Ensuring a Perfect Fit:How Smart Screening Guarantees a Better Workforce

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© Copyright 2008 Taleo Corporation Ensuring a Perfect Fit: How Smart Screening Guarantees a Better Workforce PAGE 1

Every Business Like an Ad Agency

There’s an adage about the advertising industry that says, in a business founded on ideas, all of an agency’s assets walk out the door at the end of the day. That an agency is nothing without its people.

Today every business is like an ad agency, with a company’s people more valuable than ever. In com-parison to even ten years ago, companies employ fewer people, each of whom is expected to solve more problems, assume greater responsibilities, and be more productive than ever before.

Case in point: the airline industry. Whatever dif-ficulties the airlines are currently experiencing can’t

be laid at the feet of their flight attendants. Where

once a flight attendant was expected to provide

only for a traveler’s comfort, now she is expected to know CPR, be adept at detecting security risks, and have a minimal level of training in anger and crisis management.

With so much riding on their people, organizations are demanding more quality in every hire. Whereas in years past an employer primarily valued a candidate’s skills and education, now judgment, personality traits, and emotional maturity are added to the mix.

Hiring managers are struggling to keep up. Despite a softening economy and rising unemployment, 59 percent of hiring managers in a 2008 study say that finding qualified workers is their biggest challenge,

an increase from 52 percent in 2007.1

Lack of time and focus are problems. In a separate study of 537 senior HR executives in charge of recruiting, many spoke of inefficiencies in early-

stage recruiting tasks such as sourcing, initial screening, and interviewing.2

On a brighter note, however, a firm majority said

they believe that technology offers the best means to help their in-house recruiting staff become more effective.

1 Employment Dynamics and Growth Expectations (EDGE) Report, Robert Half International and CareerBuilder.com, www.rhi.com/EDGEReport2008

2 Hansen, F, Survey Data Emboldens Cry for Recruiting Funding, http://www.workforce.com/section/06/feature/25/72/85/index.html, (August 2008)

In this paper, we’ll examine one such technol-ogy. It’s called Smart Screening, and it works in tandem with an employer’s applicant tracking system (ATS) to assess candidates electronically and shave countless hours from some of the more onerous early-stage recruiting tasks. We’ll provide details on Ace Screening and Knockout Screening, processes that electronically fast-track the most qualified candidates and eliminate the least prom-ising applicants within moments of an application being submitted. We’ll examine the degree to which skills and behavioral assessments factor into Smart Screening, along with the increased reliance organizations now place on screening for fraud and criminal histories.

Smart Screening a Boon to SMBs

For the small to medium-size business (SMB), Smart Screening offers a cost-effective way to have an in-house recruiting function without churning through limited financial and employee resources.

Not only will Smart Screening quickly steer hiring managers toward the most promising candidates, it will assist you in building a repository of pre-qualified, ranked candidates to draw from in the

future. (As a supplement, see the summary report What SMBs Should Look for in an Applicant Tracking System, also from Taleo.)

It’s a point worth repeating: Smart Screening is not just about finding employees, but finding the most

qualified employees. The employees who, based on

skills, behavior, and prior history, will fit perfectly

within your organization.

Let’s examine how it works.

First Things First: Knockout Screening

Every organization evaluating job applicants distinguishes between mandatory requirements (needs) and desired attributes (wants). Mandatory, of course, is a condition that must be met if the applicant is to progress on to the next round of evaluation. Failure to meet any one of the require-ments means rejection.

© Copyright 2008 Taleo Corporation

Mandatory requirements may include authoriza-tion to work in a country, specified job certifica-tions, union membership, degrees awarded, business affiliations, or a minimum number of

years experience in the position being applied for. Past experience managing a team of people and/or a budget and experience with specific technologies

might also be included.

Typically the mandatory requirements are decided by the employer. However, in a few cases – such as authorization to work in a country – they are a matter of law.

Knockout Screening applies technology to assess the data entered into the system by each applicant and determine automatically whether the applica-tion merits further consideration – that is, whether all of the mandatories are being met. No human interaction on the part of the employer is necessary.

