[MUSIC] Imagine that you have a group of people, a number of people who responded to your advertisement, and they all want to work for your organization. On their resumes, they all meet minimum qualifications. So how do you select who gets in? What tools will you use? You need an organized process and reliable, proven techniques for selecting candidates and evaluating their true capabilities and qualifications. And that's where the selection process begins. These are the general steps that take place in the selection process. They're common to most organizations. We start with screening applications, moving onto testing and reviewing work samples, interviewing candidates, checking references, making a selection and then the background check. Let's take a look at these a bit closer. Remember at this point, we've all ready placed our add because we've done our recruiting efforts, and now the resumes are coming in. We need to have some sort of way to evaluate candidates. Years ago, when I started in HR, we received paper resumes. And so we made this yes, no, maybe pile of candidates. And now things are so much smoother when we can use applicant tracking systems to bring in all of our resumes. And even better yet, it's so nice when your applicant tracking system, as part of your human resource information system suite also can tie in your workforce planning and your performance development, training, all of these different things in one package. But I'm getting ahead of myself a bit, so let's go back to this idea of just bringing all of our resumes and candidates together in applicant tracking. So just briefly, what are applicant tracking systems do and kind of what don't they do? So the systems help businesses filter through resumes and we get on solicit resumes, we get solicited resumes. They really help provide impartial solutions to the growing problem of resume management. Many of these systems also keep resumes in the system. So if there's a future position that arises, the system will flag it as, hey, you might have a candidate who has the capabilities you're looking for. It's also more efficient in terms of time and money. It's automated, it reduces paperwork, lower admin and advertising costs. And so the disadvantages include the fact that applicant tracking only looks for resumes that really meet the requirements of the position. So sometimes recent college graduates can be overlooked, borderline candidates, those who are switching careers, all of these different kinds of things may be screened out from your system. Automated systems are often also unreliable that they can reject resumes for unnecessary reasons. Maybe if you're scanning it for instance, it's unable to read the resume properly. That's why oftentimes we look for resumes to be sent to us via email and upload and things like that to our systems. And lastly applicant tracking limits the information applicants can provide. So there are some restricted application fields and that may help in some ways because we're really limiting the information, too much information we're getting. But we also may eliminate a good candidate because we're not collecting the information we need to. So, you can see here on this slide for instance that maybe we have our, instead of the paper, yes, no, maybe, maybe we can just, you know use a button for red, green, yellow, something like that. The candidate's score is in here, in terms of how they score for interviews matched to the position. Their name, of course, when they were looking. Looks like we were missing a year here and also what status. You know, where are they in the process and where did they come from? You collect all these kinds of things with applicant tracking. In the next stage we look at testing and reviewing work samples. The testing may include things like personality inventories or cognitive ability tests. For instance, a cognitive ability test assesses the ability to think. Reasoning, perception, memory, verbal, mathematical ability, and problem solving. So test for cognitive ability pose questions designed to estimate your potential to estimate your potential to use mental processes to solve work related problems. In a previous human resource position, we would have candidates bring in work samples. And so these positions would be like graphic designers and artists. And it would be really helpful then to see what was their portfolio, what have they done in the past. Now that we've looked at work samples, and we've done some testing, perhaps now it's time to interview. And to be quite honest, a lot of times these may be mixed around. And so maybe interview and then we test and look at work samples it maybe the other way around. So it just really depends on your organization. Interviewing can involve things like an initial phone screen which is really helpful to get to the basic level things. What are you looking for? You would ask this question to the candidate. What are you looking for, what kind of money. So it could be a really, really efficient way to screen out some candidates based on basic qualifiers. Do you have the requisite skill sets? Things like that that need clarification from the resume. And then also too, you can gage a little bit about the person's personality perhaps over the phone. So really effective way to not bring in everybody all at once but just we phone screen some people to limit our pool. Of course, we have in person. We have team panel interviews so maybe we bring in more than just one person to interview. We may not interview in person at all. Maybe we interview