Understanding the Candidate Selection Process

Now we come to the next chapter which is about candidate selection. I mean we still have the situation where More than one, more than one applicants apply for a job, for an internship, or whatever. If a company has more than one candidates, more than one applicants... They have to make a choice. Okay? So, now we talk about how do companies do this? Why do they do interviews? How do they do interviews? Do they use tests? If yes, why? What? and what is the difference between a good test and a worse one what is an assessment center all this stuff I mean it's relevant to you because you should know this not only because you are a business student you should know this because you will become a candidate too so these are our leading questions We will look at the entire recruiting process from the application to the job offer. And we'll have a look at what will happen. Of course, in the first instance, the company will look at the CV. But in the later process, you might be invited to an assessment center. We will look at this process. We will look at how things change along with this process. The question is now, how can a company predict the future performance? This is what candidate selection is all about, predicting the future. If I hire you... will you perform well that's about the future and which kind of criteria are used to determine future success then a big chapter will be We will talk about different selection methods. We will talk about tests. We will talk about interviews. We will talk about how companies use a CV. We talk about assessment center. We talk about all this different stuff. And at the end, I want you to have really an idea about why companies do this, how companies do this. At the end, we will talk about three criteria which we can use to determine whether a selection method is good or bad. bad. You know, there are selection methods which are ridiculous. Where you cannot predict future. Things like maybe I look at your face and tell from the shape of your face whether you will perform well. Ridiculous. Validity, zero. Objectivity, zero. Reliability, zero. So I mentioned all these three. We will talk about these three criteria in more detail. so we'll also talk about statistics then. So, what is it all about? I have a couple of applicants. Now, let's imagine I'm in a lucky situation that I offer a job and you all have applied for this job. I can only pick one out of you. So, what I need to do is, I can say, well, I flipped the coin. coin or I do it somehow by chance congratulations no that would be bad yeah I would like to predict the future I predict performance and and the question is now well I believe that in the future you will show a high level of performance or not. If I think that you will perform very well, I will hire you. I hire the one where I think the performance will be the best. That's what I do in the selection process. One year later, once I have hired you, I will know whether you have performed well or not. So this is the truth, the actual performance. So we have four situations where we can end up. One situation is that I say, well, I don't think that you will perform well, so I will check you, and indeed, if I would have hired you, your performance would have been better. low. That's great. Who's the right negative? If I think, well, your performance will be very high, and indeed, once I have hired you, performance is really good, then we talk about the right positive. That's great, too. I made a right... decision to hire you. But what I would like to focus on are there are two wrong decisions. One wrong decision is I, based on what I have learned about you, based on your CV, based on tests and the interviews we did I predicted that your performance will be low so I don't hire you but if I would have hired you you would have been a star yeah so performance would have been great false negative so this was a wrong decision I have rejected the wrong one the other wrong decision is I predict that you will be a star you will really outperform but Later on, you end up as somebody we name a warm body. What is a warm body? A warm body is somebody who just has died. Still warm, but rather passive. A warm body. That's also a wrong decision. Which is worse? False positive, false negative. This one. Yeah. Because why? Because this will be a long-term challenge. Yeah. You're going to suffer a shortage of talents, which you've already rejected. So there you can get rid of them somehow. Maybe after... six months which is the occasion or whatever. Notice period. Well, you say this is really a missed opportunity, this is a missed opportunity and this person will work somewhere else and this person will probably strengthen your competitor. And here you say I can get rid of this person. Okay? Okay? Some would say it's different. Some would say it's different. In some companies, it's hard to simply get rid of a person. If you realize that you have hired the wrong person, you lose time, you have... You have to start again. You try to get rid of this person, so to speak. In some countries, that's hard to be done. You really have to do it. during the probation period. Yeah, probation period. There you have the chance to more easily get rid of the candidate. But sometimes you realize after years that it was a warm body. So, I don't know. I leave it to you. I don't want to make a final decision what is really worse, wrong decision. But when we talk about candidate selection, it's about increasing the right decision and increasing the right decision. increasing the false decision. That's what candidate selection is all about. So what do we do in talent acquisition? We fill positions, okay? Empty positions. We name these also vacancies. A vacancy is a position in a company that is approved to be filled. And then all the recruiting efforts take place just to fill a position. All right? to put it very simply. What I want you to see right from the beginning is that there is a difference between a position and a job. I once asked in an exam, what is a job? What is a I mean everybody knows what is a job but you think that job was job is something I I go to in the morning and I go home from it in the evening and I get paid for no this is not a job What is a job? A job is defined simply as a set of responsibilities. Well, if you compare me with one of my colleagues, maybe Professor Mergaard, our Dean, we have the same job. We have the same job, but we don't have the same position. What is a position? A position is, let's put it simply, a position is simply a box in the org chart. It's located somewhere. Most professors in Germany have the same job because they have the same responsibilities. So a job is is something qualitative. It's something abstract. It's simply about the responsibilities, the tasks, while a position is really allocated somewhere in an organization. So a position is rather quantitative, so to speak. At the end, we have an employee on a certain position in a company with a set of responsibilities. I mean, that's academic stuff. I want to start with this, talk about some basic terms. So when we start. the recruiting process. The first question is, of course, what are we looking for? A company is looking for somebody who fills a position as key account manager. What the hell does a key account manager do? What is the responsibility? What are the requirements for a key account manager? For a SharePoint architecture evangelist? I don't know. So, what companies very often do is they that they start with a job analysis so let's talk about job analysis for some minutes okay in a job analysis we simply try to understand the nature of the job I think okay we are looking for a new professor what's that what is the responsibility what is good about being a professor yeah you want to really understand this I mean this is an easy example but sometimes it's a little bit more more complicated. So we do two things as part of a job analysis. As you can see on the slide. The first thing is we try to understand the critical requirements related to a job. What are the required competencies somebody should have to successfully fill a position with a certain job? I mean, that's clear. When you look then at some job description and then to... to some job ads, you will find these requirements listed. But this is not the only thing. Besides the requirements, we also try to look at attractive elements, attractive aspects, I named it. Because nowadays, in times of talent shortage, we sometimes have to sell a job. A company has to sell a job. I mean, what I tell to practitioners outside, to HR people. I say, well, look at current job ads. You can do this as a little exercise. Look at current job ads. You will find that the biggest part of most job ads are about requirements. You need to be able to do this, this, this. This would be your task. And the question is, do you think you can fulfill these requirements? Do you feel that, do you think that you can meet all these tasks? If yes, please apply. And you will hardly find something written about why is this job a great job. But more and more companies learn to do so and say, well, the first thing we have to tell the people is, why is this job a great job? What are the attractive aspects of this job? So in the future, in the past, we very much focused on requirements. In the future, we also will look at attractive aspects. And how do we do this? On the top left-hand side of this slide, you find the critical incident. I will talk about the critical incident in a minute. I should. show you how that works. That's a very important technique. With regards to attractive aspects, I used to look at magic moments. Magic moments. I mean, what is that? You can ask somebody in any kind of job and ask him or her, what are the magic moments in your job? Give me an example of any kind of job you like. Teacher. Okay, a teacher. I mean, being a teacher has good sides and bad sides, really. Yeah? But if you would ask a teacher, Mr. Teacher, what is magic? about your job? Are there any moments where you think, wow, that's great, that's why I love this job, that's why I love to stand up in the morning doing this job? Do you have any idea? from my own experience when I started learning French I had to catch up with a class because I had to first learn German and my teacher still helped me and he made it with me to an Elka and I got a really good grade in my Abitur-Gruppen and he was ecstatic. A teacher can help people really to achieve something. You make these people happy. And that makes you proud. So these are magic moments. But let's look at the requirements. Here I have an example of a waiter. We could take any other example. I took here a waiter. I mean, here the task is to understand what are the critical competencies some body. must demonstrate to be successful as a waiter. I mean, we all have ideas. But if you really want to understand what are the critical requirements for a waiter, you must look at the critical incidents. What is that? A critical incident is a moment, a situation, a problem, a challenge that is extreme. This is a situation where the probability to fail is very high But if you win, you are great. So it is a significant moment. Let's have a look. Here are some examples which came to my mind. I mean, probably you have other ideas. But when I think of a waiter, I never was one. Maybe some of you work as a waiter and you know it better. But I thought, well, think about, well, the restaurant is crowded and guests become impatient. Guests complain about uneatable dishes. A drunken group of students asks a drunken group of guests with no money in their pocket. A guest is interested in minor details about a specific one. What is about this one? The cook is sick and his deputy is fully over. challenged. I mean, hey, this is a nightmare. And if you are strong as a waiter, you can cope with that situation. Okay, now let's look at this critical incident. When we look deeper into this and we ask ourselves, what is necessary? to really cope with all these situations. You will easily find out that it's about being friendly, being fast, showing some level of resilience. You must have deep knowledge about wine and all this stuff. You have to have a level of direction. You must lead people. You must show a certain level of coolness, diplomacy, empathy. So, you can tell from all these different incidents what is required to be successful as a waiter. This is a very simple example. I mean, as a preparation for the exam, you can think about any other job. A teacher, taxi driver, goalkeeper. What are the critical incidents? And