The recruiting process is highly significant in bringing on new team members with a different viewpoint. Through my experiences, I have participated in a couple of interviews as a candidate and many others where I was in the role of the recruiter. When I was the one being interviewed, I always found the interview to be most effective when the recruiter shared a bit about themselves and their journey. The factors that made these interviews ineffective is when there were questions that were simply “Yes” or “No” answers as this left little room for me to expand on the topic and attempt to stand out from other candidates.
This differed from my experience when I was approaching the process from the recruiting standpoint. Interviews at my job are conducted with another manager to allow both people to get to know the potential hire. Getting to know the candidate by starting off with introductions has been the most effective aspect. This allows the candidate to warm up to answering questions and understand a bit more about the job itself. As shared from the article “The Perfect Hire,” The goal of the recruiter “is to find the person who best fits the requirements and culture of a given job.” This has always been the goal of the interviews I have conducted, as the grocery store I work at has a very specific culture.
To prevent bias, the process starts with online applications where individuals are only filtered out if there listed availability does not fit with the needs of the role. This practice is noted in “7 Practical Ways to Reduce Bias in the Hiring Process” as choosing to go blind when reviewing resumes. Another tip from this article is having standardized interviews. This is another strategy utilized in the interviews I conduct as we are given a set of questions from the company and this addresses the most important aspects of the job, such as communication, teamwork, and customer experience.
To build a diverse workforce, an effective tactic that myself and fellow managers use is to stray away from hiring someone who reminds us of another person in the store. This allows us to bring on people with a variety of personalities and skills. Similar to the lesson taught in the book “First Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers do Differently,” the philosophy of the job involves managers defining the outcomes and being comfortable with each employee finding their own route to complete the task. We often discuss how there is no one “right way” to get any part of the job done within the store.
In tying this into the concepts of reliability, validity, and utility, the company has made many strides in creating the standardized questions that relate to the core competencies of the job. The interview process is reliable because it is consistent with each candidate, it has validity because we are directly asking about the most important factors of the job to determine if the candidate would be successful upon hiring and training for the role, and it has utility because the standardized questions help weed out candidates that are not a good fit early on to save time and money in the overall process.
Sources:
Buckingham, M., & Coffman, C. W. (2014). First, break all the rules : What the world’s greatest managers do differently. Gallup Press.
Chamorro-Premuzic, T., & Steinmetz, C. (2013). The perfect hire. Scientific American Mind, 24(3), 42-47. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/24942432
Knight, R., (2018). 7 practical ways to reduce bias in the hiring process. SHRM. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/talent-acquisition/7-practical-ways-to-reduce-bias-hiring-process