APICS Atlanta Employment and Recruitment Coordinator
Article appeared in the September 2003 APICS-Atlanta newsletter
An otherwise competent manager often depends upon gut instincts in making a hiring decision and ends up hiring the best "salesperson" whether he or she is looking for a salesperson, an engineer, a programmer or a VP of Purchasing. A hiring decision, if allowed to be subjective, frequently will fall to the person who interviews the best, and unless you actually want to hire a "salesperson", you will not likely select the best candidate purely using instincts.
There are many sophisticated consulting practices, numerous books and expensive training courses to help us with the selection of employees, yet hiring decisions are often drawn out and unduly time consuming. We waste time and energy and often lose our top candidates to more nimble organizations. The problem seems to be our difficulty making an objective decision in this subjective situation.
The following process is about as simple as you can get, yet I prefer it over 80% of the practices I have observed being used. It is as simple as 1,2,3 (and 4):
- Establish a list of critical characteristics you want to evaluate for all candidates.
- Devise questions to get a feel for competency within each category.
- Assess and grade the same characteristics of each candidate on the same scale of 1-10.
- Average the scores for each candidate.
| CANDIDATE A | CANDIDATE B | CANDIDATE C |
| Manufacturing Skills _______ | Manufacturing Skills _______ | Manufacturing Skills _______ |
| Engineering Skills _______ | Engineering Skills _______ | Engineering Skills _______ |
| Supervisory Skills _______ | Supervisory Skills _______ | Supervisory Skills _______ |
| Promotability _______ | Promotability _______ | Promotability _______ |
| Job Stability _______ | Job Stability _______ | Job Stability _______ |
| Chemistry/Fit _______ | Chemistry/Fit _______ | Chemistry/Fit _______ |
| Salary Range Fit _______ | Salary Range Fit _______ | Salary Range Fit _______ |
| Computer Literate _______ | Computer Literate _______ | Computer Literate _______ |
| Total Average _______ | Total Average _______ | Total Average _______ |
Do not waste further time on those candidates scoring 1-6, other than face saving courtesies. Give serious additional evaluation time to those scoring 7-8, and expedite reference checking and hiring of 9s and 10s before someone else does.
If you want to make your system marginally more sophisticated, you can give greater numerically importance to critical characteristics and lesser weight to less important categories.
If the decision needs to be a group decision, each interviewer on the team completes either their independent evaluation of all categories for all candidates, or a designated subset of categories for all candidates. One person evaluate the first four items, another evaluate the next four items, etc. The latter will save time, reduce redundancy and may make a better impression upon the candidate than having every interviewer ask the same set of questions.
In the absence of an effective decision making system of your own, feel free to use this one. It gets the job done.
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