what do we learn from these critical incidents with regards to the requirements? That's the best possible technique to understand requirements. So, um... As I've shown in the previous slide, we do all this to, at the end, have a job description. A job description that really shows, okay, this is the job, these are the requirements, this is great about the job, and so on. That's... simply a document and then we use this document to create a job ad maybe, also to show to the employees, oh look, this is your task. So the traditional approach of human resource management is really about building all these, creating all these job descriptions. Many companies have this. Now, let me add one point. Nowadays we know that it's not always good to have these kind of jobs. We learned that many jobs change over time. If you look at a software developer, okay, a software developer must develop software, but... I mean, the requirements, the environment, the attractive aspects, they change over time. So once you have a job description, it might be outdated already after a very few years. You have to understand, okay, when we do job description for our jobs, what kind of jobs do we have? I mean, think about a company like Bosch. What kind of jobs does Bosch have? I mean, there are thousands. It's really very hard to identify the different types of jobs. jobs. And there is one phenomenon we also see is de-jobbing. It's a phenomenon we see nowadays in the modern world of work that people more and more create their own job. I mean, when I look at myself, I have the same job as any other colleague at this faculty. Really, we have the same job. But what I do is to... To a certain extent really different from what my colleagues do because everybody defines his or her job by his talent, by his own motivation, preferences and so on. I teach differently, I do different things with the students, I do projects, some don't. I work also beyond the university, I do a lot in practice, I work as a consultant, the speaker, author and so on and some others don't. This is something individual. And we find this nowadays that people define their job by their own, and that's great. Bureaucracy. If you want to have job descriptions for all your jobs, that might lead to a certain level of bureaucracy. But the most important point related to job description is that this is not my job mindset. As you can see on this picture here, this is a good example for this is not my job mindset. If you have... have a company where people always refer to their job description, the company is a bad situation. People constantly say, oh, this is not my job. You asked me to organize the Christmas party. Is that written in my job description? No, so I don't do it. If you have people like this, you are in deep trouble because successful companies have people that are ready to walk an extra mile. So job descriptions, they bring in some clarity. are useful to a certain extent, especially for recruiting, but job descriptions are not always a very good idea. So, having shown this all around job analysis and job description, now let's talk about recruiting, right? Candidate selection. Here is a candidate. Now what I want you to understand is that a candidate or an applicant is something quite complicated. There are many different dimensions. The candidate has certain knowledge, right? candidate has certain personality, interests, motivation, competencies, talents, expectations towards the job, towards life, towards the police. employees have certain attitudes, they bring in some contacts, relations to other social networks, and they have a certain age, gender, and look. So, there are multiple facets around one single applicant. And now, the task of a company is, once you have more than one an applicant, if you have, let's say, 3 or 10 or 20, you must look at the candidate and find out, okay, what of all these elements? are relevant for us and how can we tell the personality, the knowledge, the motivation, the competence, all this stuff of different applicants. To then make a decision about who is this most suitable candidate. That's complicated, right? So you try really to understand people, try to draw a picture of people. That's challenging. So what do we do in recruiting? To understand all these different things, we look at certain, let's say, sources. Right? Kind of flip back and forth. So, if you want to understand something about the knowledge, look at the education. You want to have certain knowledge in technical fields? Okay, look at what did the candidate study? You want to learn something about the personality? Simply look at the appearance of the person in the interview. You want to learn something about the competencies of a person? Well, look at the CV. What did this person do in the past? You want to understand something around the talents of a person? We're going to talk about this topic in more detail later. You want to understand the talent of a person, his or her potential? You look at how this person developed in the past, form of development. You want to understand about the age, the gender? Well, look at the picture. Now the question, of course, is, is that relevant? Can you look at the age? Can you look at the gender? Is that allowed, at least in Germany? Can you say I don't take this applicant because he is too old? Can you say I don't want this candidate because he's a man? No? You don't say it, but many people do it. They do it, but they don't say it. Oh, that's worse. No, the rule is very simple. These criteria must be relevant. to the job. So, can you ask somebody about his religion? No, you can't. But if you have to fill the position of a pope, you must be Catholic. Right? No doubt about it. You want to have a model? Female? You have to have a female. For some jobs you must be female. For some jobs you must be male. For some jobs you must be young. But it must be relevant to the job. Okay? I mean this is a big chapter. that relates very much to law I don't want to cover this in more detail so again we want to understand about these different dimensions so we use different sources we do interviews we look at the education, the CV, we look at the motivation letter to understand what is the reason why a candidate applied on this job at our company. So, now let's start. Here are two candidates. Candidate number one. He's an engineer, he's intelligent, he's a team player, he's confident, result-oriented, ambitious. and creative. Okay? Great. This is candidate number two. She's an engineer. She's intelligent. She's a team player, confident, result-oriented, ambitious, creative. Whom should we take? Hmm? Don't say something wrong now. I think it depends on what company you are and what do you need the people for. If you need somebody very creative, young, and you don't have so many young people in that position, in that team. So you need young ideas, then I would take the boy. But if I need somebody who already has a lot of experience, I would take her. Yeah, okay. So the difference between the two is the age? Yeah, so you can tell from the age, the gender. That's one point, the age and the gender, but that should not be relevant. Well, you said it depends. It depends, right. If I meet somebody with a lot of experience for this job, it's relevant, so I can take a look at it. Okay, But don't you think that the different attributes, they feel somehow different when I look at this good person versus at this person? I mean both are ambitious. She's ambitious, he's ambitious. feels different. Ambitious of a young guy is something different than being ambitious as a more... I don't know, something wrong? Mature? Nice looking lady. She's an engineer? He's an engineer, I'm sorry. Intelligent? I'm more intelligent than him. The point is that when human beings try to build, make a church, about other human beings we try always unconsciously to create a holistic picture it's the human the person as a whole we don't look at isolated attributes. We make a complete picture. So it's something that relates to in psychology we name it Gestaltpsychologie, Gestaltpsychology is that we always create a holistic picture. So the point is when human beings make judgments about other human beings we can't be very rational by nature. We are not built, when we can say so, we are not built to be really rational, really objective when we make a judgment about other people, right? So, Let's have a look at some biases. And this is really important. When a human being makes a judgment about another human being, some typical biases occur, biases that lead maybe to wrong judgments. One is first impression. The first impression is a very important effect. I mean, in earlier days, let's think about a couple of thousand years ago. When a person walked through the wood or through the countryside, and it was only countryside, you walk there and there were not so many people on this world as today, you suddenly meet somebody. The first thing you have to figure out is, is that person an enemy or not? So you really have to make a judgment in very few seconds. And you do this all the time. Whenever you meet somebody, you meet somebody in the elevator, you make a judgment. Every moment I look into your eyes, I make a judgment. Sorry. The first time I came into this room, you made a judgment about me. In very few seconds. And now I fight for hours against this first impression. You think I'm a nice guy. No, I'm not. First impression. That's so powerful. But can lead really to wrong. implications, right? But also recency effect. This is the last thing I've experienced about a person that stays in my mind. The last sentence somebody said, the last observation that stays in my mind. Protection. Protection, what is that? I mean, you have a manager who really takes care about the outfit. A manager who does so really looks at the outfit of the candidate. There's a manager or a recruiter that really tries to be sportive. He does any kind of sports. Sports is so important to this guy. When an applicant comes in, the first thing he will look at is, is this person sportive or not? So the attributes that I feel are important to myself, to myself, is used as a reference frame to make make a judgment about others, right? But maybe one of the most important biases is stereotyping. I mean, example, you tell your friend, oh, I have a new boyfriend. Oh, great. He's an Italian. He's from Switzerland. Immediately you draw different conclusions, right? If you like it or not. But somebody from Switzerland is a different person than somebody from Italy. In terms of whatever. I have a new boyfriend. He's studying computer science. I have a new boyfriend. He studies business with a focus on marketing. Different pictures come to our mind, different attributes. But that's not fair, because you cannot tell, you cannot draw conclusions about personal attributes just based on the nationality. Sorry, that's not fair. But we do so. That's because we as human beings, we try to reduce the complexity of our social environment. I mean, every day you meet thousands, hundreds of people, and you must make immediate... judgment about these people. Otherwise, you would get lost. So the easiest thing you can do is to categorize the social world. There are male, female. There are older, there are younger. There are Italians and there are Germans. And you draw conclusions about these different categories. We do this. We do whether we like it or not, whether it's fair or not, we do this. This is a very important effect. I mean, we must really take care of this. Contrast effect. Imagine, yeah? At the end of this class, I will have a bunch of written exams. Now imagine, now I come to yours. Would you prefer that the exams which I have reviewed before are great? or lousy You want them to be lousy, right? Because, oh, so lousy. