Pre-Hire Assessments

Before I leave my current position, I am trying to finish a proposal for a five-year plan designed to reduce turnover and increase the bottom line by $1 million per year. It's unlikely I will have the opportunity to see how it turns out, and I won't be able to do everything that I had originally planned to oversee. Consequently, I'm having to flesh out my proposal with operational details, specifying particular people to oversee various aspects of it, what qualifications different positions might require, etc. It's fascinating, and I'm really enjoying the work, but boy, I wish I knew I'd be able to see it through!

Basically, the proposal suggests implementing a new training system and a pre-hire assessment. It should be a one-two punch that really allows us to recruit smarter and train better. There are some tremendous companies out there that produce really wonderful pre-hire assessments, however, it is not financially or culturally appropriate for us to look at one of these, so we will be developing our own. Understandably, this comes along with its own hurdles and pitfalls, because we need to ensure we have the data to back up our hiring choices as appropriate.

This project is one of the first times that my BA in Anthropology has come in really handy. My experience with data gathering and statistical analysis and my research background means I can come up with some valid data gathering techniques, and I know better than to assume the outcome.

Essentially, we need more high performers. I have a benchmark sales number x annual salary calculation, and what amounts to a customer satisfaction/errors index to use to identify my high performers. The same calculation will be used to identify my average performers, and they will be used essentially as a control group, and for comparison purposes. We are going to ignore the low performers; they should be gone anyway, as they cost us money.

Once we have our group identified, I will be personally interviewing a number of them. The purpose of the interview is to identify some areas to look at that generate higher performance and better sales numbers. I will personally interview as many high performers as it is feasible, and based on their answers, we will generate some characteristics that the high performers themselves think differentiates their performance from that of others. Average performers will be interviewed similarly. Ideally, I would love to interview everyone, but as a company that is geographically spread over most of the company, this is impractical. So the answers of the interviewed group will be used to generate a survey to be administered to all employees.

At this point, the survey cannot be anonymous, because we need to be able to identify the answers of high performers as compared to those of average performers, so employees will be identified by their employee number and no further information. This is intended to minimize decision-making based on pre-concieved notions about race, gender, or any other protected category that might be identifiable by name. We will also need to reassure staff that the survey will have no impact on their performance appraisals, etc. in order to try and encourage honesty.

This isn't a perfect system; not everyone will be honest, for one thing, and for another, we are necessarily operating under the assumption that our high performers can identify what it is that they do differently from everyone else. But it should give us some interesting data to work with.

I'm going to leave things at that for now; so that this blog post doesn't turn into a novel.