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As a hiring manager, you want to hire the “best” person for the job (whatever that means for the role), but how do you know who’s right?
This is a simple question with no easy answer and a high risk of deterioration. Price of no rent ranging from delayed schedules to eroding service levels to worse. The price of a wrong rental often calculated in the range of 30% to 50% of their salary – or more. Traditional approaches to screening and hiring have always been imprecise, but given the speed of change in the very nature of the job itself, these tools are becoming even more limited.
Startups create a minimum viable product, or MVP, to test consumer demand for a concept before investing in building a polished version. What if recruiters could use tactics like this to gain better insight into your candidates, streamline the hiring process, better match true competency to work, and increase the diversity of your hiring ? We believe you can.
To do this, however, you will need to be prepared to think differently about the job interview, which originated in its current form from the psychological examination of soldiers during the First World War. Even when the interview questions are relevant, the interview is a poor predictor of future performance. It demonstrates one’s competence in answering questions, knowing theory, and prioritizing information—all of which may or may not correlate with what one needs to do on the job.
The traditional interview also makes us more likely to hire someone in our image, the “mini me” cognitive fallacy. We can’t help it, no matter how objective we feel. (Organizational psychologist Adam Grant calls that’s the “I’m not biased” bias.) Think about it: When someone walks out of your office or cancels a Zoom call, what makes you think the interview went well? It’s usually a spark of connection that happens when you find something in common rather than something different. Simply because we are human, we all tend to substitute this sense of connectedness as a substitute for competence. In a world that is more focused on driving DEI, the interview is actually a tool that is likely to succeed more difficult to achieve the objectives of the DEI.
Many organizations have no idea what should replace the interview process, even when they know it isn’t working. Personality tests often attempt to judge competence based on temperament. Bot screening can help cut through mountains of resumes, but it’s cumbersome and misses a lot, especially as jobs become less codified. Previous work experience is often a poor predictor of future performance. Some gamifications show promise, but to date mostly measure work ethic, emotional intelligence, and situational judgment. Pre-employment assessment technologies have been called the “Wild West” and can have unintended consequences with respect to protected characteristics such as race, gender, or national origin.
But there is a better way. We propose an approach we call minimum viable demonstrations of competence. What is this? This means reducing each path forward to the smallest testable hypothesis and taking action to see what happens. If it’s going well, keep going; if not, correct course. We believe this method holds great promise in the hiring process.
One of us (Jeff) spent several years recruiting writers for our firm. It uses a scripted written task administered after a short introductory conversation to assess skills. Many publications use writing or editing tests for job applicants, but Jeff approached the task more analytically than most: after receiving the assignment, he conducted a follow-up conversation to understand not only what was on the page, but also the applicant’s choices in its making. Not only did this give us an idea of how the candidate would perform, but they got a much better idea of the job itself as we connected elements of the task to the real expectations of the role. By using the same exercise repeatedly, he also built a database of responses over time, positive feedback to better evaluate the next candidate. “This approach to hiring was a game changer and I ended up landing some rock stars,” says Jeff. “The exercise also allowed me to hire people with really unconventional backgrounds because I didn’t have to worry too much about the specifics of the job on the resume. The process itself told me if someone would be good.
Let’s focus for a moment on our term for this process: minimum viable demonstrations of competence. “Minimum Viable” means making the test as simple and short as possible while still providing the evidence you need. “Demonstration of competence” means quite simply that the test actually shows skills in action that are essential to the job. It won’t work if the test shows something interesting and important, but not central to the job or predictive of performance.
Minimum viable demonstrations of competence are a mouthful, so we sometimes use a shorthand term for this process: discovery. Refers to the moment in poker when players turn over their hands and show what they are holding. For many types of roles, a minimum viable demonstration of competence can offer the same revealing moment.
Of course, working conditions vary enormously. It’s easy to ask an aspiring writer for a mock assignment, an aspiring consultant to join a project team for a workshop, or an aspiring saleswoman to make a cold call. But what about manufacturing, where physical movement and the ability to adapt to the unexpected are paramount? Or fighting a forest fire, where you are fighting something that is unpredictable in conditions that can be difficult to imagine. Well, it works there too. Through scenario planning and AI-enabled virtual reality tools, we can approximate almost any real-life situation these days. But the human response to these situations cannot be predicted, only observed through revelation.
This process can be industrialized because hiring five people to write is very different from hiring thousands. One useful tool is a “pre-employment assessment,” usually some kind of test that was used by the Han Dynasty in ancient China. In part because it can be implemented impersonally and at scale, it grew in popularity at the start of the pandemic as a way to whittle 10,000 resumes down to 1,000. Some of these assessments measure dimensions like emotional intelligence, work ethic, or core abilities (which isn’t always great indicator of future performance). But a well-designed pre-hire assessment can be a useful tool as part of a larger process.
Deloitte (where we work) does this today with a full suite of engineers, taking a minimum viable approach, asking the candidate to actually build something. In part, this is due to the rapid development of the software development field and the resulting inaccuracy of employment history. Someone may claim to be a software engineer, but do they really have the ability to do full stack development in a modern DevOps way? Today, Deloitte conducts more targeted interviews based on applicants’ actual coding abilities.
Human judgment still plays a vital role. One of us (Steve) once hired a candidate for a consulting role who didn’t meet our firm’s protocol for hiring fresh graduates. Ellen took five years to complete her degree, was not in a business program, and is in a school where we don’t normally recruit. However, she was an engineer with experience managing a hydrocarbon plant, and her cover letter was clear about why she was making a career change, signaling maturity. And she travels two hours to meet us. When we met, she took on a problem and quickly came up with an elegant, smarter answer that we and hundreds of others missed. A bot would reject Ellen, but today she is a managing director in our M&A practice.
Relying on human judgment and carefully crafted disclosure is more targeted and predictable than the “wrap the pipeline and see what it does” approach that many companies use today. There are still few companies that practice this on a large scale, but the good news is that some seem to be starting to challenge the traditional practice of the traditional hiring process. Steve and Jeff’s friend and mentor, Joe Fuller, recently wrote very persuasively about the trend in HBR. We envision a world where it becomes the norm for the “interview” to unfold into a purposeful set of minimally viable steps, culminating in perhaps a day or two of “riding together”: the corporate equivalent of dating without any notion of obligation or strings attached. Better yet, why not make the “gig economy” an ongoing process: organize work and invite top performers to full-time, premium roles?
This is an approach that more companies should try.
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