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Now it comes yours. Maybe your exam is just, it's okay. But I feel it's great. Because compared to the previous one, it's really genius. That's contrast effect. Yeah? We adapt our expectation level through our expectation. If you have a couple of applicants come in. coming in and they are all lousy. Then somebody comes through, it's just OK. We found that this candidate is great compared to the others. And then the halo effect. This refers to what I already said. We build, we create an overall picture of a person. So I feel as a recruiter, well, this guy is great. That's a great candidate. You ask me about his team ability. Is this person a great team player? I don't know, but he's a great guy. He must be a great team player. Even though I don't have any clue about his team abilities. This is a very typical effect. So, what is the message? Of course, I want you to understand these different effects. And I want you to have some own examples on this. But my main message is, as I already said, when human beings, recruiters, men, managers, HR people, when human beings make a judgment about other human beings, there are some biases that lead to wrong judgments. Right? And that increases the risk of either hiring the wrong one or rejecting the right one. Okay? That's why we use some methods to be more objective, not to... not to walk into these traps. Now this is how a recruiting process looks like. Very roughly spoken. At the beginning we have some applications coming in. That's really traditional perspective now. At the beginning you get some applications. And the first thing you do as a company is you do pre-selection. You have first look at the application file at the resume. You make a decision. Should we continue with this candidate? Yes or no? It's really a yes or no decision. If yes, many companies do a short telephone interview or you are invited to do a kind of test online. So a little bit of an assessment. If you pass this, you are invited to a personal interview. I mean, most companies do this. And you sit together face to face. You talk about experiences, competencies, mutual expectations, all this stuff. Have you passed this? Many companies have a more intense step where they really look at your competencies, your talents and everything, which might be happened in a so-called assessment center. This is really intense. You spend maybe an entire day doing totally different exercises together with other people. And the company tries to understand really multiple attributes about you. Please. My personal interview in the assessment center changed because all the companies I've been to, they do it the other way around. They first do the assessment center and then the personal interview. Okay. This is not how it looks like in every company. This is really a very traditional, the textbook style of approach. I know that some companies do it the other way around. But the point is, and this is what I want you to understand, is that there are some systematic changes from the beginning to the end. First, what do you think? How much time does a recruiter take? to review a resume? How much time? On average? Five minutes. Yeah, what do you say? Five minutes. Five minutes. Oh, that's less. I heard something about seconds. Yeah, five seconds. Five seconds. Average. Average. I mean, if they think it's okay, they will take... longer look at it okay on average on average so from what I know from research it's on average about 11 seconds 11 seconds on average I mean sorry you take so much time to prepare your resume, yeah? And then it comes to the recruiter looking at this. 11 seconds. How can you, I mean, remember all the things I just said. The complexity of a candidate, the judgment biases, how can you... can a person make a judgment about another person in 11 seconds? You can't. You just look at some critical cues. So you want to fill a position of a software developer. and you have a candidate and you look at the CV and you know an educated, experienced recruiter looks at the CV for a second and says, okay, this person had a great career as a gardener. Reject. Experienced recruiter can tell within seconds whether there is a chance for this game or not. But the point is, it's not really valid. It's not so valid. We'll talk about validity later, what that is. But it means that, is it really the right decision? You can't be sure at this point of time. It's really, it's not flipping a coin. It's more than this. But it's a not very valid... reliable objective method. But the positive thing is looking at the resume for some seconds that does not cost much. That's really efficient. So at the beginning of the recruiting process for many companies it is about efficiency. How many applications does a company get? What do you think? You can't know but there's is a rule of thumb. The rule of thumb says that a company gets as many applications in a year as they have employees employed. So if you have a company, 2,000 employees, how many applications do they get in a year? Say, roughly 2,000. Is that much? 10 a day. Look at a company like Siemens, 440,000 employees, half a million applicants every day. every year. These companies really try to be efficient at the beginning. It's about efficiency. But the more you progress in this process, the more you progress, the less applicants are in play, the less applicants you really consider, and the quality and the cost of the selection method increases. While here at the beginning, when you look at the application, it's... seconds but at the end an assessment center that's a day but at the assessment center you just look at a few candidates so the amount of candidates which which stay in play decrease over the process but quality costs increase so we have some numbers here these are just roughly estimated ratios okay tells that you get ten applications so that one applicant really passed through the first step. You have to do two telephone interviews to, at the end, have one single candidate which you invite to a personal interview. You invite five people to interviews so that you invite one of these to the assessment center. You can now calculate how many applicants you should need at the beginning to have one single applicant who takes the offer. And that, again, is the problem. we already talked about companies for critical positions companies don't get so many applications so that they really can select through the process so at the end they have the one single perfect candidate so now let's have a look at certain criteria and I have prepared a table on two slides where I show you an overview about different selection methods. This is a table you should not learn by heart. I will not ask you about the size of the circles in these different boxes. But you should understand why we believe that an assessment center, for instance, is more objective than an interview. But you will be able to do this when you follow my input, my presentation. Okay, so let's look at some of these. We're not going to talk about resumes in more detail. I mean, you. You know what a resume is. Bewerbungsmappe. Or an online application. That's a resume. You know what that is. But then we have tests. We're going to talk about tests in more detail. And when we look at tests, we have two different major categories one category is about personality test or trait test the personality with personality there is nothing good or bad personality is as it is. The other category is ability tests. Here you can be strong or weak. For instance, cognitive ability, intelligence, you can be strong or you can be weak. So we have physical ability tests about your physical power maybe, while cognitive tests about your your mental capabilities. We're going to talk about these different tests and how they work. Biographic questionnaire, that's something very simple. There is one idea behind this. It's based on a very simple but valid law in psychology that says the best predictor for future behavior, the best predictor for future behavior is what? Is past behavior. That's because we believe that people don't change so much. So if you want to understand how people are going to behave in the future, just look at their past behavior. That's a simple idea. So you want to hire somebody for a sales job? Okay. Ask the person about his or her behavior and success and strategies in the past. And some companies do this by simply handing over a questionnaire. And you have to describe... things, how you dealt with different situations in the past. That's a very simple idea. We're going to talk about the personal interview. I mean, that's the most dominant selection method. I'm going to show you how interviews are structured. What is the difference between a good interview and a bad interview? And we, of course, are going to talk about assessment center. Right? On the second table, I have added added some more selection methods. For instance, the reference check. Now, reference check. What is that? You simply look at a former colleague or the former supervisor, former manager of a candidate. Here you have a candidate, Bernd. You want to understand more about Bernd? You just figure out with whom Bernd worked with in the past. And you ask these people. By law, you have to... The candidate must allow this. And then you talk to the people. This is simply look at the reference. In the United States and in some other countries, we have something which we call a background investigation, background check. So before you hire a person, you check whether the CV is really valid. Was this person really on this high school? Did this person really study on this? this university since 9-11 it became very easy to check all these things. How many years did this person spend in prison and why? Yeah, drug abuse, criminal record, all this stuff you can check. Then a very new selection method is to Google somebody. This is not written in a textbook, but in practice, recruiters do. So before they hire somebody, they check what do they find on Google. So be careful. It's not a problem if they find pictures of you in a party or so. I mean, that's fine. I think in the future, it will be rather a downside if you don't find... pictures of somebody at a party. You say, what's wrong with this guy? But be careful. I mean, if there are pictures in the web showing you at a party, naked body, please fuck me. Don't do this. Please don't do this. Be careful. And big brother is everywhere. You are big brother. In my time, we could really have parties and everything was kept secret because there was nobody with a smartphone or cell phone. ...are making photos. Now, you have to be careful because everybody makes photos of everybody. So, I mean that's scary. Yeah, the HR people will Google you. There are heuristics. This is not really a selection method, but it's still there. You know, it's... There are managers who look at... Somebody told me that if he or she has an applicant and he wants to... understand more about this applicant, he tries to have a look into his or her car. If it's messy like mine, you don't get a chance. Or you look at some mess, managers say, well, I only want to hire people which did some sports in teams. If somebody was not a team player in sports, I won't hire him or her. This is a rule of thumb. Best candidates are those that were strong in sports, especially in teams. I mean, is that valid? I don't think so. But for some managers, they use these very simple rules. Yeah. Okay. physiological tests then graphology graphology, what is that? graphology you look at somebody and someone's handwriting style and you tell from the handwriting style about the personality is that valid? can you predict future performance based on the handwriting style? some say so but it's not valid from a scientific standpoint we know that the handwriting style does tell you something about a person. It's not that it does not tell anything, but you cannot predict future performance based on the handwriting style. Okay? Great, then games, you have games, simulation, things like this. Okay? So, with physiological tests, I mean, if you look at the shape of the face, look at the shape. of the body of somebody. And tell from the shape of the face about the personality. Sorry, some companies do this. And I know that there are some defenders on this. Tell, well, that's really great. We have some... some methods really to tell from a physical shape about the personality. Sorry, that's crabby. Bullshit. So you see, there are still some methods used in practice which are valid and some are not. So I'm going to pick out some of the most relevant ones. And then we talk about it. What's the logic behind? How do they look like? On this table, you find different columns. I don't want to... refer to these columns now in more detail. We're going to talk about what validity is. We're going to talk about what objectivity is. Spread is how much are these different methods used. Small circle means they are not used too much. Big circle means, well, many companies use these, maybe all companies. Effort is how much cost is related to the usage of certain methods. You might ask where do these circles come from this is a mix of scientific insights and personal and personal estimations all right so I cannot really prove the size of any circle it's just a rough estimation and again don't learn this by heart but to compare financial how much does it cost me to use this