Four Groups

An interesting article and comment from HR Magazine highlights the lack of consensus over appropriate selection methods (also see Personnel Today). There are some pretty startling figures in here too, along with the editorial comment;

Popular recruitment methods are useless at predicting whether a new employee will be any good in their job, according to the very people who use them most. Cranfield’s latest Recruitment Confidence Index shows that 86% of HR managers who take written references do not find them useful as predictors when it comes to finding an applicant who can go on to do the job well. The majority of HR managers surveyed also found panel interviews (78%) and CVs (67%) poor indicators of future success. The more modern psychometric tests were deemed ‘not useful’ by 44%.

HR comment: HR departments are either sticking to what they know – even if they are poor at predicting successful employees – or there is a real gap in the selection process that someone has yet to fill.

Perhaps there is a gap waiting to be filled?