When you consider recruitment costs, management time, training, termination costs and lost productivity, recruiting the wrong person can prove costly. Estimates on the cost of recruitment errors vary significantly from 2x to 5x starting salary – even for the most junior roles in the legal profession this could cost organisations at least £50,000. In the context of today’s cost conscious business environment, it is therefore absolutely crucial that managers hire the right person the first time.
It is relatively simple for hiring managers to select the right candidate based on aptitude (a candidate’s ability to actually do the job) but most personnel issues tend to arise due to attitude (a candidate’s willingness to do the job). It is consequently very important that hiring managers select the right person based on both aptitude and attitude.
Recruiting the wrong person can prove costly
Hiring managers typically use a variety of tools to carefully assess a candidates’ suitability, amongst them is competency based interviewing (CBI). But is it all it’s cracked up to be? Does it lead interviewers to overlook technical ability? Is it relevant for highly experienced and qualified candidates?
At a recent Badenoch & Clark sponsored BrainWeave™ discussion at the Corporate Counsel Exchange™ a wide range of organisations representing telecoms and retail through business services and electronics to FMCG agreed that establishing whether a candidate has the right fit for your organisations’ culture can be challenging.
Hiring managers need to identify what particular competencies are required for a given role. For some this is easier said than done although it was suggested that hiring managers could draw on support from HR here. Common competencies tested during CBIs include leadership, influencing others, teamwork and decision making, to name but a few. The group thought that the linking of competencies to the main duties of a role is also not a particularly easy proposition.
As with all types of interviews, to be successful it is important that all interviewing parties agree the content for each stage of the process to avoid repetition. In addition to this the same competencies need to be tested on each candidate throughout the recruitment process so that all applicants can be benchmarked against the same criteria. However, there was some disagreement between delegates on precisely when to use CBIs – at the beginning to rule out those not suited to the organisation or at the end of the recruitment process once hiring managers have a better insight into the candidates’ strengths and weaknesses?
Whilst it was concluded that CBIs do add significant value to the recruitment process, they should be used in conjunction with other interviewing and selection techniques. There is a danger that, by focussing too heavily on competencies, a candidates’ technical ability and legal background could be overlooked. It was also debatable whether CBIs actually make any difference when a hiring managers’ instinct and judgement so often play a major part of the decision making process.
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