Misplaced Talent: A Guide to Better People Decisions

Chapter 3

Capability Assessment

The act of selecting staff for recruitment or promotion is one of the hardest people decisions practitioners make. A choice is required based on who is most deserving for a job, resulting in both elation and disappointment, depending on which side of the fence the candidate is on. Usually, the ratio of jobs to candidates is not even and a far greater number of people will be disappointed. Depending on how invested emotionally and physically the candidates are in being hired, this disappointment can teeter on hatred for the hiring company. Sometimes, this feeling is warranted.

In a recent poll conducted in Australia, with over a 1,000 candidates who had recently been through a hiring process, nearly 75 percent of candidates were dissatisfied with how they were treated by their prospective employers. More startling, a parallel study found that nearly 50 percent of candidates reported that they blamed the organization as a whole for their experience and their impression of the employer had been tarnished. So bad was this feeling that 18 percent would take their business elsewhere, 36 percent would complain to family and friends about the company, and 10 percent would engage in social media to expose their poor experience to strangers they don't even know.

These statistics beg the question: What is going on in the hiring process? Recruiters rushing the hiring process at the expense of a professional, systematic assessment surely is part of the problem, ...