How to implement structured scorecards to leverage unbiased hiring decisions
Making unbiased hiring decisions is a hot topic in modern Talent Acquisition and HR. It’s not a secret that diversity and inclusion foster organizational effectiveness. Many international companies use AI to maintain objective decision making. However, not every company can afford buying certain tools and software.
On the other hand, very often in different forums and groups, I hear people say that recruiters copy-paste job descriptions, that they don’t really know what to look for, that the interviewers ask questions that don’t matter to the job they are interviewed for. Well, if you represent the candidate’s side, be sure, there’s a whole science behind the Talent Acquisition curtain.
If you represent the HR side and are looking for where to start, you are in the right place! In this article, I want to share with you the methodology I’ve created to build structured scorecards and leverage objective hiring decisions. You can implement this practical use case in your organizations by finding your “North Star”. If you are wondering what’s the “North Star” and how to find it, let’s put it in another way. The goal of any successful recruiting team is to hire the right people that are qualified and willing to do the job, and of course, do it faster than any other company. There’s no room for mistakes (mis-hires) and no room for narrowing down the filter with unnecessary factors (biases) that actually don’t matter to the job specifications.
The logical chain is as follows: by creating a focus group of high performing employees and identifying what exactly determines their success in a certain role, you build a competency model. The Competency model is your “North Star”. They are used for a wide variety of HRM purposes (Workforce Planning, Career Development/Guidance, Learning & Development, Comp & Ben, etc). Based on the competency models that you’ve identified you build your structured scorecards that guide the interview panel during the technical and behavioral interviews. If you use an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) or any HCM (Human Capital Management) system, it’s better to have scorecards built into the system. If you don’t have one, you can monitor and document the process with other means at your hands.
Sounds easy, right? But it’s hard work and requires managing a lot of stakeholders. So let’s slow down here and go into the step by step process.
1. Create a focus group. Identify your role models, the employees that exemplify your company values, and perform their job with a high level of competence. The participants who are selected to be in the focus group should be well-qualified employees within the certain Job Family in order to have a high standard job profile as a result. For this purpose, you can use your recent performance evaluations, 360 reviews, goal setting results, documentations from formal feedback sessions, or any other process that you use to monitor employee performance. For this project, we have used the recent performance review results covering both the hard and soft skills.
NB! People of different gender, ages, origin, and other demographic characteristics should be included in the focus group to ensure the focus group is diverse. In our company to all the above-mentioned characteristics we have also included personality types as we use company-wide personality assessment which helps us better communicate with each other, accept and respect our differences. Having different types in the focus group ensures also diversity in personality characteristics and the way how people interact with others, what’s their communication style, what are their possible motivators, how they make decisions, are they more introverted or extroverted, etc. This will help you have a more rounded and comprehensive picture, a bias-free foundation.
2. Conduct Job Analysis with the focus group. Job Analysis refers to the study of jobs within the organization and includes analyzing the activities the job holder does, the working conditions, depending on the industry the organization operates, it can also include information about tools, equipment, health & safety requirements, etc. But normally Job Analysis mainly focuses on what tasks the job holder performs and what technical and behavioral competencies are needed to perform the job successfully. The method of analyzing jobs will depend on the types of jobs you have in your organization. You can use the method of observation, structured questionnaires, interviews, or any other method that is in alignment with your purpose.
My main experience is with the semi-structured Job Analysis interview method which by the way, works better in the Software Development industry. There are a lot of open-source resources available on how to create one. Here is a good resource you can use. For this project, we, of course, have created our own form and have validated it during the process. If you wonder how many interview results are considered representative, it all depends on the resources (number of employees in a certain job family, number of role models out of the total number of employees, time, etc.) and, of course, what percentile of top performers you’ve included in the focus group. In order to make the results more reliable, we have conducted interviews with not only the role models but also with their direct managers.
NB! It’s always a good idea to create a user’s guide for the Job Analysis Form. If you work at a large company, there’s a good chance that someone won’t conduct all the interviews alone. In order to keep the process alike and ensure that the gathered data is valid and reliable, every interviewer should follow certain steps and instructions while conducting the Job Analysis Interviews.
3. Create a database of Job Analysis results. You can choose a better way that works for you, but personally, I prefer creating a data warehouse in Google Spreadsheet. Ensure you find and highlight the KSAOs (knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics) that are common for different interviewees for the same job profile.
NB! Make sure you document all the information accurately. If you have had a comprehensive Job Analysis form that covers not only tasks and KSAOs, but also reporting lines, communication scope and channels, scope of responsibility, hazards, etc., you can use the collected data to update your Job Descriptions, Org. chart, Job Family Models, and get the best from the data that you’ve collected.
4. Map the identified KSAOs with validated competency libraries. Some of them are available open-source. You can create your own competency library, to have a unified wording within the organization. I have created one for my own interest analyzing and integrating different models. It’s a bit time consuming but worth doing for sure. Why do we need that? Well, when you say the candidate has Critical thinking skills the hiring manager knows what you mean. The competency library should include a well-defined name for each competency, its definition, and behavioral indicators (See Figure 1).
5. Research what others use. You can also do an optional stage of conducting research of the same job profiles and competency models in the global market, which I’ve done for all of my previous projects. It’s also very useful to cooperate with different professional organizations that, for sure, have validated and widely accepted competency models already in place. A good example here is the competency model for HR professionals developed by SHRM that includes the body of knowledge and behavioral competencies.
6. Build the scorecards in the system. Now when you have found your so-called “North Star” and you know what you are looking for in the candidates, you’ll be able to create interview scorecards. If you don’t use any ATS, create simple forms and share them with the interview panel before the interview and explain how to use them in order to guide the interview structure based on the characteristics that matter the most for performing the job successfully.
NB! Each item in your scorecard (technical or behavioral competency) should be ranked in order to compare different candidates against the same competency model. You can choose to do it in numbers. In this case, I would suggest you to have even numbers in order not to have neutral answers as a result. Or simply have yes, no or no decision. We chose to have the second option plus using a pros and cons framework that will add more details for balancing and making the decision more data-driven.
7. As a final stage, make sure you train your interview panel on how to ask different types of questions in order to get the best out of the interview. You can also choose to store behavioral and technical questions in interview kits and interview guides which will make your interview more structured and grounded.
Of course, not every company has the relevant skills and resources to implement empirically supported hiring models. It’s always a good idea to build a network and ask questions to people who have the experience of doing that. I personally, will be happy to help.
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