Four problematic selection tools that could be hurting your recruitment process

You’ve already found a great channel for sourcing top candidates by using EuroJobsites’ niche job boards, but what about the next step in the recruitment process?
Even though the selection process has been thoroughly researched by academics and practitioners alike, many organisations get this crucial recruitment step wrong. By using selection tools incorrectly or by using the wrong tools altogether, you may be failing to predict the future job performance of candidates, which is the whole point of the selection process.

Following are four problematic selection tools and techniques that could be hurting your selection process.

• CVs: Job seekers write their CVs in a way that presents their work performance in the best possible way. A full and honest assessment of their work history never makes it into job seekers’ CVs, which is completely normal, of course. Recruiters and hiring managers must do their best to read between the lines and discover candidates’ weak points, which they do with varied success rates. 
• Interviews: Structured interviews are fairly reliable performance predictors. However, most recruiters and hiring managers aren’t trained in interviewing techniques. The interviews they lead are of the unstructured sort. This leaves room for error and bias and predict future job performance about as well as a coin toss.
• Poorly conceived job selection criteria: How much is a poorly performing IT Manager with 10 years’ experience worth to your organisation? If you don’t know how well candidates in your applicant pool will perform, don’t assume that more job experience will mean a better hire. Many people don’t think about selection criteria at all, instead opting for whatever was used last time. 
• Historical job performance and references: Recruiters and hiring managers focusing on how candidates performed past jobs are leaving themselves open to the same sort of traps inherent in CVs. When asked about past behaviour on the job, candidates will stay well on the positive side and may be prone to overstating their role and taking credit for results for which they were only partly responsible. Intra-organisation differences in roles also mean that success or failure in one environment wouldn’t necessarily translate to another environment. References checks, in most cases, don’t provide the opportunity for asking about specific job situations. 

If these tools and techniques seem to leave you few or no options for your selection process, take comfort in the fact that for the most part, combining two or more selection techniques is nearly always better than the same techniques used in isolation. Don’t take your selection process for granted. Thinking through how you assess and choose candidates can have a dramatic effect on your selection outcomes.