When you consider that nearly a third of employ-ers report that more than half of all job applicants prove unqualified,3 you get an idea of the amount of time that Knockout Screening can save.

Consistency is one of Knockout Screening’s virtues, the knowledge that every applicant is being screened uniformly and without bias. However, in the event that too many applicants are being screened out, you might chose to set the bar lower. By relaxing your requirement on academic degrees, for example, or the number of years experience in managing people, you knock out fewer applicants and give yourself more candidates to consider.

The inverse is true as well. If not enough applicants are being screened out and you want to set the bar of entry higher, you might bump up the type of academic degree or add a foreign language require-ment. Flexibility is built into the system.

3 Employment Dynamics and Growth Expectations (EDGE) Report by Robert Half International and CareerBuilder.com, www.rhi.com/EDGEReport2008

Assessing Skills

Imagine that you work in the hospitality industry and that you’re tasked with staffing a new upscale

restaurant. You know that good bartenders are hard to find and that this job is likely to attract a

large number of unqualified applicants. Begin by

encouraging applicants to apply through your website.

Use Knockout Screening to eliminate those who either aren’t authorized to work or aren’t qualified.

Because some applicants will probably choose to inflate or otherwise distort their experience (see

sidebar next page), an online skills assessment is a valuable tool for narrowing your list of candidates.

A skills assessment can include any number of questions in a series of different formats. In the example of the bartender, you might begin by asking applicants to list the ingredients in a dozen or more drinks, including garnishes. You could time them as they answer, then quiz them on the type of glass each cocktail is served in. You might ask some questions about bar etiquette. By adding some essay and how-to questions to your multiple-choice questions, you can get a better idea of how each applicant thinks. The goal is to determine the applicant’s skillset and find out whether he

approaches a task in a suitable fashion and knows the specific answers.

With Smart Screening, every applicant who passes Knockout Screening and completes the skills assessment is scored. As the person responsible for hiring the bartender, you may choose to invite the five highest scorers to the restaurant bar for a

mix-off. You won’t have any trouble identifying them because the system will have already singled them out. To this point, your only investment in time will have been in authoring the questionnaire. Everything else – the knockout screening, the skills assessment, even the interview invitation – was managed automatically.

That’s bartending. You could as easily develop a questionnaire for waitressing, retail clerks, landscaping, building maintenance, etc. Smart

Ensuring a Perfect Fit: How Smart Screening Guarantees a Better WorkforcePAGE 2

© Copyright 2008 Taleo Corporation

Screening can also be applied to more complex occupations such as engineering, accounting, hotel management, plumbing, website develop-ment, architecture, law enforcement, healthcare, teaching… In short, anything that permits a skills assessment.

Ask for Their References

Many job seekers decide they need to give their

prospects a little boost. The following are among the

most common falsehoods told on a resume:

38 percent surveyed admitted they had embellished

their job responsibilities.

18 percent acknowledged lying about their skill set.

12 percent said they had fudged their start and end

dates.

10 percent confessed to lying about an academic

degree.

7 percent said they had lied about the companies

that had employed them.

5 percent said they misrepresented a previous

job title.

Data from Outrageous Resume Lies, compiled from a survey of

hiring managers by Rosemary Haefner, CareerBuilder.com senior

career adviser.

The Cream Rises: Ace Screening

Let’s look at another example. Say you’re looking for a controller with three years experience and you have a number of candidates to choose from. Two of your stronger candidates have five years

of experience. A third candidate has seven. What’s more, this third candidate has worked in the same industry as your company and possesses nearly all of the attributes you identified as highly desirable.

Finally, she scored in the top five percentile on your

skills assessment.

This candidate can be automatically flagged by the

system as an “ace,” or top candidate, and imme-diately be offered an opportunity to interview. By acting proactively, you escalate the hiring process and dramatically improve your chances of landing one of your top choices.

