Recruit candidates beyond the specs

Most organizations ask candidates about their motivations, career aspirations, and strengths and weaknesses in their cover letters. While these questions can help them understand a candidate's fit with the organization, they must be asked differently to ensure they are hiring for the right skills.

Company A struggles to hire because it can't find the candidates it wants. At the same time, Company B wastes time and money because it has many applicants, but only a tiny percentage of them pass the personality tests and interviews. Company C is making every effort to reduce the early retirement rate of new hires, while Company D is facing dissatisfaction among existing employees due to new hires who need more expertise and willingness to work.

These are classic examples of "bad recruitment and selection" that we often encounter. While beyond-specs hiring aims to ensure equal employment opportunities for all job seekers, hiring organisations also need new guidelines to ensure they select the right people. In this context, we'll present the steps to successful selection from the perspective of skill-based hiring. One crucial aspect of this process is self-assessment, which plays a significant role in managing candidate expectations and ensuring a more transparent and efficient recruitment process.

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How to successfully recruit?

Successful recruitment starts with recruiting quality candidates or talent. By talent, we mean academically strong candidates with a long list of certifications or fluent in a foreign language. We suggest candidates who are capable of doing their job well, aligned with the organization's culture and values, and organizationally loyal (less likely to leave). Most people, including CEOs and recruiters, believe that the higher the competition in recruitment, the higher the value of their organization's recruitment brand and the more successful the recruitment. Unfortunately, a high competition rate does not guarantee a successful selection. What matters more is "how many of the candidates applied for the job that the organization wants" - the ones that don't will only add to the time and cost of the organization's selection.

Once you've identified the jobs you need to fill and the job requirements (the content and characteristics of the job and the knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitudes required to perform the job successfully) during the recruitment and hiring planning phase, you need to leverage them to attract talent. You need to actively communicate what the job does, what knowledge, qualifications, and experience are required to do it, where it's located, what the approximate salary is, what the organization's values are, and what the culture is like. It would help if you attracted "on-spec" candidates to do the job and avoid unnecessary "over-specs" that will turn off potential candidates. Beyond-spec hiring is an effort to.

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Beyond Specs Recruiting and Applications

One of the most significant shifts in traditional hiring practices is the focus on competency-based job applications. Candidates accustomed to applications that primarily list their education, foreign language test scores, and certifications will notice a stark difference when faced with an application that explicitly asks for skills relevant to the job they are applying for. This can challenge organisations as they need to present different knowledge, qualifications, and experience for each job. However, if the job requirements are well-defined in the recruitment and hiring planning phase, they can be matched to each item in the new format, enabling a more effective assessment of candidates.

A competency-based job application can be broadly categorized into personal information, education, qualifications, job-related experience, and other activities.

Personal information

Education

③ Qualifications

④ Job-related experience and other activities

① Personal information

It is recommended that the minimum amount of personal information required to identify applicants should be kept to a minimum unless it is essential for job performance and selection. This is not only due to anti-discrimination issues but also because requesting personal information unrelated to the job may cause offence to the applicant and damage the organization's image. (There may be exceptions depending on the job/profession.) Items such as the applicant's photo, family information, or disability status are unnecessary in the recruitment process in most cases and should be avoided because they may cause discrimination controversy.

② education

is used to evaluate whether the applicant has the necessary knowledge to perform the job. For example, if a job in a human resources organization requires knowledge of 'human resources management,' 'management principles,' 'labour relations management,' 'psychological principles,' and 'labour relations management,' the applicant is asked to write down the subjects (or curriculum) and main contents of the education (if necessary, grades, credits, hours, and timing of the education). For the organization, this measures how interested and diligent the candidate has prepared for the job. For the candidate, it allows them to know what knowledge the job requires so they can prepare ahead of time.

On the other hand, in the context of over-special hiring, the school of origin sometimes needs to be understood. Strictly speaking, a school of origin is not an "over-spec" because the school of origin (especially a good university) results from the applicant's hard work. Aptitude test scores that measure cognitive abilities are highly correlated with university rank. However, in Korean society, there is a strong correlation between parents' socio-economic status and school of origin, and evaluating applicants by school of origin may lead to controversies of socio-economic status inheritance and discrimination, so it is necessary to be very careful.

③ Qualifications

is an item to evaluate whether the applicant has the necessary skills to perform the job. By presenting job-related certifications for each job in advance, applicants can acquire the skills they need to perform the job, and organizations can evaluate applicants without being misled by unnecessary certifications. In the past, it was not possible to identify the skills required for each job or present the certifications related to those skills. As a result, applicants did not know what skills they needed and rushed to acquire various certifications indiscriminately, leading to a flood of high-specification applicants. On the other hand, if you provide job-specific certifications up front, candidates will naturally acquire the skills they need to do the job while earning them.

A classic example of "over-specification" is foreign language test scores: if a job requires foreign language skills, such as international sales or a service industry where foreigners are the primary customers, it makes sense to require foreign language test scores or certifications. However, this is not the case (and there is a growing trend of organizations not looking at foreign language test scores at all). In that case, requiring only a primary foreign language proficiency may be pragmatic.

④ Job-related experience and other activities

This section asks about your experience doing work or activities related to the job. If you have a job with a regular salary, you can write it down in the work experience section. If you have had other activities related to the job without a regular salary, you can write them in the different activities section. In the "Job-related work experience section," you should briefly write the period of work, name of the organization, role, and responsibilities, and describe more specific details in the "(Job) Experience Statement. Similarly, in the "Other job-related activities" section, you should briefly list the dates, organizations, roles, and main activities and provide more details in the "Work experience" section.