method we talked about how much does it costs to look at the resume. Our effort was really little, it's small. While now assessment center, much effort. You spend entire day with the candidates that's really costly. That might cost you two or three thousand euro per applicant. But these are just rough estimations, just to give you a little bit of sense of spread, effort, and so on of these different methods. Okay, so now let's talk about personality. What is personality? I mean, we all know this term, right? But what is that from an academic standpoint? How would you define personality? Do you all have one? Yeah. Silly question. I lost my personality. Oh my god. What is personality? Okay. Do you think that it could happen that in the morning I have a different personality than in the evening? No, that does not relate to personality. That is mood. That is whether you are drunken or not. This is a different story. Personality is something very stable. It's something meant as stable. Over years... I mean, if you're going to meet your classmates in 10 years, you know what your signature experience is going to be? You think, well, my classmate John, now after I meet him 10 years later, years after study he did not change still the same behavior the same sense of humor the same bad jokes this is typical experience that you feel it people don't change they're very stable on this so this is personality personality is very stable but still what is personality To me it's the way people handle situations. Yeah, it's the way people handle situations, any kind of situation. Think of a party. I mean, you can predict the people which you know how they're going to behave on a party. Some will be the... first on the dance floor, some will be the last on the dance floor, some will never, ever enter the dance floor. Some people even don't show up at any party, while others you will find on any party. Yeah? So... Personality are behavioral patterns which are stable and which we show in certain situations. Now there's a long tradition addition in research about personality. And that was an idea from a couple decades ago that we thought as psychologists, there is something that we name personality. People differ with regards to stable behavioral patterns. So if it's there, we want to measure this and we want to understand what are the different dimensions of prismally. And to explain this, I should show you a test which is probably the most commonly used test in practice. It's the so-called Myers-Briggs type indicator, MBTI. And I show you this because in this test you find typical dimensions which we use in personality tests. The first one is probably the most prominent one. Extroversion, introversion. There are people which are rather extroverted. They are outgoing. They are present. They constantly communicate. They don't have any fears. and approaching other people. They are the first on the dance floor. While introverted, or rather laid back, or not so present, quiet, they don't like parties. They rather prefer to be on their own. They live in their own world. Oh, the cycle! No, not at all. I mean, you know, people differ on this dimension. There is the idea that people differ in a way how they make decisions. There are people who are rather rational in their decision. They go to a warehouse, they want to buy a shampoo. They find they are faced with 30 different types of shampoo. They take their iPad, create an Excel sheet, and... type in all the criteria which are relevant for buying a shampoo. Then they compare the different types of shampoo. Then they calculate the right decision. And after six hours they make a decision. I take this shampoo. This is definitely the best one for me and I can argue based on 17 criteria. That's very extreme. But there are people who are not sure about the criteria. People who are really structured, think before they act. They don't act spontaneously. When they buy something, they buy a digital cap. They take weeks to really understand what it types. They visit thousands of websites. While others say, oh, I should buy a digital cam. Take a smartphone, Amazon. Oh, there's one, I like it. Bye. Some decide rather based on what they think. They decide with their brain. While others decide rather based on gut feeling. Bauch, bauchentscheidung. Based on feeling. Some are... very structured in judging situations and people yeah others are much more holistic so i just show you because this because these are typical dimensions which we have. The most important one, really, which I want you to understand is the difference between extroversion and introversion. So, what's the problem with personality tests? I mean, just imagine. You apply for a sales position, right? And you know that you have to sell. You have to go out, meet people, build networks, convince others. Be present. And now, you have to do this personality test. And you know that at the end, the result must be that the company believes that you are extroverted because it's better to be extroverted in a sales position, in a sales job, to be more correct. So what will you do? You probably will not answer every question in the right way. I don't want to say that you lie, but try to draw a picture about yourself which is not actually you, but that brings you in a better position, right? But, those who have created those tests, they were not dumb. Yeah? So, they have included some questions that measure a different dimension. Your tendency to draw a positive picture about yourself. So, if you are ever asked in a test a question like Have you ever stolen something? What will you answer? Yes. You say please yes. If you say no, you're a liar. Now you come and say, but that's true. I've never stolen something. Come on. You've never stolen something. Or, if I'd be sure, when I use a tram, I will not be in control. Will you buy a ticket? If you're asked something like this, you say no. Because if you say yes, you're sorry. You're either idiot or... I don't know. But I would. I would buy a ticket. Because from my ethical understanding... Have you ever used a sink? for a different purpose than it is designed for. You say yes. This is an ability test. I want to talk about ability. aptitude, competence, certain skills. The difference to personality is that there is a strong end and there is a weak end. Personality is as it is. There is not that it's a good personality, bad personality. It makes no sense. People differ and that's fine. But with abilities there is a strong end and a weak end. This is a test about your ability to concentrate on something. A very simple test. It's genius. The idea was, you get a booklet, some pages filled with such kind of weird signs. You find P's, B's, D's and Q's. With one, two, three lines above, below, below. Your task is that you check all the D's with two lines. Either both on top, both below, one on top, one below. All the Ds. Only the Ds with two lines. And you have an entire booklet. And now there are two versions. The one version is you have to complete the entire booklet. And then two things are measured. How fast were you? And how many failures did you have? Or. You have a predefined period of time, let's say eight minutes. We get the booklet and it's to check how far you can go and how many failures you make. And then you have tables that clearly indicate, okay, that was your speed, that's the number of your failures, your concentration level is this. This is about concentration. The most important kind of test in that area are probably intelligence tests. I just took some examples here. You will find in almost every... Every task about intelligence is the task on the right-hand side. So you get a sequence of numbers and you must figure out what is the next one. 1, 3, 6, 12. What do you do? You look at the numbers, you try to create a kind of theory. What is the theory behind this logic? You apply this theory for the already existing numbers, and if it works, you use this theory to calculate the next number. So the theory in that case... might be okay you first add two then you add three then you add four then the next number is probably ten yeah three five eight thirteen Now you have to create again a theory. You have to play around in your mind, apply different theories based on the existing numbers, and from there, if you find that this theory is valid, at least for the existing numbers, you apply this theory for the next number, which is what theory? Plus 2 plus 3. 2 plus 3 equals 5, so we add 5. 2 plus 3. 3 plus 5 equals 8, so we add 8 to 13. 8 plus 5. equals 13, so you add 13. That's what I would do. You just add the previous number. So from 3 to 5, you add 2. From 5 to 8, you add 3. The two added numbers, you add them up, and you add it to the last number. So 34. Right. And at the end, you're going to have tasks which you will definitely not complete. So it's going to be more difficult step by step. But there are also other kinds of tasks. There is scientific evidence that people who earn more money are often not as happy than those who earn less. Okay, check. Please create much thesis, theories, explanations. supporting this finding as possible. Now you have five minutes time and you have to come up with explanations. Why is this the case? I mean, that's interesting. You are under pressure, the time pressure. Now come up with explanations. Or totally different. Sorry? I said it's not true, but you still can defend it. You think it's not true. That's not true. Yeah, but I still can... that's intelligence so even though you don't believe in this you can explain this wow here is a cube a transparent cube with a cable enrolled in it This is the same cube, but you look at this from a different perspective. So, left cube is the reference, and the right one is the same cube. Do you look at the cube from the left-hand side? From the front? Probably not. From behind? From left? from below from top so again what you must do in your mind is you you must be able to rotate this cube and you must in your mind be able to to look at the cube from a different angle And you must draw a conclusion how this cube must look like once you look on it from a different angle. I mean, that's a very complicated process. Imagine somebody would need to program a software that just... from the picture is able to decide to do this task, you can immediately understand that it's highly complicated. Some people are good at this and some are worse. In some jobs you really have to have this... This ability to have a three-dimensional imagination. The right one is taken from an intelligent test version which you use for kids. It's the same again. If you look at this boat, and the question is, what is wrong with this picture? I mean, you know that, okay, a boat is driving from or into this direction. If this is the case, and we can tell this from the water, so if you drive into this direction the wind comes from front so these clouds and everything, this is the smoke must go into the other direction just like the flags so I mean this is something expected by children in a certain age that they can come up with such a conclusion okay whenever we talk about ability tests like this, intelligent tests or the D2. These are really scientific tests. They are really expensive and don't mess these up with some tests which you might find on Facebook or in some weird journals or so. These are really scientific tests, and they are created, there's a lot of research behind. Please. These tests are not only used for concentration tests for employees, they are also used in in a seriously psychological IQ test. So people use this test, like this D2, I had to do to get my IQ measured. Ah, okay. You have done the D2 as part of the intelligence measure. Okay, I didn't know this. Okay, interesting. Yeah, right. For different purposes, you find tests like this. If you want to become a pilot, you have to do tests like this. If you want to become a physician, yeah, in early... the days in Germany, you had to do this Mediziner Test. So actually this exercise, this task, this item is taken from the Mediziner Test. For people, I want to study medicine. So for different purposes, for different jobs, for different professional roles, you can take different things. So I just want to show you the typical type of items. Now, as I said, these These tests are scientifically designed. There is much effort behind, long years of research. And especially intelligence tests are designed in a way that you can really tell from the overall test square for how good you are. So, just a question to you. If you have intelligence, IQ, intelligence quotient, of 115, is that good or bad?

