We Said/He Said: Quality Candidates Are Not Always Quality Hires

Let's continue on our talent roll!

Time for a focus on the talent acquisition function. Question: suppose you had 50 applicants for an open position. Which of the following describes how you will decide which candidates move on in the process?

A. Toss all the candidate resumes onto the stairs and see which fall to the lowest step

B. Check their social media to weed out whackos, and everyone else moves on (assuming anyone's left)

C. Look for candidates with the most impressive-sounding biographies -- the 'right' elite universities, the 'right' elite credentials, same job title, etc.

D. Do a preliminary screening interview to see whether the candidate seems like a real human being who actually did what they said v. some AI-generated candidate.

All of these approaches are based on the idea that a "quality candidate" is going to become a "quality hire." This is a false belief.

We see this all the time. The belief system is that all the candidates (other than whackos or AI-generated candidates) are "The Best," and any hire that is made is therefore by definition "The Best Of The Best." 

Another way to put it is that you have "quality candidates," and you ASSUME that a hire from among quality candidates is a "quality hire."

You know that's how you think.

Beyond anything else we could say, listen to Steve Hunt (yes that's two days in a row for Steve!):

There is a big difference between being a good candidate and being a good employee. A good candidate is someone who has the skills, social connections and attributes to get hired. A good employee is someone who has the skills, social acumen, and attributes to be successful in the job. These things often overlap, but they are far from the same thing. Hiring managers might be impressed by candidates who have the “right look”, went to the “right schools”, or worked for famous companies but that does not mean these candidates will be good employees. A socially awkward but technically skilled applicant might come across as a poor candidate in a job interview but be an exceptional employee when placed in the job.

Steve continues:

The mismatch between what hiring systems measure about candidates and what actually matters for job success lies at the heart of people's dislike for candidate selection systems. The best action we can take to build credibility in use of hiring technology is to stop building solutions that only evaluate quality of candidates and build solutions that predict quality of hire. This requires creating solutions that empirically link pre-hire candidate data with post-hire job outcomes. This change is well within the capabilities of modern technology. But companies must shift from just focusing on maximizing hiring efficiency to increasing hiring effectiveness. 

It boils all the way down to what we have always said: your goal is to assess the candidate's talent as it relates to potential to be effective on the job in the future -- Day 1 and Day 90. That is a quality hire. 

When you focus on anything other than talent to be successful, you are focusing on a quality applicant. Not all quality applicants have the talent to become quality hires. But you get paid for quality hires, not quality applicants.

Unless of course you get paid for creating only quality applicant pools.

Which is it?

Ask us how we can help you find a quality hire among your quality applicants.

(image credit: Widdy99, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)