Employee Selection Process Made Easy

The employee selection process is quite simple when one candidate stands out above the rest. What if this is not the case? The best insurance against this is a documented impartial process for finding the right candidate.

While it could be that using employee selection tools or testing but these are often geared to very large companies.

Top Employee Selection

Excellent employee selection starts with the main elements of the job description and the success factors. With the job parameters, responsibilities and skills/knowledge and abilities laid out, the interview assessment becomes much more straight forward. The next step is to define which elements are most important and rank or weight them accordingly. 3-4 from each section is sensible and do this before interviewing the candidates.

For example, if a person is in charge of sales for 3 product lines, has to manage a team of sales people and develop new vertical markets, which of these is the highest priority in the position. Whichever part is weighted more heavily. If it is 2X important than assign weights accordingly.

Selection Methods

Using these elements, there are a number of ways to proceed. You can simply grade each element for each candidate or you can rank candidates on each element. A candidate assessment tool works best for this type of process.

If your interview includes using a panel method, have each person grade/rank the candidates separately. This is done with an interview evaluation form. (For your convenience we have provided a sample interview evaluation form.) Be sure that each panelist keeps notes from every interview in the employee selection process so as not to confuse the strengths and weaknesses of candidates.

Other Considerations

If you chose to use a pre-employment assessment such as a personality test you can fold that into the overall judging of employees. There are a number of other pre-employment screening tests that are available. Choose the ones that make sense for your company.

The final results can be a tabulated score of each candidate's grade or ranking. Of course there are intangibles that can enter the equation in any method chosen. A final meeting of the minds to discuss the numbers and the intangibles is often the final step in the employee selection process . With the graded/ranked criteria, often minor differences in 2 top candidates can be distinguished.

Round Robin/3 Point Interview

As an side, when I worked for the Government, they did something in looking back that I think worked well. We met individually with 3 separate people who took 3 different aspects of the job and interviewed the candidate from that perspective.

Each interviewer in the employee selection process questioned us, the candidates, on different aspects of the job. For instance, one interviewer asked technical questions, one focused on what I wanted to do in my career and one was focused on work environment. This type of interview method is sometimes called round robin interviewing or serial interviews

In my own hiring employees, I have found that combining this 3 prong interview method with a ranking/grading or interview evaluation system results in a great selection.

The Decision

Ultimately, a decision has to be made. This decision falls to the hiring authority. Should you find that all the data does not agree with a gut feeling, remember that too often our gut instinct is telling us we like one person more than another but the data is telling us a different story.

My experience has been that it is it is better to spend the time and resources to reassess the candidates a second time and possibly uncover a reason for the gut feel, than go with the gut without regard to the data. If necessary bring back the finalists for a second round of interviews... but the decision is yours!

One side not, be sure to notify candidates not selected with some form of rejection letter . This is not a pleasant task but it is a courtesy.

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