04: Job Analysis & Competency Models

Stretching the Truth like Silly Putty

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During recruitment interviews, HR professionals would love to give potential future employees a 100% rating, but not for the reasons one would think of.

A research study from the University of Guelph has identified that 100% of employment candidates lie, stretch the truth, or exaggerate during the employment interview process. These results should have all HR professionals asking questions like:

  • What conclusions can be drawn from this?
  • Does this mean all potential employees are liars?
  • Is a certain amount of lying acceptable?
  • Is this a systemic issue with HR’s recruitment methods?

What should be done to address this pervasive lying from potential employees? The research does not provide many answers. The study, however, does suggest that the level of competition may play a factor in the tendency for the candidate to lie, but not in the way one would think.

The research shows that if there is a fewer number of candidates competing for a job position, the tendency to lie during an interview will increase. For more details, click here to read the CBC article.

Perhaps the only way to overcome this is with direct confrontation, where recruiters can leave a copy of this research for the candidates to read at the start of an interview, and at the end of the interview, ask the candidate, “Was there at any time during this interview that you lied, stretched the truth, or exaggerated?” If the candidate answers “no,” since 100% of employment candidates lie, now you will know the “truth”!

Discussion Questions:

  1. Research how to make employment interviews more reliable and valid. Make a list of potential ideas for improvement that you find the most beneficial.
  2. Imagine you are a recruitment consultant who is making a pitch to a potential client about why your recruitment methods are better than your competitors’. Complete a 5-minute presentation to outline your methods.

Nurses Wanted

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As we have learned from our Recruitment and Selection studies, the Canadian demographic makeup is undergoing a significant transformation. We are facing significant increases in the number of people retiring or exiting the workforce as they continue to age. This aging and exiting workforce is leaving behind high numbers of job vacancies, along with a corresponding decrease in the number of skilled and available workers for those jobs. This pattern is evident and highlighted recently in the province of New Brunswick. Provincially, the health care sector will not be able to meet increasing patient needs due to the predicted lack of availability in skilled and talented nurses.

In order to address this issue, the New Brunswick government has put together a provincial ‘Nursing Resource Strategy’. This is a pro-active recruitment plan designed to meet current and future nursing demands. The strategy has four action items which include the targeted recruitment of internationally trained nurses; reducing barriers to work while waiting for provincial nursing registration; permanent employment offers and potential signing bonuses for new nurses committing to work for three years in the province’s rural areas.

Click here to read about New Brunswick’s nursing recruitment strategies.

As the focus of this strategy is to increase the numbers of internationally trained nurses, the plan includes targeted recruitment from countries with nursing education programs that provide ‘similar nursing professional standards, competencies, and credentials’. This approach links directly to the need for accurate job analysis so that there is a precise match between the alignment of job availability, professional requirements, and candidate competencies.

Further, this plan is based on an analysis of demographic information that forecasts both the supply and demand of skilled nurses over a nine-year plan. It may seem that a nine-year time frame is focused far into the future but, the current state of this skilled labour shortage is already at a critical stage and cannot wait for any future delays.

New Brunswick’s ‘Nursing Resource Strategy’ is a plan that has been developed for one particular province to meet its health care sector needs. The plan includes demographic analysis, staffing forecasts, job analysis, professional and competency requirements, action items and a time frame for delivery. In summary, the approach provides us with a template for what an effective recruitment strategy looks like. All that remains is effective implementation.

Discussion Questions:

  1. Identify additional recruitment strategies that could increase the availability of skilled and qualified nurses in New Brunswick.
  2. What types of services or industries are impacted by the lack of skilled nurses provincially?
  3. What types of skill shortages are forecast for your province?
  4. What types of recruitment strategies would you put into place to address these skill shortages?
  5. As a new graduate, would you be willing to relocate to another province or another country if you were given a guarantee of employment in your field? Explain your rationale.

How to Get Employees to Stay

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Employee retention keeps many HR professionals up at night. You can just hear the echoing murmurs throughout HR conference rooms across the country as turnover rates go up in this tight labour market. Many of them ponder these thoughts:

  • How do you keep employees from leaving?
  • What will make them stay?
  • Retention is the key, someone will always say

However, is retention really the key? Perhaps our language around employee turnover is wrong. Let us look at the definition of the word retention:

“The continued possession, use, or control of something.”

Now, let’s put that in the HR context and the perspective of building a relationship with the employee:

  • the continued possession of employees
  • the use of employees
  • the control of employees.

It makes one ponder how employees interpret the meaning of retention. Would you want to be retained by your employer, let alone be considered a controlled possession?

Is retention the key? Or perhaps it’s time to move our language forward.

MEC, an outdoor supply retailer, has always been an innovative company right from its foundational roots of being a cooperative.  MEC applies a forward thinking concept of employee retention. Here is a quote from Nahal Yousefian, chief people experience officer at MEC:

“The philosophy we’re taking here at MEC is that the approach to talent retention is already outdated.”