So, now we talk about how do companies do this? Why do they do interviews? How do they do interviews?

Do they use tests? If yes, why? What?

and what is the difference between a good test and a worse one what is an assessment center all this stuff I mean it's relevant to you because you should know this not only because you are a business student you should know this because you will become a candidate too so these are our leading questions We will look at the entire recruiting process from the application to the job offer. And we'll have a look at what will happen. Of course, in the first instance, the company will look at the CV. But in the later process, you might be invited to an assessment center. We will look at this process.

We will look at how things change along with this process. The question is now, how can a company predict the future performance? This is what candidate selection is all about, predicting the future. If I hire you... will you perform well that's about the future and which kind of criteria are used to determine future success then a big chapter will be We will talk about different selection methods.

We will talk about tests. We will talk about interviews. We will talk about how companies use a CV. We talk about assessment center. We talk about all this different stuff.

And at the end, I want you to have really an idea about why companies do this, how companies do this. At the end, we will talk about three criteria which we can use to determine whether a selection method is good or bad. bad.

You know, there are selection methods which are ridiculous. Where you cannot predict future. Things like maybe I look at your face and tell from the shape of your face whether you will perform well.

Ridiculous. Validity, zero. Objectivity, zero.

Reliability, zero. So I mentioned all these three. We will talk about these three criteria in more detail. so we'll also talk about statistics then. So, what is it all about?

I have a couple of applicants. Now, let's imagine I'm in a lucky situation that I offer a job and you all have applied for this job. I can only pick one out of you.

So, what I need to do is, I can say, well, I flipped the coin. coin or I do it somehow by chance congratulations no that would be bad yeah I would like to predict the future I predict performance and and the question is now well I believe that in the future you will show a high level of performance or not. If I think that you will perform very well, I will hire you.

I hire the one where I think the performance will be the best. That's what I do in the selection process. One year later, once I have hired you, I will know whether you have performed well or not. So this is the truth, the actual performance.

So we have four situations where we can end up. One situation is that I say, well, I don't think that you will perform well, so I will check you, and indeed, if I would have hired you, your performance would have been better. low.

That's great. Who's the right negative? If I think, well, your performance will be very high, and indeed, once I have hired you, performance is really good, then we talk about the right positive.

That's great, too. I made a right... decision to hire you. But what I would like to focus on are there are two wrong decisions. One wrong decision is I, based on what I have learned about you, based on your CV, based on tests and the interviews we did I predicted that your performance will be low so I don't hire you but if I would have hired you you would have been a star yeah so performance would have been great false negative so this was a wrong decision I have rejected the wrong one the other wrong decision is I predict that you will be a star you will really outperform but Later on, you end up as somebody we name a warm body.

What is a warm body? A warm body is somebody who just has died. Still warm, but rather passive.

A warm body. That's also a wrong decision. Which is worse? False positive, false negative.

This one. Yeah. Because why? Because this will be a long-term challenge.

Yeah. You're going to suffer a shortage of talents, which you've already rejected. So there you can get rid of them somehow.

Maybe after... six months which is the occasion or whatever. Notice period.

Well, you say this is really a missed opportunity, this is a missed opportunity and this person will work somewhere else and this person will probably strengthen your competitor. And here you say I can get rid of this person. Okay? Okay?

Some would say it's different. Some would say it's different. In some companies, it's hard to simply get rid of a person. If you realize that you have hired the wrong person, you lose time, you have... You have to start again.

You try to get rid of this person, so to speak. In some countries, that's hard to be done. You really have to do it. during the probation period.

Yeah, probation period. There you have the chance to more easily get rid of the candidate. But sometimes you realize after years that it was a warm body. So, I don't know. I leave it to you.

I don't want to make a final decision what is really worse, wrong decision. But when we talk about candidate selection, it's about increasing the right decision and increasing the right decision. increasing the false decision.

That's what candidate selection is all about. So what do we do in talent acquisition? We fill positions, okay?

Empty positions. We name these also vacancies. A vacancy is a position in a company that is approved to be filled. And then all the recruiting efforts take place just to fill a position.

All right? to put it very simply. What I want you to see right from the beginning is that there is a difference between a position and a job. I once asked in an exam, what is a job?

What is a I mean everybody knows what is a job but you think that job was job is something I I go to in the morning and I go home from it in the evening and I get paid for no this is not a job What is a job? A job is defined simply as a set of responsibilities. Well, if you compare me with one of my colleagues, maybe Professor Mergaard, our Dean, we have the same job.

We have the same job, but we don't have the same position. What is a position? A position is, let's put it simply, a position is simply a box in the org chart.

It's located somewhere. Most professors in Germany have the same job because they have the same responsibilities. So a job is is something qualitative. It's something abstract.

It's simply about the responsibilities, the tasks, while a position is really allocated somewhere in an organization. So a position is rather quantitative, so to speak. At the end, we have an employee on a certain position in a company with a set of responsibilities.

I mean, that's academic stuff. I want to start with this, talk about some basic terms. So when we start. the recruiting process. The first question is, of course, what are we looking for?

A company is looking for somebody who fills a position as key account manager. What the hell does a key account manager do? What is the responsibility?

What are the requirements for a key account manager? For a SharePoint architecture evangelist? I don't know. So, what companies very often do is they that they start with a job analysis so let's talk about job analysis for some minutes okay in a job analysis we simply try to understand the nature of the job I think okay we are looking for a new professor what's that what is the responsibility what is good about being a professor yeah you want to really understand this I mean this is an easy example but sometimes it's a little bit more more complicated. So we do two things as part of a job analysis.

As you can see on the slide. The first thing is we try to understand the critical requirements related to a job. What are the required competencies somebody should have to successfully fill a position with a certain job? I mean, that's clear.

When you look then at some job description and then to... to some job ads, you will find these requirements listed. But this is not the only thing.

Besides the requirements, we also try to look at attractive elements, attractive aspects, I named it. Because nowadays, in times of talent shortage, we sometimes have to sell a job. A company has to sell a job.

I mean, what I tell to practitioners outside, to HR people. I say, well, look at current job ads. You can do this as a little exercise. Look at current job ads. You will find that the biggest part of most job ads are about requirements.

You need to be able to do this, this, this. This would be your task. And the question is, do you think you can fulfill these requirements? Do you feel that, do you think that you can meet all these tasks?

If yes, please apply. And you will hardly find something written about why is this job a great job. But more and more companies learn to do so and say, well, the first thing we have to tell the people is, why is this job a great job? What are the attractive aspects of this job?

So in the future, in the past, we very much focused on requirements. In the future, we also will look at attractive aspects. And how do we do this?

On the top left-hand side of this slide, you find the critical incident. I will talk about the critical incident in a minute. I should. show you how that works. That's a very important technique.

With regards to attractive aspects, I used to look at magic moments. Magic moments. I mean, what is that? You can ask somebody in any kind of job and ask him or her, what are the magic moments in your job? Give me an example of any kind of job you like.

Teacher. Okay, a teacher. I mean, being a teacher has good sides and bad sides, really. Yeah? But if you would ask a teacher, Mr. Teacher, what is magic?

about your job? Are there any moments where you think, wow, that's great, that's why I love this job, that's why I love to stand up in the morning doing this job? Do you have any idea?

from my own experience when I started learning French I had to catch up with a class because I had to first learn German and my teacher still helped me and he made it with me to an Elka and I got a really good grade in my Abitur-Gruppen and he was ecstatic. A teacher can help people really to achieve something. You make these people happy. And that makes you proud.

So these are magic moments. But let's look at the requirements. Here I have an example of a waiter. We could take any other example. I took here a waiter.

I mean, here the task is to understand what are the critical competencies some body. must demonstrate to be successful as a waiter. I mean, we all have ideas. But if you really want to understand what are the critical requirements for a waiter, you must look at the critical incidents.

What is that? A critical incident is a moment, a situation, a problem, a challenge that is extreme. This is a situation where the probability to fail is very high But if you win, you are great. So it is a significant moment.

Let's have a look. Here are some examples which came to my mind. I mean, probably you have other ideas. But when I think of a waiter, I never was one. Maybe some of you work as a waiter and you know it better.

But I thought, well, think about, well, the restaurant is crowded and guests become impatient. Guests complain about uneatable dishes. A drunken group of students asks a drunken group of guests with no money in their pocket.

A guest is interested in minor details about a specific one. What is about this one? The cook is sick and his deputy is fully over. challenged.

I mean, hey, this is a nightmare. And if you are strong as a waiter, you can cope with that situation. Okay, now let's look at this critical incident.

When we look deeper into this and we ask ourselves, what is necessary? to really cope with all these situations. You will easily find out that it's about being friendly, being fast, showing some level of resilience. You must have deep knowledge about wine and all this stuff.

You have to have a level of direction. You must lead people. You must show a certain level of coolness, diplomacy, empathy. So, you can tell from all these different incidents what is required to be successful as a waiter.

This is a very simple example. I mean, as a preparation for the exam, you can think about any other job. A teacher, taxi driver, goalkeeper.

What are the critical incidents? And what do we learn from these critical incidents with regards to the requirements? That's the best possible technique to understand requirements.

So, um... As I've shown in the previous slide, we do all this to, at the end, have a job description. A job description that really shows, okay, this is the job, these are the requirements, this is great about the job, and so on.

That's... simply a document and then we use this document to create a job ad maybe, also to show to the employees, oh look, this is your task. So the traditional approach of human resource management is really about building all these, creating all these job descriptions. Many companies have this. Now, let me add one point.

