The Ultimate Guide For Hiring Assessments

 

Interviews are a critical part of the hiring process for most companies as they provide an opportunity to assess a candidate's skills, experience, and fit with the company culture. However, evaluating candidates based on a subjective impression can lead to bias and ineffective hiring decisions. 

So that's where interview scoring sheets come in—in this guide, we’ll dive into what interview scoring sheets are, the elements of a scoring sheet, and tips for creating and using a scoring sheet effectively. 

 

In this guide you will learn:

• What are interview scoring sheets
• Hiring right is hard
• Why is Journeyfront more accurate than traditional assessments?
• It all starts with hiring accuracy
• What makes Journeyfront the most accurate?
• 5 reasons hiring accuracy works better than hiring efficiency

 

---

What are interview scoring sheets exactly?

Interview scoring sheets are tools used by interviewers to evaluate candidates based on predefined criteria. These sheets provide a structured approach to assessing candidates and can help ensure that all candidates are evaluated consistently and fairly. Interview scoring sheets can be used in interviews to better focus on skills, attributes, and other role-specific needs of the job.

To use interview scoring sheets effectively, you and your team should have a consistent format for your scoring sheets, the number of criteria, and the rating system that will be used. The initial change requires an adjustment in workflow, but the benefits are worth it in the end.

Hiring right is hard

Humans are prone to numerous biases, which makes hiring really hard.

1. Confirmation Bias: The tendency to seek, interpret, focus on, or remember information about a candidate in a way that confirms one’s initial impression.
2. Bandwagon Effect: The tendency to unconsciously jump on the bandwagon’ in favor of a candidate just because others like/dislike them.
3. Anchoring: The tendency to rely too heavily on one data point or piece of information about a candidate when making a decision (e.g. their college GPA, a particular comment they made in the interview, etc.)
4. Availability Heuristic: The tendency to rely on recent or emotionally charged memories when evaluating a pool of candidates (e.g. unconsciously penalizing Brad because you once knew a jerk named Brad).
5. Clustering Illusion: The tendency to overestimate small streaks or trends in a large sample of random date (e.g., our last 2 great hires came from NYU; NYU candidates are the best.
6. Similarity Effect: The tendency to like/dislike candidates who are similar or different than us (e.g. Sue likes animals too, she’s a great candidate.)
7. Ostrich Effect: The tendency to ignore negative information received about a candidate rather than factor it into a decision, like an ostrich burying its head in the sand (e.g., ignore red flags).
8. Over-Confidence Effect: The tendency to be overly confident in one’s abilities when deciding on a candidate (e.g. we can skip the reference call because I’m confident about this one).
9. Stereotyping: The tendency to expect a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about the person.

 

Companies get this wrong a lot.

In part, because of the above, companies get hiring wrong a lot.

“U.S. companies make the wrong hiring decision 46% of the time, on average across all position types.”
- LEADERSHIP IQ INSTITUTE -

Why is Journeyfront more accurate than traditional assessments?

 

1. Your Company’s Data vs. Outside Data

Every company and position is different. Journeyfront captures what drives results at your company by using data tied to your company and positions, vs. traditional assessments that rely primarily on outside datasets.

Why is it more accurate to use your data VS outside data?

Because every company and position is different. The most accurate way to confidently hire people who will perform and stay’ at your company is to screen candidates based on traits that you’ve identified lead to performance and turnover at your company — not data taken from an outside sample of the general population. Your data is more accurate than outside data.

 

2. More Data to Make Better Decisions

Assessments do not take into consideration other insights collected on candidates during the hiring process. Journeyfront helps collect and aggregate insights across the entirety of your process so you can make the most accurate decision possible.

Assessment data alone isn’t enough.

The insights generated from pre-employment assessments are limited in their ability to inform great hiring decisions. Think of all the other valuable information gathered on a candidate from resume reviews, phone screens, onsite interviews, work samples, etc. Journeyfront helps collect and aggregate information collected on a candidate across the entirety of the hiring process so you can make the most accurate decision possible. More Data = More Accurate.

 

3. Track and Improve Your Results Over Time

Tracking your results to figure out what’s working is the only way to get better. Journeyfront automatically connects your pre-hire data to post-hire outcomes like performance and turnover for increasing accuracy over time.