What does she mean talent retention is outdated?  What is MEC replacing it with? MEC is replacing the controlling concept of retention with the concept that the employees’ talent should be generated and that will create an environment where employees will want to stay.  This seems to make complete intuitive sense.

There are also surveys that support this concept transition; here are some current statistics about retention according to a Hays study:

  • 43% of employees are actively looking for other career opportunities and
  • 71% of employees are willing to take a pay cut for their ideal role

In addition, LinkedIn has discovered that 93% of employees would opt to stay in their role if their employer invested in their careers.

Think about these numbers for a minute: Almost 100% of employees will stay if the employer will develop them, and almost 75% are willing to take a pay cut to leave their current employment.

It may be time for HR professionals to put the controlling language of employee retention to bed and truly be a workplace where employees want to stay. All it may take is a true relationship-building commitment of employee development.

Discussion Questions

  • Research several organization that have low turnover rates.  Once that list is generated, identify what are the factors that may influence their success.
  • Identify what are the most beneficial training and development activities employers can implement to create an environment where employees want to stay employed

Talent Management Expertise

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While Recruitment and Selection is usually linked together and included as one of the many functions within a Human Resources department, it is one of the few programs that can be implemented as a successful stand-alone business option.

There are numerous recruitment services across Canada providing support to organizations that need or want to use external expertise in order to find solutions to their staffing concerns. There are firms that provide immediate or short-term staffing solutions, such as temporary agencies supplying specialized workers for daily, weekly, or mid-terms assignments. There are also high-level talent management agencies (headhunters) that work with organizations to fill senior or executive level positions. In either case, these companies are focused on making the link between what an organization needs and what the marketplace of potential candidates offers in order to fill those needs.

As with any business, productive talent management firms thrive on passion and commitment to best practices in recruitment strategies. A recent interview with Erica Briody (Senior VP, Global Talent Acquisition) provides us with an excellent overview of what success looks like as a leader in this field.

Click here to read the interview.

Of the key messages that Briody shares through the interview, one is the need for Talent Acquisition and Human Resources to be proactive and aligned with the organization’s business practices. In addition, Briody, advocates for well-designed recruitment plan in order to meet the needs of the business, which may not be a one-size-fits-all strategy.

On the one hand, the proactive response needed from Human Resources to ensure that recruitment efforts are aligned with business needs do reinforce sound corporate practices. On the other hand, adapting recruitment design to fit a specific organizational need may be more of a challenge. As Human Resources practitioners, we are trained to provide objective and systematic approaches in recruitment in order to avoid or diminish potential discriminatory, illegal or subjective practices. We are trained to not place the organization at risk through the implementation of overly creative practices.

Perhaps a take-away from this expert is the reinforcement of the view that the role of Human Resources is always a bit of a balancing act. What saves us from falling is the commitment to passion, trust, and integrity in our chosen vocation.

Discussion Questions:

  1. How does recruitment design impact business success?
  2. What impact does a successful hiring decision have on both the individual and the recruiter?
  3. What are some of the fundamental Human Resources practices that Erica Briody uses at a global level?
  4. When you think about your own career in Human Resources, what excites you the most?

Talent Shortage or Recruitment Skills Shortage?

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What does your company value more? The potential employee or the recruiting process? All organizations should ask themselves that question? Is there a talent shortage in Canada and the USA? Well, based on the following North America headlines one would definitely think so.

If these headlines are accurate, employers should be raising the alarms and screaming at governments, educational institutions, and HR departments to do something — anything!

However, according to Liz Ryan, CEO/founder of Human Workplace, and author of Reinvention Roadmap, the headlines are all wrong. Her opinion is that there is no talent shortage. Rather, it’s organizations that lack effective recruitment skills.

Click here to watch a short video on the five mistakes organizations make when recruiting.

Could the recruiting process itself be the problem, rather than a lack of suitable employees? Most HR departments pride themselves on their sophisticated recruiting systems. They have often created complex processes, which may include online applications, impersonal advertising, tedious screening tests, and uninspired interviews. HR carries out these screening activities for two reasons: to be duly diligent, and because they believe good systems will hire the best candidates. But, could these HR processes in fact be barriers to finding and hiring the best candidate? Perhaps in some cases the reason the best candidate wasn’t found is because he or she chose not to apply.

HR needs to start treating potential employees like customers, marketing to them, and treating them with respect. Companies need to be convey to prospective employees the message that, “we value you, not our recruiting processes.”

 

Discussion Questions:

  1. Think about the last time you applied for a job and you went for an interview. How was the process? What did you like about the process? What did you dislike about it?
  2. If you were an HR consultant called in to assess the company’s recruitment process, what recommendations would you make?