Learn And Perform e-news

Dear Learn & Perform subscriber,

Here is the May e-news. For me, a quiet month in Kuala Lumpur, staying on the ground to alleviate my health worries and work furiously on the Asia HRDCongress, Kuching. Recently, we had our second Global Round Table conference in KL following the first one in Bangkok, Thailand.

Here is this month’s e-news:

In the last e news we talked about putting talent management on the board’s agenda. The Malaysian Prime Minister tabling the 10th Malaysia Plan with the agenda to power the economy into First World status announced the setting up of the Talent Corporation. This is the first time a country has established a talent corporation even though the talent initiative might have been achieved though other ways. The aim of the talent corporation is attract and retain the necessary talent needed to power the country towards Vision 2020 by when the country aims to achieve a developed nation status. Realising that the country is not developing enough talent and losing the existing talent, the Government now aims to move from ‘brain drain’ to ‘brain gain’.

Several outstanding speakers representing great organisations will present at the Asia HRDCongress on this vital topic: Chris Brooks from Philip Morris International, Nora Manaf from Maybank, Jonathan Low from PowerUp Success, Hassan Rizwan from Hirelabs, Dr.Karen Lawson from the USA to name a few. Visit www.hrdcongress for more details or email karina@smrhrgroup.com

The Validity of the Selection Interview

Every organisation uses it to select employees at all levels and yet the interview is very often criticised for being unreliable, subjective and prone to bias. This can be largely attributed to seeing the interview as an informal conversation between two persons.

We now know from research much more about how selection decisions are reached and the errors that arise from interviews. To quote, Eder and Harris‘ when interviews are structured and the interviewers trained, the validity of interviews improve considerably. Structured employment interviews define content more explicitly. The success of structured interviews is therefore more likely to be repeated.

There are at least there convincing reasons for structuring the interview:

Reliability – Structured interviews have high interrater reliability. Meta-analysis reports average interrater reliabilities of 0.67 for high structure vs. 0.34 for low structure.
Standardisation – When interviews are standardised, the burden is placed on the instrument rather than the interviewer’s skills. When the situational interviews are standardised and applicants respond to critical work incidents, the rating are less prone to biases.
Fairness – Structured interviews treat all candidates fairly and equally in a consistent manner. Court outcomes on unfair handling of candidates have supported organisations high on these interview characteristics: standardised administration, high job relatedness and multiple raters.

Behavioural Interviewing and Situational Interviewing are two most common forms of structured selection interviewing. This primarily involves asking interviewees to describe critical incidents or specific behaviours in the past relevant to the job. This is based on the premise that past behaviour predicts performance.

Interviews can be a valid means of selecting employees provided it is structured to ensure that:

The interview questions are prepared as a result of job analysis.
Questions are consistently used across both the interviewers and interviewees.
A consist set of criteria is used to evaluate the responses of the interviewees by the assessors
The assessors are trained to deal with the errors

To gain more information how you can improve your selection decisions, we have three services for you:

Our Executive Search Division can help you with cost effective recruitment decisions.
Our Technology Division can automate your decisions.
Our Consulting Division can help you develop the systems and train your users.

Visit www.hrdcongress.com and review the outstanding programme and the great sessions offered by international experts. Make it a point to learn, network, share and shape the future in the lovely city of Kuching, Malaysia. Learn from the gurus – Thiagi, Jim Smith, Karen Lawson and a host of close to 50 speakers.

Join the 1000 professionals to learn and shape the future. Make sure you are there.