Five Steps to Effective Employee Selection
By John D. Arnold, Ph.D. and Todd Sperl

(This article first appeared in the Detroit Regional Chamber’s “Detroiter Magazine: Complete Business Resource Guide”, January 2005. Reprinted here with permission.)

Introduction:
St. John Health (SJH) implemented a pre-employment screening process about a year ago. The system focuses on jobs across SJH, ranging from patient transporters to nurses to finance. Follow-up studies have shown that the system successfully identifies employees who are empathetic, service-oriented and effective. Use of the system also reduces turnover among new hires by over 50%, which as business leaders know can represent a significant cost savings. Given this success, we thought we might share with the readers of Detroiter magazine the key developmental steps we followed that allowed us to be successful.

Step 1:
Define your goals. Before you begin to even think about what your employment selection system should look like, think about what you’re after. Improved performance? Reduced training time? Reduced turnover/absenteeism? Enhanced ease of supervision? SJH was looking to align their employment process with their Work Life Strategy – Create an environment that attracts and retains the best service-oriented associates. Different goals will lead to different decisions regarding the system you need.

Step 2:
Develop a success profile. For each goal, analyze what employee characteristics relate to that goal. Personality, skill, mental ability and physical ability characteristics should all be considered. The primary focus at SJH was on service orientation and turnover, so we emphasized personality and attitudinal characteristics. It should go without saying that all employment “characteristics” should be job related.

Step 3:
Decide on assessment methods and tools. Our advice is to keep things simple. We used an application and assessment phase to screen out unsuitable candidates and then an interview phase to select the best. This saved tremendous time interviewing candidates that are clearly not a fit. We also passed information obtained in the assessment stage (e.g., areas where the candidate passed, but was marginal) on to the interviewers so they could probe those areas in further depth. We tailored the tests closely to the jobs, developing a service orientation tool from scratch and used a “Polaris Item Library” to form the personality and attitudes assessment tool. Commercially available tests can also be used, but we suggest getting professional advice when selecting what to use. Typical “off-the-shelf” assessment tools may not fit with the goals of your firm. The key is to make sure the tests you use are very closely matched to the job responsibilities and activities that you are hiring for.

Step 4:
Be prepared. If selection systems result in “disparate impact” (i.e., minorities or females are screened out disproportionately), they need to be supported by validation (job-relatedness) documentation to pass legal muster. We conducted a validation study in which current incumbents from across SJH took the tests on a confidential basis and then we correlated their results with supervisor’s ratings of their on-the-job performance. Commercially available tests can sometimes be supported by validation studies the publishers have already conducted. Just make sure the previous studies focused on jobs that are similar to yours.

Step 5:
Think through the administrative issues. Who will administer the tests? When and how? Who will conduct interviews? How will the interviewers be trained? Will you allow participants to retest? Will you use the system to evaluate returning employees? The design of a test and interview system is usually pretty straightforward. But, as you develop the system, bring together a cross-section of users and other interested parties (e.g., from operations, HR, legal, training, etc.) and let them ask questions about how the systems will operate. Then, make sure you have thoroughly thought out the answers to their questions -- before you implement.

The Payoff
Effective employee selection need not be difficult, and the pay-offs in terms of employee performance, reduced absenteeism and reduced turnover can be tremendous. And, the journey to more effective employee selection is only five steps long!

John Arnold is president and founder of Grosse Pointe Park, MI based Polaris Assessment Systems, Inc. Dr. Arnold can be reached at (313) 822-0646, or email him at jarnold@polaristest.com.

Todd Sperl is corporate manager, workforce assessment & performance improvement, St John Health with corporate offices located in Warren, Michigan. Todd can be reached at (586) 753-0959, or email: todd.sperl@stjohn.org.