virtually. I have a later video, actually I apologize, an earlier video that talks about virtual interviewing. And then we'll also focus on, in this video set, on selection. How to have structured and documented interviews as well. Now it's time to check references. Okay, so we've gone through the process, we've done our screening testing, interviewing. And we like some people and so now it's time to find out what are they like? Now this part of the stage is a little bit difficult because checking references, you don't get a lot of information, unfortunately. A lot of companies are worried to share Information about past employees. They're reluctant, they don't want to get sued, they don't want to say something that could be harmful to that candidate. So when you call to get references you often get transferred to the Human Resource department and they typically will only verify dates of employment and title only. If you have a candidate sign off on a form, maybe you'll get more information than that. But even though we don't get great information always from checking references, it's still a best practice, we don't want to skip that step. In our next step, we've done all of these things and we checked references and we've got a candidate we like. And now it's time to make an offer, we make that selection, we make the offer, and we're at that stage. And then next, and our final step is, someone hopefully takes the job, they accept the position and we go through a final background check. So legally we want to make sure that this is the order. We go make a selection and an offer and then we do the background check and any sort of drug screen and things like that. And so typically employers will make the offer, contingent upon the successful completion of the background check. So remember though that if, for instance, we make an offer to someone, and they don't take it, they do not accept the position, then we have to go back. And maybe we have to go all the way back to screening applications. Maybe we just start again with some interviewing, perhaps we just make an offer to someone else. So the process is not necessarily perfectly linear, it can definitely end up that we have to start over. And that's not always the best situation. So out of the steps I listed for you then, which ones do you need to use? And the truth is they're all important. It's really about how you will use each step. And that depends on your organization and your strategy, going back to the very core of the course. For instance, can you afford an applicant tracking system? If you can, great, if you can't, then you may need to think of another way for you to organize resumes. What types of jobs are you hiring for? Does it make sense do you to use a cognitive ability for a temporary worker for instance. In an entry level job, probably not. It depends on how expensive it is and all these different things. So while no step should be skipped it comes down to which make the most sense for your organization. So, as we move on in the videos, take the time to really analyze your hiring process, your selection process. And here are some reasons why you need to be pretty careful about selection. The first is, some candidates just look great on paper. And so we think gosh, we're going to bring this person in and we're going to hire this person because wow, they just look fantastic. And we need to use screening tools to ensure that it's not just that they look wonderful on paper, but they really have substance. That they can back up that they've done what they say they can do. Other people are just really good at interviewing and I call them professional interviewers. They maybe change jobs a lot and they are very, very polished in terms of how they present themselves. Another option is that, they're just very outgoing people and sometimes their personality gets in the way of our understanding of the skill set. So someone can be very gregarious, or as I said, charismatic. And we look to that to hire the person, rather than really looking at is this person qualified. Do they have the knowledge, skills, and abilities. All these different things. Of course, hiring the right person is critical. And I've said that many many times already in this class before. But just to reiterate, we really want to make sure that we're using these selection steps because we want the right person in the right job at the right time. It's also important to train managers in why you're using these selection steps, how to use these selection steps, and so they don't skip anything. And they really buy into the process of, this is really something that we need to do as an organization. The best processes, the best selection processes avoid politics. In organizations, you often see somebody getting promoted or maybe someone getting hired because of who they know. And while that's not always a bad thing, sometimes we overlook, does the person have the requisite knowledge, skill and abilities. Do they have the cognitive ability, the leadership potential, all these different things. Are they a cultural fit, a job fit? And if we just look to, hey Bob knows Ted, so let's hire Ted, that's not necessarily going to be the best fit for the organization, the best long term hire. And so the best processes are really taking into account all of the testing, the interviewing, the subjective, I'm sorry objective measures that we can use to find the best hire. So, who gets in? As we move through the rest of the videos on selection, we will look at other ways to ensure good selection decisions.
