Improving Job Candidate Evaluation & Selection

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You don’t have to be an HR manager for a Fortune 100 company to appreciate the challenges in evaluating, comparing and selecting job candidate. Setting meaningful criteria, organizing evaluation and selecting the best job candidate or recruit is often frustrating and time consuming. How do you create meaningful criteria that everyone can agree on and interpret similarly, make sense of the feedback received and then try to compare job candidates / potential recruits so that you make the best selection, is difficult at the best of times. However, with a little preparation and the use of best practices in evaluation and selection, the task will become much less daunting and much more informative.

 

Developing a standardized evaluation (rating & ranking) and selection framework that enables staff members to assess a job candidate or potential recruit on multiple attributes and facilitates comparisons makes the task less taxing and improves the quality and transparency of an employee selection process. Below is an example of a job candidate evaluation framework which can be used in conjunction with software applications such as the one offered by ProGrid Evaluation Solutions. Together they can bring greater objectivity, transparency and consistency and to your job candidate evaluation process and significantly improve your candidate / recruitment selection process.

 

A word of warning before you bound off to implement a standardized evaluation & selection framework. As Susan M. Heathfield describes in her popular human resources series on About.com , “Your Guide to Human Resources”, systematizing your process for hiring employees, is the first and most vital step to recruiting or hiring a superior workforce. Read Susan’s checklist for setting up and systematizing your hiring or recruitment process.

 

Implementing an Effective Job Candidate Evaluation & Selection Framework:

1. Make a list of the requirements you expect the right job candidate to possess. Note any specific qualifications, attributes or technical skills as these will combine to form your evaluation and selection criteria and later support high impact visual representations of the results.

    

2. Group these requirements into similar categories or "criteria themes". For example, public speaking skills, ability to work in teams and awareness of own strengths and weaknesses might be put under a theme of Interpersonal Skills.

    

3. Cross-check the logic in getting what you want by placing your job candidate evaluation criteria themes under three columns, Credentials, Enablers and Impact, in that order as shown in the example below.

    

   Candidate Attributes	Activites / Enablers	Impact on Organisation
   Education / Training	Time Management	Developing Others
   Work Experience	Interpersonal Skills	Customer Service
   Technical / Management Skills	Supervising & Leadership	Innovation / Improving

    

4. For each criteria theme, write one to three sentences that capture the most important and differentiating aspects for it. Hint: look at items from the list you created in step 1 that you grouped under the criteria theme.

    

5. Create candidate evaluation criteria using the format below or your own. If you design your own, evaluation best practices suggest that your grading scale for each criteria theme should have an even numbers of choices as shown in the example below. This helps differentiate job candidates as it forces evaluators away from going for ‘safe’ or lazy ground in the center. You also need to assign a value to each level on your grading scale. This is done to convert your more explicit levels of performance into metrics so you can calculate a total for each job candidate, rank and compare. It’s best not to show the assigned value on your evaluation form. Note: this is not the same as criteria weighting. Weighting your criteria is not used here and is not recommended…unless of course you have an academically validated econometric model for selecting the best job candidates or recruits. See List of Sample Job Candidate Evaluation Criteria at the end of this article.

    

Technical Skills
The job candidate demonstrated to your satisfaction that he/she has the necessary technical skills to perform the job successfully.
_____ Does not meet requirements.
_____ Meets some but not all requirements.
_____ Meets requirements.
_____ Exceeds requirements.

 

6. Create an evaluation form using the evaluation criteria themes you developed in step 5. Use the form in interviews or for job candidate / recruitment selection committees. If you share questions and responsibility across interviewers or committee members, you will learn more about the job candidate or recruit and the individual will not suffer the same interview questions repeatedly. Try giving the same form to the candidate or recruit and asking them to assess her or him self and justify their answers to each criteria. You will also discover whether the job candidate "fits" your organization by fostering a discussion on a criterion by criterion basis. Hint: focus only on the criteria where scores (ratings) differ across interviewers or committee members.

    

7. Collect the evaluation forms and tabulate the results for each job candidate or prospective recruit. to download and try a quick and informative candidate evaluation tool (free demo) from ProGrid Evaluation Solutions.
   (download link: www.progrid.info/evaluationtools/download-ce.html).

    

8. To best facilitate your assessment of a job candidate, chart the results on a graph. – See sample report produced by the rating and ranking evaluation tool mentioned above.

    

   Below is an example taken from that report. The first chart suggests that this particular job candidate has strong attributes, i.e. Skill, Education & Experience but lacks something that enables him or her to make a strong positive impact on the organization. The second graph (bar chart) indicates that the job candidate's specific weakness is his / her low interpersonal skills which is inhibiting his or her ability in (1) Developing Others effectively and (2) providing satisfactory Customer Service. The second graph gives you the specific insight drawn from the first graph, i.e. why his or her impact on the organization would be low.

    

   

    

9. Keep your results as they greatly assist the hired job candidate or recruit, his / her supervisor and Human Resources staff in understanding which skills or capabilities the individual needs to strengthen.

 

Implementing a standardized evaluation and selection framework like the one described above, will help you and your organization’s staff members assess job candidates faster, more objectively and transparently. It will also provide you with specific, actionable and meaningful results that will help differentiate job candidates / potential recruits, focus discussion on areas of concern instead of wasting time chatting about what everyone agrees on. Once implemented, you can rely on it to support and document your decisions and as a basis for performance evaluations or 360º reviews.

 

Sample Job Candidate Evaluation (rating & ranking) and Selection Criteria
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