You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

Tracking your results to figure out what’s working and not working is the only way to get better. Traditional assessments don’t track back to post-hire results so you end up with general recommendations that stay the same. Journeyfront connects the data collected in the hiring process (assessments, phone screens, interviews, reference calls, etc.) to the post hire outcomes of those you hired (job performance, culture fit, turnover) to help you continuously get smarter about who and how you hire.

 

It all starts with hiring accuracy

 

Turnover

Did you know that 80% of turnover is due to bad hiring decisions? Short-term turnover (turnover in less than a year) is especially impacted by flaws in the hiring process and tools. Journeyfront improves turnover up to 40% in the first year.

Diversity

Bias in hiring prevents a diverse workplace and research shows the most effective way to reduce hiring bias is to remove it out of the process completely, vs. trying to remove it out of people.

Job Performance

A great hire creates 3-5x’s more value than a bad hire, despite the same environment and pay. What would job performance improving 50% look like at your organization?

Culture

You can’t be everything to everyone. To have a great culture a company must define who they are and then hire people that align with those goals.

What makes Journeyfront the most accurate?

 

Custom to you

Custom always fits better. Every company and job is different, so we use your employee data to identify what success looks like in each one of those roles. No matter what you want to measure, or how you want to measure it, we can help you do it.

Centralize all your hiring data

More data means more accuracy. We help you collect and optimize all your data, from initial application to the final interview to ensure you have all the data available to make the most accurate hiring decisions.

Continuous improvement

If you can't measure it, you can't improve it. Our closed-loop feedback process connects your pre-hire data with your post-hire outcomes, which allows you to know exactly what’s working in your hiring process as you continuously improve.

Why does hiring accuracy matter?

When you hire the right person for the job, they thrive naturally. That means job performance goes up and employee turnover
goes down.

5 reasons hiring accuracy works better than hiring efficiency

 

 

1. Hiring accuracy is built to get it right

Hiring accuracy matters more than anything else at your company because people create all value. When you hire the right people, they'll drive your company to success. When you hire the wrong people, it can cause irreversible damage to culture and your bottom line. Great leaders and companies hire and treat people like the precious assets they are, while bad leaders and companies hire and treat people like fixed COGS in a machine. 

Somehow hiring accuracy, (the ability to hire right) albeit the obvious solution, still eludes many companies for numerous reasons. One barrier to achieving hiring accuracy is human complacency. Unfortunately, some people involved in hiring don't think the hiring decision matters that much. But consider the fact that if everyone was the same, it wouldn't matter who you hired. You wouldn't need a screening or interview process at all. Who you hire does matter in fact, because people are different—their attributes vary, and so do their results.

This often follows the scientific phenomena known as the "The Pareto Principle":

• For a given event, ~20% of the inputs will often produce ~80% of the outputs. 
• In hiring, this means 20% of hires will produce 80% of the total value. 
• And conversely, 20% of hires will produce 80%  of the total losses.

This is true for a given position or across an entire company and that’s why having a process that helps you accurately identify and select 'great hires' and avoid 'bad hires' is so crucial.

Some think that for certain roles, these issues have nothing to do with hiring accuracy. It's true that job fit is driven not just by the person's characteristics, but also the job's. So how do you know if your employee issues are more a 'hiring problem' or 'job problem'? The answer? Look at how results vary across employees in the same role. For example, if everyone turns over around the same time (e.g., 12 months), it's likely a job problem. If you're seeing very different results across employees in the same role (boss/pay, etc.), however, it's likely a hiring accuracy problem.

The point is, where there's variability, there's opportunity.

If you're seeing variability across employees, focusing more on hiring accuracy often presents an opportunity in your efforts to improve employee performance, retention, or culture.

When you factor in the negative impact of time and money associated with turnover (voluntary and involuntary) and the positive impact of high job performance, data strongly supports the idea that hiring accuracy will solve your problems naturally from the start.

Recent data supports the idea that it’s simply a matter of time before this new emphasis on hiring accuracy (hiring right) will completely replace traditional tendencies to focus on hiring efficiency (speed to hire). In fact, research shows hiring accuracy produces a staggering 15-20 times more ROI than just focusing on hiring efficiency.

Every company deals with:

• Employee Turnover
• Performance Issues
• Culture Issues
•  Diversity Issues

How does hiring accuracy produce 15-20X MORE ROI than focusing on hiring efficiency?

