It’s normal for HR professionals to feel that management is more concerned with speed and execution rather than HR expertise. If you want to avoid your HR expertise being ignored by your manager, you need to take up the baton. Here’s an example of how you can do this.
An email drops into your inbox. It’s from your line manager:
Hi,
I need a new employee after Kasper leaves. The position has to be filled as soon as possible – within 14 days at most. I’ve attached the job ad. Could you make sure it gets out and we fill the vacancy with a suitably qualified candidate?
Superhuman wanted
You open the job ad and immediately see that it describes a superhuman. A person who can do it all, but who in reality does not exist.
If you’ve experienced this or something similar before, you’re not alone. We often hear about workplaces where HR is reduced to a purely practical function. Expertise is not taken seriously. HR becomes responsible for a rushed recruitment process that they find hard to vouch for and that is likely to fail.
Because you can’t expect a recruitment process to succeed if you don’t make use of HR’s insights and expertise to quality-assure the process. HR’s insights should help to provide the best basis for assessment. A basis that enables us to assess whether a candidate will end up as a valuable employee or a costly recruitment mistake.
Best practice – make use of HR expertise
At People Test Systems, we’ve previously written about what we call a best practice recruitment process. It comprises of five simple steps that minimise recruitment bias and increases the likelihood of the new employee being a success. The five steps are inspired in part by Sally A. Carless’s research article ‘Psychological testing for selection purposes: A guide to evidence-based practice for human resource professionals’.
Basically, it is about doing your HR homework and using the right tools to create a streamlined and harmonised process. The five steps can be found here:
- Competence prioritization
Together with the people involved in the recruitment process, identify the 4-6 skills you believe are most important for your future employee. - Prepare a Job profile
Based on the selected skills, you can design and test the quality of your Job profile in People Test Match. In the system, you can validate the quality of the skills mix in your Job profile by using the Job profile-bias-tool. - Generate a standardised question guide based on the Job profile
Based on the Job profile, you can now generate a question guide that is standardised based on the skills you have prioritised. - Analyse the test result
Once testing of the candidate is complete, the test results should be analysed on the following parameters: validity, match score and job-relevant competencies. - Prepare an onboarding plan
Use the insights from the recruitment process to understand what motivates and drives the candidate you end up selecting to create a customised onboarding plan that gives the candidate a good chance of both thriving and performing in the job.
If, as an HR professional, you’ve found yourself in a situation where your HR expertise is being ignored, you need to proactively bring your expertise into play.
We find that HR professionals who have found themselves in a situation where their expertise is neglected find it difficult to break out of the role.
It’s difficult to recommend a best practice process when you haven’t tried it out before.
Therefore, a good way to actualise it is not to pretend that you’re a world champion at it, but to suggest that you try out the process.
You could do this, for example, by replying like this to the email that initiated this discussion:
Hi (name of manager),
Of course I would be very happy to find a new employee to replace Kasper.
I’ve recently read an HR newsletter. In short, the best way to ensure the most effective recruitment process and minimise the likelihood of costly recruitment mistakes is to establish an initial skills prioritisation and Job profile. I also know that several of our competitors do it that way.
I think we should try it.
Can we agree on that?
If so, I’ll invite you to a short meeting right away. Then we can work together to identify the 4-6 most important skills for the job. I’ll send you a prioritisation list in advance from which you can select the skills.
Find your own style – but do something
Of course, you have to decide what is the most natural way to communicate with your manager. Maybe the email needs to be reworded, or maybe you should have an informal chat by the coffee machine or a strategy meeting about your recruitment. Whatever you do, there is no guarantee that it will work.
However, you will considerably increase the chances of success by doing something rather than nothing. And most managers love initiative, so give it a shot!
