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Recruitment & Retention

Published November 2007

Finding Candidates with the Right Fit

Steven T. Hunt, Ph.D.

About 20 percent of hiring decisions made for salaried jobs end in failure. Failure rates for hourly jobs are even worse, frequently reaching levels of 50 percent or more, according to recent research by Kronos Inc. It is astonishing companies tolerate these failure rates, given the costs associated with poor job performance and staff turnover. It is even more surprising because everyone in the staffing process has a vested interest in making the best hires possible.

Hiring managers directly benefit from hiring good employees and bear much of the pain and frustration that result from hiring the wrong person. Recruiters' reputations are made (or broken) based on the quality of candidates they find for their clients. Even candidates recognize it is rarely in their best interest to be hired for jobs they are ill-suited to perform.

Given that everyone from the CEO to the prospective employee has an interest in making effective staffing decisions, why do companies make so many poor hires? Two of the top reasons are that companies oversimplify what successful job performance looks like, and as a result, they hire candidates based on the wrong criteria. Second, hiring decision makers do not effectively use staffing assessment tools to evaluate candidates.

Job Success is Multidimensional

Imagine you hired a salesperson who consistently exceeded his quota but also treated co-workers with contempt and rarely did anything for the company unless it directly benefited him. Is this person a good or bad hire?

Your answer will depend on how much you value different dimensions of job performance. When hiring people, it is critical to remember there is no such thing as a good or bad candidate, in a general sense. People are not just good or bad — they are good or bad at doing certain things.

Both jobs and people are multidimensional. The challenge of hiring is matching candidates' myriad characteristics with the myriad demands of the job. Despite this multidimensionality, companies often treat candidates as though they can be placed along a single dimension, ranging from best to worst.

This results in overemphasizing certain candidate characteristics while downplaying or overlooking others. The only way to avoid this problem is to define what behaviors drive successful job performance before you begin sourcing and selecting candidates. This requires getting hiring managers to carefully describe the different ways an employee might succeed or fail in the job.

Hiring managers frequently struggle when asked to describe what candidates actually will need to do to be successful in a job. Rather than defining what behaviors are critical for job success, they rattle off generic platitudes about good performance such as being "a passionate, service-oriented, team player."

These things sound good, but they tell us nothing about what people actually need to do to be successful. What does it mean to be passionate? Is there romance involved?