 

2. Hiring accuracy ROI in the short-term

If you hire wrong the first time, it doesn’t matter how ‘efficient’ you were, because you’re going to have to do it again.

An inefficient hiring process looks a bit like this graph, with the length of the bar representing the time it takes to fill an open role, with all the consumed resources that come along with that.

Improving hiring efficiency means less time and resources go into each hiring decision, resulting in something that looks like this:

At first glance, you might say, ‘Improving hiring efficiency should be our number one priority when it comes to hiring, right?' WRONG.

If a restaurant gets a customer’s order wrong, it doesn’t matter how efficient they were at making the wrong order. They’re going to have to do it again. The same is true for hiring. If you get it wrong, it has to be done again. Now let’s consider what happens to those ‘hiring efficiency’ gains when that happens:

Note that not only are 100% of the gains from hiring efficiency erased; the company is actually worse off for having hired “efficiently” if it’s at the expense of accuracy.

If you’re efficient, but not accurate, ALL gains from efficiency will be offset (likely 3-5x) from having to do it over again.

3. Hiring accuracy ROI in the long-term

Hiring efficiency delivers no additional value after the hire is made; hiring accuracy continues to deliver value as long as that person is employed at your company – and usually longer.

Consider the analogy of marriage. No one looks back at the end of their life and says, ‘I wish I’d gotten married after 9 months of dating, instead of 11.” When taking everything into account, it's marriage accuracy – not efficiency - that matters most because of the greater impact who you marry has on your life. The same principle is true for hiring. For this second reason, hiring accuracy trumps hiring efficiency not because of what happens during the hiring process, but what happens after.

Good hires and bad hires create very different amounts of value for your company, as illustrated in the chart below.

Important things to note:

• Good hires ramp up to productivity faster than bad hires - requiring less training, manager time, etc.
• Good hires create more value than bad hires – and it only gets better. Good hires do more, stay engaged, and continue to improve. Bad hires’ growth flattens, often doing just enough to get by before jumping to their next job.
• Good hires leave the company in a positive manner; bad hires do not. For those with bad hire’ horror stories, this is perhaps the greatest understatement of this article. Good hires care about the quality of their work and produce value right up to the end. Bad hires often checkout as soon as they know they’ll be getting another job – and sometimes they extract vengeance on their way out.
• Good hires stay longer than bad hires. That means you don’t have to pay the cost of replacing them as often as you do with bad hires - and those savings can be significant.

 

You’ll notice in the chart that the y axis represents value created, not ROI. This matters because your company begins to incur significant costs the moment you decide to fill a role and even more so once you've hired the person. You’ll find some of these costs below:

It is almost certain that these costs constitute your company’s largest expense (especially those on the right side) and the only way for your company to recoup these costs is for your hires to create more value than they cost.

This threshold looks something like this, where the employee that generates value above the dotted line produces positive ROI for the company (shaded in green) and the employee that produces value below the dotted line is essentially just burning the company's cash (shaded in red).

In many cases, a bad hire may not even produce enough value to recoup the costs of having them employed.

Hiring accuracy – not hiring efficiency – is the only way out of this costly problem.

When it comes to hiring, the only thing worse than hiring the wrong person is having a hiring process that consistently hires the wrong people. This is why a company’s attitude (and understanding) around hiring accuracy matters – it will influence the extent to which they choose to invest in having an accurate hiring process.

Ignoring hiring accuracy – even if you’re hiring efficiently – becomes a vicious cycle and can create irreversible damage to your company. Many companies have been forced to downsize by 25-75% because they didn’t prioritize hiring accuracy. Even companies doing well are excited about growth, and frantically hire people but don’t take the time to ensure their hiring process will lead to accurate hiring decisions. In both of these situations, the impact is enormous, and can be crushing.

The value-producing cycle of hiring accuracy and the cost-producing cycle of hiring inaccuracy are both shown below. Which outcome is more desirable?

 

Despite the temptation to focus your attention on hiring efficiency, the data suggests this is a costly oversight. Focusing on hiring accuracy will produce 15-20x more ROI than hiring efficiency ever could. Twenty percent of that ROI comes from not having to repeat the process to replace the bad hire later; the remaining eighty percent comes from the enormous added value a good hire creates for your company over time vs. the more limited value a bad hire creates. Certainly hiring efficiency and hiring accuracy are both important, but hiring accuracy is more important.