Your Approach to Hiring Is All Wrong
Outsourcing and algorithms won’t get you the people you need. by
From the Magazine (May–June 2019)
usinesses have never done as much hiring as they do today. They’ve never spent as much money doing it. And they’ve never done a worse job of it.
For most of the post–World War II era, large corporations went about hiring this way: Human resources experts prepared a detailed job analysis to determine what tasks the job required and what attributes a good candidate should have. Next they did a job evaluation to determine how the job fit into the organizational chart and how much it should pay, especially compared with other jobs. Ads were posted, and applicants applied. Then came the task of sorting through the applicants. That included skills tests, reference checks, maybe personality and IQ tests, and extensive interviews to learn more about them as people. William H. Whyte, in The Organization Man, described this process as going on for as long as a week before the winning candidate was offered the job. The vast majority of non-entry-level openings were filled from within.