses given twice the weighting of positive ones, and candidates rejected after a single error, despite multiple positive responses;
• I’ve experienced interviewers fall into the “recency trap”, where as a result of a few bad interviews in a row, the next person who performs satisfactorily has been inaccurately rated as outstanding. The reverse is also true.
• Often candidates who “are just like me” (the interviewer) are automatically given higher ratings even though the job may not require someone “just like them”.
According to a recent HBR article, 80% of employee turnover is the result of bad hiring decisions – that’s an extraordinary statistic given the financial cost of selecting the wrong person, not to mention the negative impact on business productivity and team morale.
We encourage our clients to broaden their thinking to include personality testing. Personality testing is an extremely valuable tool to help you take the guess work out of hiring.
The reputation of personality testing has been a bit tarnished due to a surplus of instruments on the market that are not backed by any evidence or research. Don’t be discouraged, there are some terrific testing instruments available and our preferred one is Harrison Assessments.
If you’d like to learn more about the Harrison tool contact us at team@norgayhrconsulting.com.au.