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There’s an interesting article on ITWeb about different techniques that HR professionals can use to identify the right candidates for an open position and to retain them. The article notes the potential for utilizing a third-party predictive index service to help match an individual’s talents and behaviors with a job specification.
Though they can vary slightly from one service to another, a predictive index often includes a questionnaire that the job candidate fills out. As the ITWeb article points out, a predictive index provides three pictures of a candidate to help identify who the person is, how they perceive themselves and what their “displayed behavior” outside of their interview persona.
As the story also states, picking the wrong candidate can be costly and the use of a PI system to can help employers to find the right fit. It’s great for employers to have these types of tools available to them to help with the employee selection process. But I’d caution CIOs and IT hiring managers not to over-rely on such tools or to discount other important components of the interviewing process.
Several IT leaders I’ve spoken to about this topic offer similar descriptions of how the interviewing process works at their organizations. Let’s say an IT organization is looking to hire a .Net developer who’s got a few years experience in their particular industry and they receive responses from 100 applicants.
Typically what happens is the hiring manager is able to narrow the field to fewer than ten candidates because a) they’re able to quickly determine that most of the candidates lack the kind of experience they’re really looking for and b) quite frankly some of the applicants aren’t really .Net developers at all, at least not in any real sense of the word. More often than not, they're IT professionals with tangential or limited .Net experience.
Then, during the face-to-face interviews, IT leaders get a deeper sense of each candidate, what their accomplishments are and whether their technical skills match with what they’re looking for. More importantly, they sense from the candidate’s responses and demeanor whether they’ve got the right personality fit for their organization. If a job candidate makes it through that round, they’ll likely have to endure another set of interviews, including a meeting with the CIO for the final litmus test.
It may not be a perfect approach but it’s a process that a lot of IT managers continue to rely on. And it often comes down to a gut feeling and common sense. Still, there’s no harm in trying to apply a more scientific method to help pick the right employee.
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