External Candidate Assessment

Interviewing and external candidate assessment can be difficult, and if we believe that our organization is not doing these well, then we need to make changes in our approach. My first recommendation is that we evaluate our current interviewing/talent assessment methods to make sure they provide relevant selection data. The methods and tests we use should indicate something of value related to expected job performance. This does not restrict us to methods where we need to observe positive test results to indicate positive job performance. Methods where negative test results indicates negative performance are just as valuable, if not more. An example of this would be a realistic honesty test where we ask the candidate “if they have ever explained a situation in a way that made it sound better than it actually was”. We would expect that everyone has done this, so if the candidate says “no” we may wonder if they are just telling us answers they think we want to hear. One of the reasons we could be struggling is because we are asking questions that don’t help us in our hiring decision. …show more content…
To determine if the methods are valid, we can compare ours to existing scientific studies. We can then eliminate the non-valid methods and replace them with some of the recommendations below.

A second recommendation is to gather our interviewing staff and make sure we use a consistent, structured interviewing process. This ensures that all candidates participate in a comparable process, and makes comparing the candidates easier. Based on the validity dataset referred to above, structured interviews are 34% more valid for selection. One of the reasons we could be struggling is because we are allowing our interviewing staff to conduct inconsistent, unstructured