Nowadays we know that it's not always good to have these kind of jobs. We learned that many jobs change over time. If you look at a software developer, okay, a software developer must develop software, but... I mean, the requirements, the environment, the attractive aspects, they change over time.

So once you have a job description, it might be outdated already after a very few years. You have to understand, okay, when we do job description for our jobs, what kind of jobs do we have? I mean, think about a company like Bosch. What kind of jobs does Bosch have?

I mean, there are thousands. It's really very hard to identify the different types of jobs. jobs. And there is one phenomenon we also see is de-jobbing. It's a phenomenon we see nowadays in the modern world of work that people more and more create their own job.

I mean, when I look at myself, I have the same job as any other colleague at this faculty. Really, we have the same job. But what I do is to...

To a certain extent really different from what my colleagues do because everybody defines his or her job by his talent, by his own motivation, preferences and so on. I teach differently, I do different things with the students, I do projects, some don't. I work also beyond the university, I do a lot in practice, I work as a consultant, the speaker, author and so on and some others don't. This is something individual.

And we find this nowadays that people define their job by their own, and that's great. Bureaucracy. If you want to have job descriptions for all your jobs, that might lead to a certain level of bureaucracy.

But the most important point related to job description is that this is not my job mindset. As you can see on this picture here, this is a good example for this is not my job mindset. If you have...

have a company where people always refer to their job description, the company is a bad situation. People constantly say, oh, this is not my job. You asked me to organize the Christmas party.

Is that written in my job description? No, so I don't do it. If you have people like this, you are in deep trouble because successful companies have people that are ready to walk an extra mile. So job descriptions, they bring in some clarity.

are useful to a certain extent, especially for recruiting, but job descriptions are not always a very good idea. So, having shown this all around job analysis and job description, now let's talk about recruiting, right? Candidate selection. Here is a candidate. Now what I want you to understand is that a candidate or an applicant is something quite complicated.

There are many different dimensions. The candidate has certain knowledge, right? candidate has certain personality, interests, motivation, competencies, talents, expectations towards the job, towards life, towards the police. employees have certain attitudes, they bring in some contacts, relations to other social networks, and they have a certain age, gender, and look. So, there are multiple facets around one single applicant.

And now, the task of a company is, once you have more than one an applicant, if you have, let's say, 3 or 10 or 20, you must look at the candidate and find out, okay, what of all these elements? are relevant for us and how can we tell the personality, the knowledge, the motivation, the competence, all this stuff of different applicants. To then make a decision about who is this most suitable candidate. That's complicated, right?

So you try really to understand people, try to draw a picture of people. That's challenging. So what do we do in recruiting?

To understand all these different things, we look at certain, let's say, sources. Right? Kind of flip back and forth. So, if you want to understand something about the knowledge, look at the education. You want to have certain knowledge in technical fields?

Okay, look at what did the candidate study? You want to learn something about the personality? Simply look at the appearance of the person in the interview.

You want to learn something about the competencies of a person? Well, look at the CV. What did this person do in the past?

You want to understand something around the talents of a person? We're going to talk about this topic in more detail later. You want to understand the talent of a person, his or her potential?

You look at how this person developed in the past, form of development. You want to understand about the age, the gender? Well, look at the picture. Now the question, of course, is, is that relevant?

Can you look at the age? Can you look at the gender? Is that allowed, at least in Germany? Can you say I don't take this applicant because he is too old? Can you say I don't want this candidate because he's a man?

No? You don't say it, but many people do it. They do it, but they don't say it.

Oh, that's worse. No, the rule is very simple. These criteria must be relevant. to the job.

So, can you ask somebody about his religion? No, you can't. But if you have to fill the position of a pope, you must be Catholic. Right?

No doubt about it. You want to have a model? Female?

You have to have a female. For some jobs you must be female. For some jobs you must be male.

For some jobs you must be young. But it must be relevant to the job. Okay? I mean this is a big chapter. that relates very much to law I don't want to cover this in more detail so again we want to understand about these different dimensions so we use different sources we do interviews we look at the education, the CV, we look at the motivation letter to understand what is the reason why a candidate applied on this job at our company.

So, now let's start. Here are two candidates. Candidate number one. He's an engineer, he's intelligent, he's a team player, he's confident, result-oriented, ambitious.

and creative. Okay? Great.

This is candidate number two. She's an engineer. She's intelligent. She's a team player, confident, result-oriented, ambitious, creative.

Whom should we take? Hmm? Don't say something wrong now.

I think it depends on what company you are and what do you need the people for. If you need somebody very creative, young, and you don't have so many young people in that position, in that team. So you need young ideas, then I would take the boy.

But if I need somebody who already has a lot of experience, I would take her. Yeah, okay. So the difference between the two is the age? Yeah, so you can tell from the age, the gender.

That's one point, the age and the gender, but that should not be relevant. Well, you said it depends. It depends, right. If I meet somebody with a lot of experience for this job, it's relevant, so I can take a look at it. Okay, But don't you think that the different attributes, they feel somehow different when I look at this good person versus at this person?

I mean both are ambitious. She's ambitious, he's ambitious. feels different.

Ambitious of a young guy is something different than being ambitious as a more... I don't know, something wrong? Mature?

Nice looking lady. She's an engineer? He's an engineer, I'm sorry. Intelligent? I'm more intelligent than him.

The point is that when human beings try to build, make a church, about other human beings we try always unconsciously to create a holistic picture it's the human the person as a whole we don't look at isolated attributes. We make a complete picture. So it's something that relates to in psychology we name it Gestaltpsychologie, Gestaltpsychology is that we always create a holistic picture.

So the point is when human beings make judgments about other human beings we can't be very rational by nature. We are not built, when we can say so, we are not built to be really rational, really objective when we make a judgment about other people, right? So, Let's have a look at some biases.

And this is really important. When a human being makes a judgment about another human being, some typical biases occur, biases that lead maybe to wrong judgments. One is first impression. The first impression is a very important effect.

I mean, in earlier days, let's think about a couple of thousand years ago. When a person walked through the wood or through the countryside, and it was only countryside, you walk there and there were not so many people on this world as today, you suddenly meet somebody. The first thing you have to figure out is, is that person an enemy or not? So you really have to make a judgment in very few seconds.

And you do this all the time. Whenever you meet somebody, you meet somebody in the elevator, you make a judgment. Every moment I look into your eyes, I make a judgment. Sorry. The first time I came into this room, you made a judgment about me.

In very few seconds. And now I fight for hours against this first impression. You think I'm a nice guy.

No, I'm not. First impression. That's so powerful. But can lead really to wrong. implications, right?

But also recency effect. This is the last thing I've experienced about a person that stays in my mind. The last sentence somebody said, the last observation that stays in my mind.

Protection. Protection, what is that? I mean, you have a manager who really takes care about the outfit. A manager who does so really looks at the outfit of the candidate. There's a manager or a recruiter that really tries to be sportive.

He does any kind of sports. Sports is so important to this guy. When an applicant comes in, the first thing he will look at is, is this person sportive or not? So the attributes that I feel are important to myself, to myself, is used as a reference frame to make make a judgment about others, right? But maybe one of the most important biases is stereotyping.

I mean, example, you tell your friend, oh, I have a new boyfriend. Oh, great. He's an Italian.

He's from Switzerland. Immediately you draw different conclusions, right? If you like it or not.

But somebody from Switzerland is a different person than somebody from Italy. In terms of whatever. I have a new boyfriend. He's studying computer science.

I have a new boyfriend. He studies business with a focus on marketing. Different pictures come to our mind, different attributes.

But that's not fair, because you cannot tell, you cannot draw conclusions about personal attributes just based on the nationality. Sorry, that's not fair. But we do so. That's because we as human beings, we try to reduce the complexity of our social environment.

I mean, every day you meet thousands, hundreds of people, and you must make immediate... judgment about these people. Otherwise, you would get lost. So the easiest thing you can do is to categorize the social world.

There are male, female. There are older, there are younger. There are Italians and there are Germans.

And you draw conclusions about these different categories. We do this. We do whether we like it or not, whether it's fair or not, we do this. This is a very important effect. I mean, we must really take care of this.

Contrast effect. Imagine, yeah? At the end of this class, I will have a bunch of written exams.

Now imagine, now I come to yours. Would you prefer that the exams which I have reviewed before are great? or lousy You want them to be lousy, right? Because, oh, so lousy.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Now it comes yours. Maybe your exam is just, it's okay.

But I feel it's great. Because compared to the previous one, it's really genius. That's contrast effect.

Yeah? We adapt our expectation level through our expectation. If you have a couple of applicants come in. coming in and they are all lousy. Then somebody comes through, it's just OK.

We found that this candidate is great compared to the others. And then the halo effect. This refers to what I already said. We build, we create an overall picture of a person. So I feel as a recruiter, well, this guy is great.

That's a great candidate. You ask me about his team ability. Is this person a great team player?

I don't know, but he's a great guy. He must be a great team player. Even though I don't have any clue about his team abilities.

This is a very typical effect. So, what is the message? Of course, I want you to understand these different effects. And I want you to have some own examples on this. But my main message is, as I already said, when human beings, recruiters, men, managers, HR people, when human beings make a judgment about other human beings, there are some biases that lead to wrong judgments.

