Effective ways of reducing the number of competent (international) HR applicants (Swedish edition)

Feel free to copy this job posting blue-print for your next HR-professional opening for a Swedish company. You will greatly reduce the number of applications from competent (international) candidates and in addition severely harm your employer brand. All translations my work, originals taken from real job descriptions.

• Du har en PA-utbildning och minst tre års erfarenhet av brett HR-arbete med HR-frågor. (= You have a ”PA”-qualification and a minimum of three years of experience from broad HR-work with HR questions.) [1]
• Erfarenhet av att arbeta i process med ARUBA (= Experience from working according to ARUBA) [2]
• Vidare är du en street-smart person. (=Besides that, you are a street-smart person.) [3]
• Du älskar att vara spindeln i nätet. (= You love to be the spider in the web.) [4]
• A sense of humour is greatly appreciated [5]
• Swedish and English mandatory [6]

Are you really prepared for diversity?

This intention of this sally is not to argue if companies (and we all in genernal) do benefit from diversity or not. I believe the answer is yes and there are other places to discuss this opinion. I also want to avoid emotionally-loaded aspects of diversity like gender, race, age and the like. This story is about my experience in a project team with a diverse range of ideas. Following the public debate, diversity of ideas means (per se) a good outcome of the project and in the end a good result for the company. And we have created a great result! But it’s naive to think that this happened over night and without any challenges.

Using learning myths to dig into research

This sally has a double-function. Firstly, I want to bring your attention to common learning myths and secondly, how you can use these myths to start diving into the world of research. Earlier, I wrote about evidence-based and research-based HR work and how far we have come already. I still remember how hard it was for me (especially in the beginning) to embrace research papers. They were boring and I did not understand the lengthy parts about statistics which some of them entailed. Today, I am happy that I gave it a try. Because academia contributes a lot to the field of HR. There are great reviews on all kinds of areas within HR and also researcher challenges common beliefs and reveal myths. Learning more about how to read academic research give you the critical competence to be part of the discussion when other HR professionals call their practices research-based. Learning and development is an area where many professionals claim this. Unfortunately a lot of learning myths have nourished a questionable way of learning practice at school and in the workplace. It’s time to dig deeper into this.

The implications of Schmidt & Hunter

Research-based and evidence-based have become the new HR buzzwords. They are everywhere. Practitioners start their presentations with a bunch of academic references and the audience becomes quiet. Nobody will ever question the validity and applicability of a Schmidt & Hunter (1998) paper, right?

Enhancing virtual collaboration

How we facilitated online collaboration in a multi-national team

In my central function I communicate with a team of roughly 20 people spread across different time zones. It has been a challenge ever since to get them all on the same page. This is what makes it work for us:

You are invited to a video interview

Be it via Skype, Google Hangout or the like, video interviews are a great alternative for a first contact to interesting candidates. Compared to telephone interviews, video offers a more personal way to get to know each other. In addition, you don’t have to invite all candidates to personal interviews, which is more resources-efficient. But it’s important to keep in mind that a lot of applicants are still new to video interviews. Even though it’s a widely used tool for private conversations, job hunting via camera needs a different way of preparation.

Me leading a panel discussion with Google Hangouts as an assignment for the course Human Resource Management in the Digital Age – What would you do if a candidate appeared like this?

Here are some ideas on how to support video interview preparation in the recruiting process.

Structured interviews with Kahneman

How “Thinking, Fast and Slow” gives hands-on ideas for improving candidate selection

I cut myself through Kahneman’s bestseller, which is admittedly a bulky book. Whereas I admire Part I-III, it is Part IV (about the way we make choices) which was a tough chapter for me. However, I can highly recommend this book to those being interested in the way humans work and how this plays into principles of economics.

Chapter 21 “Intuition vs. formulas” covers comprehensive advise on how to improve interview procedures using concrete language beyond the human resources jargon. If you are about to have a training with line managers or a talk to management about why you need to build up structured interview competence, read this chapter first. Or send it out as a copy. It is a great way to describe the importance of structured decision-making without being at risk of throwing around HR buzzwords.

Kahneman describes that experts are always inferior to algorithms – a bold statement that most probably you are about to disagree on. He sees two reasons for his claim. First of all, experts try to be clever by making situations more complex, which reduces validity. Secondly, humans are inconsistent when summarising their judgement of complex information.

How does this apply to interview procedures?

If you are not amongst the lucky ones having well-established structured interview guidelines at hand, Kahneman compiles all you need to know in two paragraphs. The below main points are enriched by my own thoughts and experience.

• Decide on roughly six success criteria (traits) for the position you are about to fill. They should be as independent from one another as possible and assessable by asking questions during the interview.
• Decide on how you want to weight each trait in the overall final result of an interview. This is also one of my major learnings after I implemented my first structured interview together with a line manager. If you are unsure on how to weight, rate all traits as equally important.
• Decide on questions you want to ask to assess each trait, decide on a rating scale (maybe 1-5, make sure to leave room for comments) and discuss, what a good/bad answer would look like for you. The last point is especially crucial, if you have more than two assessors and if you want to brief other assessors later on.
• By leaving time for open questions at the end of each interview, you can give some power back to the line manager (especially interesting for sceptical line managers). Be careful that the answers to those questions do not interfere with the answers to the standardized questions before.
• During the interview, each trait should be evaluated one after the other, only rate the next one after you rated the preceding one. This means: continue to the next question only after everybody has evaluated the recent trait based on the current answer to the interview question.
• When you have several interviewers, mention, that it does not help to cheat. Rather than looking at the rating of others for help, assors should make comments about a candidate answer to justify their ratings afterwards.
• Plan some minutes after each interview to discuss the results with all interviewers. If the results differ, ask for concrete examples from the candidate’s answers. After the discussion, average all assessors ratings per question.
• Add up the scores based on the weighting you have agreed upon.
• Truly believe that you will make a better decision based on this procedure. Be bold and choose the candidate with the best average rating.

The most difficult part of structured interviews and candidate assessment is actually sticking to the procedure. It demands a lot of discipline. Keep this in mind. Sometimes it takes some iterations and trials until everybody can agree on the benefits of making sound decisions. From my experience it’s worth the effort.