Most job applications allow applicants to list their work experience and activities. However, the applicant's work experience and activities are separate from the job they are applying for. In that case, they will have to learn the job from scratch, and there is a higher chance that they will experience a gap between their expectations and the actual job. A Korean restaurant company specializing in store management mainly hired people with excellent grades in culinary arts and hotel management majors for store management positions. Still, after struggling with the high rate of early retirement, the company is making improvements by giving preference to applicants with part-time work experience in food outlets (hotels, restaurants, etc.).

Job-related work experience and other activities allow organizations to screen for candidates who are genuinely interested in the job (or at least have had some indirect experience). Candidates will naturally explore and revise their career paths as they gain various job-related experiences. There's a vast difference between applying for a job knowing the reality of what you'll be doing and applying with a vague fantasy of what you'll be doing.

Ideally, it would help if you used what the applicant has written to your advantage in the interview. For example, suppose you're assessing a candidate's "integrity" in an interview. How they've behaved in job-like situations is a better predictor of their behaviour once hired than in non-job-like situations. Some might argue that having various experiences will help you do your job, and you can't ignore that. In the new job application, you can still ask candidates to list other, less job-related experiences and activities separately so that you can refer to them when hiring, but what's still clear is that probabilistically, job-related experiences and activities are much better predictors of job performance, and that's where the focus should be going forward. It's also worth remembering that, as we emphasized in the last issue, merit-based hiring focuses on trying to justify and validate your hiring.

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Assessing organizational fit through cover letters

Currently, most organizations ask applicants about their motivation for applying for a job, their post-employment aspirations, and their strengths and weaknesses in their cover letter. This helps them to see the applicant's organizational fit, which should have been revealed in the job application. However, for competency-based recruitment, it is necessary to ask differently. In particular, it is required to precisely describe the organization's core values and talent image about real-life examples rather than the applicant's thoughts and opinions. This can be expressed as a "self-competency introduction", which is different from the "(job) resume" and "(job) experience description" mentioned above.

It is essential to have a precise evaluation system and questions. Reading and evaluating every candidate's description takes a lot of work. However, it's important to remember that assessing a candidate's competencies is a critical component of beyond-the-specs hiring, as it can reveal things about a candidate that may not be apparent in their specs.

Short-term actions

Job applications are tied to an organization's HR system and can be challenging to change, especially if the job description needs to be blurred or rotated. In this case, you can recruit by job family, which is a larger category, but allow applicants to select their desired job within the job family and fill out the application to showcase their strengths. For example, suppose you're hiring for both technical and clerical roles. In that case, you can have clerical candidates choose from pre-made applications for business planning, finance and accounting, general administration, and human resources, then fill out the appropriate section.

But even then, it's essential to remember that it's easier to make a successful selection if you have a plan for what department you want to place the new hire in. Without a job description, the selection evaluation factors will also be unclear, and you're more likely to select based on the specs. Even if we leave the future job rotation as a future issue, recruitment should consider what jobs must be filled. In the long run, we should aim for job-level recruitment by identifying job-specific requirements.

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Assessing organizational fit through cover letters

Currently, most organizations ask applicants about their motivation for applying for a job, their post-employment aspirations, and their strengths and weaknesses in their cover letter. This helps them to see the applicant's organizational fit, which should have been revealed in the job application. However, for competency-based recruitment, it is necessary to ask differently. In particular, it is needed to precisely describe the organization's core values and talent image in real-life examples rather than the applicant's thoughts and opinions. This can be expressed as a "self-competency introduction", which is different from the "(job) resume" and "(job) experience description" mentioned above.

It is essential to have a precise evaluation system and questions. Reading and evaluating every candidate's description takes a lot of work. However, it's important to remember that assessing a candidate's competencies is a critical component of beyond-the-specs hiring, as it can reveal things about a candidate that may not be apparent in their specs.

Short-term actions

Job applications are tied to an organization's HR system and can be challenging to change, especially if the job description needs to be blurred or rotated. In this case, you can recruit by job family, which is a larger category, but allow applicants to select their desired job within the job family and fill out the application to showcase their strengths. For example, suppose you're hiring for both technical and clerical roles. In that case, you can have clerical candidates choose from pre-made applications for business planning, finance and accounting, general administration, and human resources, then fill out the appropriate section.

But even then, it's essential to remember that it's easier to make a successful selection if you have a plan for what department you want to place the new hire in. Without a job description, the selection evaluation factors will also be unclear, and you're more likely to select based on the specs. Even if we leave the future job rotation as a future issue, recruitment should consider what jobs must be filled. In the long run, we should aim for job-level recruitment by identifying job-specific requirements.

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Self-Assessment - Candidate Expectations

Early retirement of employees is undesirable from the perspective of the applicant, the organization, and the country. There are many causes of early retirement, but one of the leading causes is the gap between the expectations of the organization and the job before joining the organization and the reality after joining the organization. Therefore, the primary way to reduce the rate of early retirement is to ensure that applicants have realistic expectations of the organization and the job at the application stage. To do this, you can use a self-diagnosis that details the organizational culture, working environment, wage level, and work tasks. The important thing is that the self-assessment allows candidates to adjust their expectations or withdraw their application if they find it difficult.

In this context, we've covered the recruiting steps for merit-based hiring, focusing on the job application. This will help you attract more of the desired talent in your organization and lay the foundation for successful selection. In the next instalment, we'll focus more on personality tests and interviews to ensure successful selection.