Keys to Choosing the Right Effective Employee for Your Organization

Organizations in general and human resource managers in specific are usually faced with the challenge of whom to recruit (how to know and choose the right employee); among the reasons which make recruitment a big challenge for organizations is the level of the employee’s compatibility with the job and its suitability for him, as well as his capabilities and commitment to the work, in addition to loyalty criterion, besides many other reasons.

Recruiting the wrong employee results in severe consequences and may affect the reputation of recruitment officer in charge of the process. In this article, I will present to you the effective methods and approaches for selecting the right employee the right employee for the right position for your organization.

Common recruitment mistakes:

1. The old practice of trial, right, and wrong: Although only  a few organizations are still relying on it, it still exists as one of the recruitment methods. It depends mainly on guesswork; and it jumps to direct employment based on a look at the resume, then the organization decides whether to retain or discard the employee based on performance.

Some hiring managers suffer from what we might call self-experience narcissism, as they think that they can know people just by talking to them or even by looking at them, and thus miss out many opportunities to get distinguished people who are not good at presenting or introducing themselves. On the other hand, they may make huge mistakes by hiring the wrong people simply because they managed to present themselves professionally.

1. Relying on the personal interview in recruiting: Personal interview is undoubtedly an important and essential step, but it should not be the only method as it is subject to personal impressions. And I can say that it is -in a way- a struggle of psychological forces between the hiring official and the applicant. This is because the strong personality the candidate may demonstrate during interview and he on which might have had training gives him a greater chance to surpass other applicants who are more suitable for the job, given there is no interference  of the hiring official’s state of mood at the time of the interview and the extent of its impact.

Here, we are not underestimating the importance of the personal interview, as it is very essential, but considering it as sufficient alone in the hiring process brings about the risk of making a bad recruiting decision, especially with mid-level and senior positions.

According to Twin Employment & Training website, based on a study of 2,000 hiring managers, 33% of them make an initial decision to hire or not hire someone within the first 90 seconds of the interview.

1. Reliance on tests and measures: Despite the fact that tests and measures give a high degree of accuracy, validity, and reliability, they are linked to the occurrence of three possible mistakes that should be noted:

• First: Relying on the test as the only criterion: It is not right to suffice with the test without the personal interview, for example, the job inclinations test clearly reflects the employee's basic tendencies and the ten jobs he desires most and towards which he is most enthusiastic. Despite the quality and efficiency of the test, it should be read by a specialist. The quality of the test is increased through the coaching session that this specialist provides with the employee who took this test.

More information about this scale can be obtained from this article, in which coach Zainab Orabi adresses it in detail and how to obtain it.

• Second: Not understanding what the test measures exactly: The market is full of tests and measures; and they vary in the taget they measure. The recruitment official should be aware of this variance and difference or rely on a trusted advisory body in this matter. For example, there is the MBTI test, which is strong and arbitral  in raising leadership performance, but it is not suitable for recruiting leaders. In fact, many companies use it for the purpose of recruiting in decision-making positions, and this causes huge losses, because some job applicants may have received training on this particular test and how to use it to obtain the required job, even if they are not suitable for the job they applied for.

• Third: An other issue is the extent to which the recruitment official understands the scale and understands its results, whether direct numbers or the deviations contained in these numbers which can be understood only by experts of this scale.

A common example of such a scale is the famous and well-known DISC assessment, which helps in understanding an individual’s spontaneous and non-spontaneous behavior. Despite its popularity and the clarity of its initial results, this test often loses its full usefulness due to poor experience in analyzing its results. It has a very great benefit in placing the new employee in the right job that best fits for him, with the ease, quality and intensity of productivity, in addition to other things such as the employee’s communication style, how he integrates with the work team, how he addresses problems, as well as his priorites map and other things that help a lot in dealing with and understanding the new employee.

1. Expecting higher performance from the first day: Logic says that the employee should prove his presence from the first day, and this often happens when the employee goes through a period of enthusiasm and exaggerated interest sometimes at the beginning of his work days.

Through my experience as a career coach, I found that a high percentage of new employees are faced with the challenges of adapting to the environment and colleagues at the workplace, making friends and knowing competitors, in addition to the challenges that they find in terms of work such as moving from his city to the city in which he will work, beesides the household movement and other challenges. For that, the enthusiasm at work beginning often decreases after a while and then returns to rise to conform to the employee’s psychological, emotional, and performance nature. Mainly, there are three stages an employee goes through:

1. Increase
2. Decrease
3. Then increase and stability

And this is likely to cause a the recruiter’s wrong  judgment on the employee.

There are two important things the employee needs most at the beginning of his job:

First: support and encouragement, no matter how weak his performance is.

Second: the clarity of the professional path that he will follow in the organization, and the point/level  he is required to achieve.

According to a Gallup study of the US workplace, only 60% of employees agree that they know what is expected of them at work. On the other  hand, the ambiguity of their job path and the expectations and goals expected of them represent exhaustion and a burnout to them.

I strongly recommend that there be a high level of communication with the new employees at the beginning of their appointment, and that the employee should finds it easy to ask questions and that the employer listens to them and answers them without making judgments. The line managers may see that some of these questions have intuitive answers given his long experience in the field. However, these questions that maight be asked by new employees may constitute a source of worry and challenge which they are concerned with and hesitates to ask about to avoid being be taunted if not welcomed to ask freely.

The more the work environment is a learning environment (listening, dialogue, reviewing and learning from mistakes), the more it becomes an attractive and motivating environment for all of its members, including the new employees.

Written by Coach Abdullah Alyahya