Right? And that increases the risk of either hiring the wrong one or rejecting the right one. Okay? That's why we use some methods to be more objective, not to...

not to walk into these traps. Now this is how a recruiting process looks like. Very roughly spoken. At the beginning we have some applications coming in. That's really traditional perspective now.

At the beginning you get some applications. And the first thing you do as a company is you do pre-selection. You have first look at the application file at the resume. You make a decision. Should we continue with this candidate?

Yes or no? It's really a yes or no decision. If yes, many companies do a short telephone interview or you are invited to do a kind of test online.

So a little bit of an assessment. If you pass this, you are invited to a personal interview. I mean, most companies do this.

And you sit together face to face. You talk about experiences, competencies, mutual expectations, all this stuff. Have you passed this? Many companies have a more intense step where they really look at your competencies, your talents and everything, which might be happened in a so-called assessment center.

This is really intense. You spend maybe an entire day doing totally different exercises together with other people. And the company tries to understand really multiple attributes about you.

Please. My personal interview in the assessment center changed because all the companies I've been to, they do it the other way around. They first do the assessment center and then the personal interview. Okay. This is not how it looks like in every company.

This is really a very traditional, the textbook style of approach. I know that some companies do it the other way around. But the point is, and this is what I want you to understand, is that there are some systematic changes from the beginning to the end. First, what do you think?

How much time does a recruiter take? to review a resume? How much time? On average?

Five minutes. Yeah, what do you say? Five minutes. Five minutes. Oh, that's less.

I heard something about seconds. Yeah, five seconds. Five seconds.

Average. Average. I mean, if they think it's okay, they will take... longer look at it okay on average on average so from what I know from research it's on average about 11 seconds 11 seconds on average I mean sorry you take so much time to prepare your resume, yeah?

And then it comes to the recruiter looking at this. 11 seconds. How can you, I mean, remember all the things I just said. The complexity of a candidate, the judgment biases, how can you... can a person make a judgment about another person in 11 seconds?

You can't. You just look at some critical cues. So you want to fill a position of a software developer.

and you have a candidate and you look at the CV and you know an educated, experienced recruiter looks at the CV for a second and says, okay, this person had a great career as a gardener. Reject. Experienced recruiter can tell within seconds whether there is a chance for this game or not. But the point is, it's not really valid.

It's not so valid. We'll talk about validity later, what that is. But it means that, is it really the right decision?

You can't be sure at this point of time. It's really, it's not flipping a coin. It's more than this.

But it's a not very valid... reliable objective method. But the positive thing is looking at the resume for some seconds that does not cost much. That's really efficient.

So at the beginning of the recruiting process for many companies it is about efficiency. How many applications does a company get? What do you think? You can't know but there's is a rule of thumb.

The rule of thumb says that a company gets as many applications in a year as they have employees employed. So if you have a company, 2,000 employees, how many applications do they get in a year? Say, roughly 2,000.

Is that much? 10 a day. Look at a company like Siemens, 440,000 employees, half a million applicants every day. every year.

These companies really try to be efficient at the beginning. It's about efficiency. But the more you progress in this process, the more you progress, the less applicants are in play, the less applicants you really consider, and the quality and the cost of the selection method increases.

While here at the beginning, when you look at the application, it's... seconds but at the end an assessment center that's a day but at the assessment center you just look at a few candidates so the amount of candidates which which stay in play decrease over the process but quality costs increase so we have some numbers here these are just roughly estimated ratios okay tells that you get ten applications so that one applicant really passed through the first step. You have to do two telephone interviews to, at the end, have one single candidate which you invite to a personal interview.

You invite five people to interviews so that you invite one of these to the assessment center. You can now calculate how many applicants you should need at the beginning to have one single applicant who takes the offer. And that, again, is the problem. we already talked about companies for critical positions companies don't get so many applications so that they really can select through the process so at the end they have the one single perfect candidate so now let's have a look at certain criteria and I have prepared a table on two slides where I show you an overview about different selection methods.

This is a table you should not learn by heart. I will not ask you about the size of the circles in these different boxes. But you should understand why we believe that an assessment center, for instance, is more objective than an interview.

But you will be able to do this when you follow my input, my presentation. Okay, so let's look at some of these. We're not going to talk about resumes in more detail. I mean, you. You know what a resume is.

Bewerbungsmappe. Or an online application. That's a resume.

You know what that is. But then we have tests. We're going to talk about tests in more detail. And when we look at tests, we have two different major categories one category is about personality test or trait test the personality with personality there is nothing good or bad personality is as it is. The other category is ability tests.

Here you can be strong or weak. For instance, cognitive ability, intelligence, you can be strong or you can be weak. So we have physical ability tests about your physical power maybe, while cognitive tests about your your mental capabilities.

We're going to talk about these different tests and how they work. Biographic questionnaire, that's something very simple. There is one idea behind this.

It's based on a very simple but valid law in psychology that says the best predictor for future behavior, the best predictor for future behavior is what? Is past behavior. That's because we believe that people don't change so much. So if you want to understand how people are going to behave in the future, just look at their past behavior.

That's a simple idea. So you want to hire somebody for a sales job? Okay.

Ask the person about his or her behavior and success and strategies in the past. And some companies do this by simply handing over a questionnaire. And you have to describe... things, how you dealt with different situations in the past. That's a very simple idea.

We're going to talk about the personal interview. I mean, that's the most dominant selection method. I'm going to show you how interviews are structured. What is the difference between a good interview and a bad interview?

And we, of course, are going to talk about assessment center. Right? On the second table, I have added added some more selection methods. For instance, the reference check.

Now, reference check. What is that? You simply look at a former colleague or the former supervisor, former manager of a candidate. Here you have a candidate, Bernd. You want to understand more about Bernd?

You just figure out with whom Bernd worked with in the past. And you ask these people. By law, you have to...

The candidate must allow this. And then you talk to the people. This is simply look at the reference. In the United States and in some other countries, we have something which we call a background investigation, background check. So before you hire a person, you check whether the CV is really valid.

Was this person really on this high school? Did this person really study on this? this university since 9-11 it became very easy to check all these things.

How many years did this person spend in prison and why? Yeah, drug abuse, criminal record, all this stuff you can check. Then a very new selection method is to Google somebody. This is not written in a textbook, but in practice, recruiters do. So before they hire somebody, they check what do they find on Google.

So be careful. It's not a problem if they find pictures of you in a party or so. I mean, that's fine.

I think in the future, it will be rather a downside if you don't find... pictures of somebody at a party. You say, what's wrong with this guy?

But be careful. I mean, if there are pictures in the web showing you at a party, naked body, please fuck me. Don't do this. Please don't do this. Be careful.

And big brother is everywhere. You are big brother. In my time, we could really have parties and everything was kept secret because there was nobody with a smartphone or cell phone. ...are making photos. Now, you have to be careful because everybody makes photos of everybody.

So, I mean that's scary. Yeah, the HR people will Google you. There are heuristics.

This is not really a selection method, but it's still there. You know, it's... There are managers who look at... Somebody told me that if he or she has an applicant and he wants to... understand more about this applicant, he tries to have a look into his or her car.

If it's messy like mine, you don't get a chance. Or you look at some mess, managers say, well, I only want to hire people which did some sports in teams. If somebody was not a team player in sports, I won't hire him or her. This is a rule of thumb. Best candidates are those that were strong in sports, especially in teams.

I mean, is that valid? I don't think so. But for some managers, they use these very simple rules. Yeah.

Okay. physiological tests then graphology graphology, what is that? graphology you look at somebody and someone's handwriting style and you tell from the handwriting style about the personality is that valid? can you predict future performance based on the handwriting style? some say so but it's not valid from a scientific standpoint we know that the handwriting style does tell you something about a person.

It's not that it does not tell anything, but you cannot predict future performance based on the handwriting style. Okay? Great, then games, you have games, simulation, things like this.

Okay? So, with physiological tests, I mean, if you look at the shape of the face, look at the shape. of the body of somebody.

And tell from the shape of the face about the personality. Sorry, some companies do this. And I know that there are some defenders on this. Tell, well, that's really great.

We have some... some methods really to tell from a physical shape about the personality. Sorry, that's crabby. Bullshit. So you see, there are still some methods used in practice which are valid and some are not.

So I'm going to pick out some of the most relevant ones. And then we talk about it. What's the logic behind? How do they look like?

On this table, you find different columns. I don't want to... refer to these columns now in more detail.

We're going to talk about what validity is. We're going to talk about what objectivity is. Spread is how much are these different methods used. Small circle means they are not used too much.

Big circle means, well, many companies use these, maybe all companies. Effort is how much cost is related to the usage of certain methods. You might ask where do these circles come from this is a mix of scientific insights and personal and personal estimations all right so I cannot really prove the size of any circle it's just a rough estimation and again don't learn this by heart but to compare financial how much does it cost me to use this method we talked about how much does it costs to look at the resume.

Our effort was really little, it's small. While now assessment center, much effort. You spend entire day with the candidates that's really costly. That might cost you two or three thousand euro per applicant.

But these are just rough estimations, just to give you a little bit of sense of spread, effort, and so on of these different methods. Okay, so now let's talk about personality. What is personality?

