Hundreds of studies reveal the profound limitations of the traditional interview. Interviews favor candidates who are attractive, sociable, articulate, and tall.  They also favor manipulative candidates, or ones who know how to make a positive impression even in a brief interview.  But those aren’t always the best job performers.

We all know of instances in which a poised, charming job candidate turned out to be a disaster on the job.  It can be difficult for an interviewer to see past attractiveness and flattery to predict how a person will actually perform once hired.  The challenge of picking the best person is especially hard in the current difficult job market, when advertised openings often receive hundreds or thousands of applications.  Conducting so many interviews is time consuming.  But the bigger problem is that traditional job interviews are simply not very good at selecting the best candidates.  In fact, research shows traditional job interviews are as effective as a coin toss for picking the best person for the position.

Nevertheless, managers are consistently overconfident in their ability to identify the best candidates using a job interview.  We cling to the notion that we can perfectly predict future job performance, despite overwhelming evidence against it.  We all want to believe that we are good judges of character, yet we do not bother to collect the evidence we would need to test that belief.  Rather, we rely on gut intuitions about whom to hire.

It would be better for companies and candidates if we hired individuals with the identifiable skills to be successful in a particular company.  To do that, organizations would have to figure out what really contributes to employee success and how to assess it.  But wait, the ProfileXT assessment tool can model your existing, successful candidates so you can pick new ones that look like your Top-Performers.  And the ProfileXT provides a structured interview approach, using the assessment outcome, to allow you to more objectively determine the candidate’s potential for success in your company.

The ProfileXT is the most technologically advanced, state-of-the-art system available today for measuring human potential and predicting job performance.  The ProfileXT can measure how well an individual fits specific jobs, or specific talent pools, or specific leadership positions, all in your organization.  The “job matching” and “performance modeling” features of the PXT are unique, and it enables you to evaluate an individual relative to the qualities required to successfully perform in a specific job or a specific pool of jobs, unique to your company.   

This less-than-one-hour, online assessment reveals consistent, in-depth, and objective insight into an individual’s thinking and reasoning style, relevant behavioral traits, occupational interests, and match to specific jobs in your organization.  It helps your managers and you interview and select people who have the highest probability of being successful in a role, and provides practical recommendations for coaching them to maximum performance.  It also gives your organization consistent language and metrics to support strategic workforce and succession planning, talent management, and reorganization efforts.

Best of all, the PXT is extremely cost effective, and the reports are written in plain language that do not require a specialist to interpret the results. 

The ProfileXT, plus using the Interview Report from the assessment outcome, will provide the essential data for a vastly improved hiring process.  Using structured interviews, and the ProfileXT assessment to select candidates, reduces hiring managers’ reliance on their gut instincts.  Gut instincts cannot determine a new hire’s fit with the organization’s culture, norms, and values.  In fact, the interview is often a lousy way to assess fit.  Because fit is important, the best approach is to create a Performance Model based on your Top-Performers, then assess and interview using the ProfileXT Modeling feature and the structured Interview Report.

Hiring decisions are among the most important any organization makes. That’s why organizations large and small owe it to themselves and their stakeholders to base this important decision on a consistent process.  The American economy has seen amazing innovations and productivity growth over the last 50 years, but there has been just about no innovation in hiring methods.  The current economy provides American employers with a tremendous opportunity.  The larger the applicant pool, the bigger the payoff from better hiring practices.  Now is the perfect time to do some fundamental rethinking of how organizations select people.

Are you ready to get some help with your hiring process??  Call or email me today…

Some of the above is excerpted from an article in the Forbes Leadership Forum, 2/7/2011, by Don Moore, an associate professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.