And what of the candidates who are not singled out as aces and offered the chance to interview? These are candidates who met many of the criteria but were trumped by others who were more quali-fied. Their applications will be kept in the system

– along with their scores – in the event they want to be considered as candidates later. By gaining more experience in their field they improve their chances

of securing an interview the next time a position comes open.

Ensuring a Perfect Fit: How Smart Screening Guarantees a Better Workforce PAGE 3

© Copyright 2008 Taleo Corporation

Safeguarding an SMB Against Charges of Bias

Smart Screening’s greatest advantage over manual applicant processing is the speed with which recruiting decisions can be reached. Close behind are the professionalism and consistency in the hiring process that Smart Screening offers employ-ers. When everyone is scored against the same criteria, charges of bias carry less weight. Some small to medium-size employers struggle to apply federal job mandates consistently. Smart Screening implemented on an ATS system rectifies this by

retaining a record of each applicant’s assessment and safeguards employers by proving that the same set of questions were asked of each applicant. The score is what drove the opportunity to inter-view. Case closed.

The Flood and the Drought

Like the economy, hiring is cyclical. When jobs are scarce and many people are contending for the same position, hiring managers can afford to be more selective. You might choose to set your job requirements higher in the hopes of securing an extremely productive employee, maybe even a rainmaker. Whereas you might ordinarily ask for a Bachelors degree, now you ask for a Masters. You bump up the years of experience and look for entrepreneurial skills. The screening questions on your ATS system require more intelligence to answer.

You ask for more, because there is a deep pool of candidates to choose from. And you are quickly proven right when an ideal candidate submits her application and immediately jumps to the head of the queue.

Even when there is a dearth of candidates and your competitors are pining for warm bodies, Smart Screening gives you an advantage. Your ATS system will already contain the applications of hundreds if not thousands of past job seekers, each of whom was assigned a score. Many of the top scorers would make excellent employees. You

can pull their names up immediately and schedule them for interviews.

What’s more, you’ll have first crack whenever new

names come onto the job market. Smart Screening will quickly bubble the top candidates to the surface, sparing you any time wasted in weeding through lesser applicants. That ace candidate whose application just landed in the system? Call him today, before your competitors know he’s even available.

Predicting the Future: The Role of Behavioral Assessments in Hiring

While people are under more pressure to perform, they’re finding fewer opportunities to escape their

colleagues. Individual offices have largely given

way to cubicles. The increase in intimacy and job pressures has led to a new phenomenon called “desk rage.”

Says Paul Spector, professor of industrial and organizational psychology at the University of South Florida, “Desk rage extends across industry and class lines, from top white-collar jobs to gritty blue-collar work, and companies pay dearly in terms of lost productivity, sagging morale and higher absenteeism.”

“The worst offenders are overachievers,” said Rachelle Canter, a workplace expert and social psychologist. “They are so invested, I would say maybe over-invested, in success and in everyone being every bit as driven as they are that they just lose their sense of perspective, and they can lash out at other people.”4

Desk rage is a symptom of a larger problem. The fastest growing category of murder in the US now is workplace violence. In any given week, one person is killed and 25 seriously injured by current or former co-workers.5

4 Wulfhorst, E, Desk Rage Spoils Workplace for Many Americans, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN0947145320080710, (July 10, 2008)5 Background Checking: Uncovering the Facts, Taleo Research White Paper

PAGE 6 Ensuring a Perfect Fit: How Smart Screening Guarantees a Better Workforce

© Copyright 2008 Taleo Corporation

Because employers can’t afford to have their employees live in fear of one another and telecom-muting is not yet universally accepted, one solution is to discourage violence and other crimes by hiring a workforce – including overachievers – more prone to cooperation. Proponents of behavioral testing argue that there are strong financial incen-tives to test for behavior. Vendors have responded by offering behavioral assessments as a component of Smart Screening.

Behavioral assessments take different approaches to arrive at different sets of information. In one approach, all of the candidates might be asked the same set of questions and judged against the requirements for a specific job. This approach

emphasizes a characteristic profile of the candidate

and a search for the appropriate job. Anyone who has taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test will be familiar with this approach.