I mean, we all know this term, right? But what is that from an academic standpoint? How would you define personality?

Do you all have one? Yeah. Silly question. I lost my personality.

Oh my god. What is personality? Okay.

Do you think that it could happen that in the morning I have a different personality than in the evening? No, that does not relate to personality. That is mood.

That is whether you are drunken or not. This is a different story. Personality is something very stable. It's something meant as stable. Over years...

I mean, if you're going to meet your classmates in 10 years, you know what your signature experience is going to be? You think, well, my classmate John, now after I meet him 10 years later, years after study he did not change still the same behavior the same sense of humor the same bad jokes this is typical experience that you feel it people don't change they're very stable on this so this is personality personality is very stable but still what is personality To me it's the way people handle situations. Yeah, it's the way people handle situations, any kind of situation.

Think of a party. I mean, you can predict the people which you know how they're going to behave on a party. Some will be the... first on the dance floor, some will be the last on the dance floor, some will never, ever enter the dance floor. Some people even don't show up at any party, while others you will find on any party.

Yeah? So... Personality are behavioral patterns which are stable and which we show in certain situations. Now there's a long tradition addition in research about personality.

And that was an idea from a couple decades ago that we thought as psychologists, there is something that we name personality. People differ with regards to stable behavioral patterns. So if it's there, we want to measure this and we want to understand what are the different dimensions of prismally.

And to explain this, I should show you a test which is probably the most commonly used test in practice. It's the so-called Myers-Briggs type indicator, MBTI. And I show you this because in this test you find typical dimensions which we use in personality tests.

The first one is probably the most prominent one. Extroversion, introversion. There are people which are rather extroverted.

They are outgoing. They are present. They constantly communicate.

They don't have any fears. and approaching other people. They are the first on the dance floor.

While introverted, or rather laid back, or not so present, quiet, they don't like parties. They rather prefer to be on their own. They live in their own world.

Oh, the cycle! No, not at all. I mean, you know, people differ on this dimension.

There is the idea that people differ in a way how they make decisions. There are people who are rather rational in their decision. They go to a warehouse, they want to buy a shampoo. They find they are faced with 30 different types of shampoo. They take their iPad, create an Excel sheet, and...

type in all the criteria which are relevant for buying a shampoo. Then they compare the different types of shampoo. Then they calculate the right decision. And after six hours they make a decision.

I take this shampoo. This is definitely the best one for me and I can argue based on 17 criteria. That's very extreme.

But there are people who are not sure about the criteria. People who are really structured, think before they act. They don't act spontaneously.

When they buy something, they buy a digital cap. They take weeks to really understand what it types. They visit thousands of websites. While others say, oh, I should buy a digital cam.

Take a smartphone, Amazon. Oh, there's one, I like it. Bye.

Some decide rather based on what they think. They decide with their brain. While others decide rather based on gut feeling. Bauch, bauchentscheidung.

Based on feeling. Some are... very structured in judging situations and people yeah others are much more holistic so i just show you because this because these are typical dimensions which we have.

The most important one, really, which I want you to understand is the difference between extroversion and introversion. So, what's the problem with personality tests? I mean, just imagine. You apply for a sales position, right?

And you know that you have to sell. You have to go out, meet people, build networks, convince others. Be present. And now, you have to do this personality test. And you know that at the end, the result must be that the company believes that you are extroverted because it's better to be extroverted in a sales position, in a sales job, to be more correct.

So what will you do? You probably will not answer every question in the right way. I don't want to say that you lie, but try to draw a picture about yourself which is not actually you, but that brings you in a better position, right? But, those who have created those tests, they were not dumb.

Yeah? So, they have included some questions that measure a different dimension. Your tendency to draw a positive picture about yourself.

So, if you are ever asked in a test a question like Have you ever stolen something? What will you answer? Yes.

You say please yes. If you say no, you're a liar. Now you come and say, but that's true. I've never stolen something.

Come on. You've never stolen something. Or, if I'd be sure, when I use a tram, I will not be in control.

Will you buy a ticket? If you're asked something like this, you say no. Because if you say yes, you're sorry. You're either idiot or... I don't know.

But I would. I would buy a ticket. Because from my ethical understanding... Have you ever used a sink? for a different purpose than it is designed for.

You say yes. This is an ability test. I want to talk about ability.

aptitude, competence, certain skills. The difference to personality is that there is a strong end and there is a weak end. Personality is as it is.

There is not that it's a good personality, bad personality. It makes no sense. People differ and that's fine. But with abilities there is a strong end and a weak end.

This is a test about your ability to concentrate on something. A very simple test. It's genius.

The idea was, you get a booklet, some pages filled with such kind of weird signs. You find P's, B's, D's and Q's. With one, two, three lines above, below, below. Your task is that you check all the D's with two lines. Either both on top, both below, one on top, one below.

All the Ds. Only the Ds with two lines. And you have an entire booklet. And now there are two versions. The one version is you have to complete the entire booklet.

And then two things are measured. How fast were you? And how many failures did you have? Or.

You have a predefined period of time, let's say eight minutes. We get the booklet and it's to check how far you can go and how many failures you make. And then you have tables that clearly indicate, okay, that was your speed, that's the number of your failures, your concentration level is this. This is about concentration.

The most important kind of test in that area are probably intelligence tests. I just took some examples here. You will find in almost every... Every task about intelligence is the task on the right-hand side. So you get a sequence of numbers and you must figure out what is the next one.

1, 3, 6, 12. What do you do? You look at the numbers, you try to create a kind of theory. What is the theory behind this logic? You apply this theory for the already existing numbers, and if it works, you use this theory to calculate the next number. So the theory in that case...

might be okay you first add two then you add three then you add four then the next number is probably ten yeah three five eight thirteen Now you have to create again a theory. You have to play around in your mind, apply different theories based on the existing numbers, and from there, if you find that this theory is valid, at least for the existing numbers, you apply this theory for the next number, which is what theory? Plus 2 plus 3. 2 plus 3 equals 5, so we add 5. 2 plus 3. 3 plus 5 equals 8, so we add 8 to 13. 8 plus 5. equals 13, so you add 13. That's what I would do.

You just add the previous number. So from 3 to 5, you add 2. From 5 to 8, you add 3. The two added numbers, you add them up, and you add it to the last number. So 34. Right.

And at the end, you're going to have tasks which you will definitely not complete. So it's going to be more difficult step by step. But there are also other kinds of tasks.

There is scientific evidence that people who earn more money are often not as happy than those who earn less. Okay, check. Please create much thesis, theories, explanations. supporting this finding as possible. Now you have five minutes time and you have to come up with explanations.

Why is this the case? I mean, that's interesting. You are under pressure, the time pressure.

Now come up with explanations. Or totally different. Sorry? I said it's not true, but you still can defend it. You think it's not true.

That's not true. Yeah, but I still can... that's intelligence so even though you don't believe in this you can explain this wow here is a cube a transparent cube with a cable enrolled in it This is the same cube, but you look at this from a different perspective. So, left cube is the reference, and the right one is the same cube.

Do you look at the cube from the left-hand side? From the front? Probably not. From behind? From left?

from below from top so again what you must do in your mind is you you must be able to rotate this cube and you must in your mind be able to to look at the cube from a different angle And you must draw a conclusion how this cube must look like once you look on it from a different angle. I mean, that's a very complicated process. Imagine somebody would need to program a software that just...

from the picture is able to decide to do this task, you can immediately understand that it's highly complicated. Some people are good at this and some are worse. In some jobs you really have to have this...

This ability to have a three-dimensional imagination. The right one is taken from an intelligent test version which you use for kids. It's the same again.

If you look at this boat, and the question is, what is wrong with this picture? I mean, you know that, okay, a boat is driving from or into this direction. If this is the case, and we can tell this from the water, so if you drive into this direction the wind comes from front so these clouds and everything, this is the smoke must go into the other direction just like the flags so I mean this is something expected by children in a certain age that they can come up with such a conclusion okay whenever we talk about ability tests like this, intelligent tests or the D2.

These are really scientific tests. They are really expensive and don't mess these up with some tests which you might find on Facebook or in some weird journals or so. These are really scientific tests, and they are created, there's a lot of research behind.

Please. These tests are not only used for concentration tests for employees, they are also used in in a seriously psychological IQ test. So people use this test, like this D2, I had to do to get my IQ measured.

Ah, okay. You have done the D2 as part of the intelligence measure. Okay, I didn't know this.

Okay, interesting. Yeah, right. For different purposes, you find tests like this. If you want to become a pilot, you have to do tests like this.

If you want to become a physician, yeah, in early... the days in Germany, you had to do this Mediziner Test. So actually this exercise, this task, this item is taken from the Mediziner Test. For people, I want to study medicine. So for different purposes, for different jobs, for different professional roles, you can take different things.

So I just want to show you the typical type of items. Now, as I said, these These tests are scientifically designed. There is much effort behind, long years of research.

And especially intelligence tests are designed in a way that you can really tell from the overall test square for how good you are. So, just a question to you. If you have intelligence, IQ, intelligence quotient, of 115, is that good or bad?

Transcript for:Understanding the Candidate Selection Process

Transcript for:
Understanding the Candidate Selection Process