Previous tips of the month
Anthea Lowe & Associates
For the best chance of getting the best possible person for each job and of not breaking any law, your recruitment and selection processes must not allow personal stereotypes, biases, prejudices or comfort levels to get in the way.
You need effective, merit-based and legally valid processes – processes that actively encourage you to make assessments that are as objective and accurate as possible.
Why? Because, recruiting the wrong person is very expensive. Human Resources and recruitment specialists reckon that it costs anything between 85% and 100% of a person’s annual salary to replace them. Add the costs of having the wrong person in the job for as long as they are in it - from such things as lowered productivity, dissatisfied or lost customers/clients, and the dissatisfaction of other employees. Add the costs and disruption of having to ensure the wrongly appointed person leaves your organisation or is shifted to a more appropriate job plus the costs of any related legal claims they might make. And finally add the possible costs of people who did not get the job making discrimination claims against you. And you have a very expensive mistake indeed.
Unfortunately, it is very easy to recruit the wrong person.
Unless properly trained and advised we can easily - Judge applicants against the wrong selection criteria; Decide who we are and are not interested in far too early in the selection process; Decide on the basis of ‘gut feeling’ rather than fully and objectively checking out the individuals concerned; Rely far too heavily on an interview as the means of selection – this means we are likely to appoint the person who is best at telling us they are good at the job rather than the person who will be best at doing the job; and Rely far too heavily on the opinions of referees – who may be either under-selling or over-selling.
Each one of these common recruitment and selection tendencies is likely to severely reduce the chances of employing the best person for the job and could also result in valid discrimination or other legal claims.
6. Recruitment and selection