In another approach, the job requirements deter-mine what questions get asked of the candidates. The questions asked of applicants for a job in sales will be entirely different than those asked of appli-cants for a position in accounting. The responses might be compared with those of your top people currently in similar roles on the theory that their success is largely the result of their temperament – and striving to duplicate this temperament is a good thing.

Behavioral assessments can help gauge a candi-date’s likelihood to remain on the job long enough for the company to recoup its investment in him. Bringing someone on board and investing months in their training can cost thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars. In an SMB environment in which job overlap is uncommon, losing a new hire just a few months into the job can be devastating. The prospect of more months searching for a replacement and the lost productivity in getting the new hire up to speed has a negative impact on the company’s financial prospects. Anything to

mitigate such an outcome is desirable.

The Past as Prologue: Background Screening

Background screening has become increasingly relevant in the last ten years. Originally imple-mented by the government and major corporations as a safety measure to prevent introducing convicted felons or drug users into the workplace, it eventually expanded to include verification of all

kinds of personal data, including employment and academic credentials, even credit history.

Background screening is now a fixture at organiza-tions of every size. The reasons for its growing popularity include the rise in workplace violence, recent and still-raw corporate fraud scandals on the order of Enron, and litigation – both real and potential – surrounding negligent hiring (see sidebar, A Failure to Screen). Background checks also help employers nail some of the 30-40 percent of job candidates estimated to lie on their resumes.

A Failure to Screen

A large San Francisco bank had employed an agency

to provide janitorial services. They did a spot back-

ground check on the 217 workers who were perform-

ing services at the time and found 12 had known

pre-employment felonies and major misdemeanors.

Luckily there was no incident and the agency was

fired.

From Background Checking: Uncovering the Facts, a Taleo Research

White Paper

The fact is that every employee has a history. Because past performance is frequently an indicator of what to expect in the future, it’s smart business to know more about potential hires and their suitability for your company before you hire them.

Unlike other components of Smart Screening, background screening is typically implemented

Ensuring a Perfect Fit: How Smart Screening Guarantees a Better Workforce PAGE 7

© Copyright 2008 Taleo Corporation

near the tail-end of the hiring cycle. Intended to prevent abuse against a company’s employer and employees rather than confer any strategic advantage, it is meant to be implemented quickly and accurately and enable the timely onboarding of the successful candidate. More on the types of background screens can be seen in the sidebar.

Types of Common Background Screens

Criminal background .......................................... 88%

Employment verification ..................................... 76%

Drug screens ....................................................... 70%

Education verification ......................................... 69%

Credit checks ..................................................... 57%

Other .................................................................... 20%

Data from 2007 Background Screening Trends, Kress Employment

Screening, 2007

Finding the Perfect Fit

Employers continue to expect more from employ-ees and employees continue to deliver. Productivity continues to rise, as fewer workers produce more goods and services than ever before. However, cracks in the labor market are appearing. Even as job growth flatlines and the ranks of interested job

seekers swells, hiring managers are struggling. A full 59 percent of them report difficulties in finding

qualified help to fill vacancies. A majority pointed

to inefficiencies in early-stage recruiting tasks such

as sourcing, initial screening, and interviewing.

Smart Screening promises to cut through the clutter and help employers quickly identify the most viable candidates. It works in tandem with an employer’s ATS system to assess candidates electronically and rank them by score, moving the most promising candidates to the head of the queue for an interview. Screening of candidates occurs in stages, and may include any combination of qualifying and skills assessment followed by behavioral and background screening.

Originally designed for large corporations, screening is now increasingly valuable for SMB employers. With fewer people available to assume more responsibility, the SMB has more riding on each hire.

In an environment where you’re only as good as your people, hiring the best talent is your objective. Smart Screening can help you identify the candi-dates you need quickly. Finding a perfect candidate isn’t practical. But finding a candidate that fits

perfectly may be.

PAGE 8 Ensuring a Perfect Fit: How Smart Screening Guarantees a Better Workforce

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