Does Qualified Equate to Quality?

Editor's Note:  Today's post comes to us courtesy of guest contributor Chris Dobyns.

Late last year I had a unfamiliar experience. I finally replaced my 20-year old vehicle and bought a new car. As with each prior car I’ve purchased over the years, to include the current one, I’m always impressed with the improvements car-makers have made in the quality of the vehicles in the intervening years – whether that’s in technology, handling, safety-related features, noise levels or just the precision fit of the body panels and trim.

The tie-in to compensation is coming – I promise.

Strengthening Federal Executives

Last week I attended a meeting on behalf of our HR Director, at a really big, five-sided building down in Washington, D.C. Among the topics for discussion was an overview of the Executive Order signed last year, targeted at strengthening the recruitment, hiring, and development of the Federal government's future senior executives.

The order includes a talent acquisition plan that would, among other things, establish a mechanism to track information about each future executive vacancy including, at a minimum, source of the recruitment, number, quality and diversity of applicants, source of applicants, and timeliness of the hiring process.

This Should Be Easy, Or Wait . . . Maybe Not

When I spotted the magic word quality in the presentation – I couldn’t resist the temptation to ask the speaker exactly how the quality of candidates for vacant executive positions would be reliably assessed? The response from the speaker and rest of the meeting participants could best be characterized as “the sound of crickets . . . .”

What Does Quality Have To Do With Anything?

My reason for asking was because quality has been a huge issue, since we recently instituted a much a higher pay structure, with one of the goals to make ourselves more attractive to a much higher quality of job applicants in a specific technical discipline. Two years later, I’m not sure we have much that tells us that the quality of the folks we’ve hired has changed substantially – except feedback from our hiring managers claiming that recent hires “are some of the very best we’ve ever gotten”. Realistically, what response did we expect to hear from the same managers who made the decision to hire these new employees in the first place? Worse yet are the lingering, yet unproven concerns that we’re obtaining the same quality of new hires, and we’ve simply made the recruiting effort that much easier – while simultaneously incurring substantially higher salary costs. That’s why quality is important.

If The Candidate is Qualified, They’re Quality, Right?        

Not necessarily. They might represent a quality candidate, but using minimum qualifications as an barometer to measure the quality of your job candidates seems highly problematic. After all, they’re called minimum qualifications for a reason – because they represent the lowest qualifications threshold a candidate should possess that would reasonably suggest their successful performance in the job. Assessing candidate qualifications (education, relevant experience, etc.) beyond the minimum threshold is at least one possible proxy for quality – and is typically, at least in part, one that is most often used by employers to establish a new hire salary offer.

Does Assessing Imperfect Subjects Require Imperfect Measures?

So, by what criterion (single) or criteria (multiple) should people quality be measured – either before making the hiring decision, or after? Focusing on pre-hiring quality would seem best, in order to minimize the negative return-on-investment proposition. However, existing pre-hire quality measures (hiring costs, time-to-fill, candidate assessment scores, and new-hire attrition) all seem hopelessly confounded in assessing the new hire candidate and the hiring process itself.

Post-hire measures are only a little better, and admittedly they’re all “after-the-fact”. These include, time-to-productivity, error rates, job performance, organizational “fit”, manager/employee satisfaction and turnover. These measures all include some level of imprecision and subjectivity – which makes them less-than-perfect.

Measuring Car Quality Is Definitely Easier

Whether the issue has to do with future federal executive candidates or the fit of the rocker panels on your new car, the concept of quality is intriguing. However, defining and measuring quality – at least when it comes to human capital issues, remains elusive. The recruiting process can select individuals that demand higher starting salaries, but it's critical to know if you are over-paying for new hires, because people quality . . . matters.

Everyone probably has a different perspective. What’s yours?

Chris Dobyns, CCP, CBP, is Manager of the Office of Human Resource Strategies for one of the largest U.S. intelligence agencies. The Office of Human Resource Strategies is responsible for compensation and incentives, occupational structure, recognition and rewards, HR policy, and human capital program evaluation and assessment for his Agency. Chris has worked in the area of compensation for more than 30 years, and has been employed in various compensation-related positions by a number of large, private sector companies including, Sears, Roebuck, Arizona Public Service and Westinghouse Savannah River Company.

Original image "People Quality Matters" courtesy of Chris Dobyns.

Comments

[Joe Thompson]

Its an interesting comparison between the quality of a new car and a new hire. Many times, we'll spend more considerably more on the latter (and they'll stay with us longer), yet we don't often know if we're getting the quality we want (or need).

I can't help but think, though, that your hiring managers use some version of 'quality' in their assessment process. After all, they take a pile of ostensibly-qualified candidates and winnow the list to something manageable on the basis of quality, right? And from that list of Most-Highly Qualified (a moniker which really isn't about qualifications, but about a hypothesis of quality), the managers then discern (ala Car-nac, pardon the pun!) the highest quality candidate from the lot.

But, perhaps what you're suggesting is that what those hiring managers use as their proxies for quality are perhaps proxies for something else.

If only we had a Consumer Reports Guide to Candidates or a Kelly Blue Book to let us know how much each candidate was worth and what other buyers in my area had recently paid for theirs!

[Chris Dobyns]

Interesting analogue to the KBB, since I recall using something like that with my new (used) car purchase recently. Of course, that accounted for condition, accessories/options, and even the mileage - which were all highly-quantifiable.

The only real certainty with people, is that you can be fairly confident that the odometer hasn't been rolled back (or at least fairly confident . . . at the present time). If only we could roll back those personal odometers quite so easily.

[Boris]

Best to "kick the tires" as they say.

Boris

[E. James (Jim) Brennan]

Self-fulfilling prophecies complicate the metrics. Hiring is heuristic, with the least objectionable candidate inevitably garnering the most approvals from minions and managers and others in any CYA chain. "Taking a chance" on a problematic recruit with known "issues" is a death sentence in all bureaucracies where no error is ever forgotten or forgiven. Especially in The Puzzle Palace, I'm sure, where Doing Wrong is far more noticeable than Doing Right (which is assumed, overlooked or hidden).

Only two suggestions: (1) The best predictors of future behaviors are past behaviors. (2) Track those previewed as Super, OK or Lousy for predictive accuracy.

Kicking the tires today will generally yield a broken toe. Our best motor vehicle got great preview ratings when initially launched. The entire class then received terrible post-purchase reports as used cars, but ours has been absolutely perfect for almost a decade. Anything can happen.

[Jacque Vilet]

I’m convinced that the traditional methods of defining (not defining) quality are pretty worthless. We need to quit focusing on degree type, name of university, college courses on a transcript and grades. And predicting future performance by looking at past performance is questionable at best.

Why not step back and think about the type of actual, practical skills that are needed in a job — skills that actually show a person’s ability to perform? And then figure out how to get an applicant to demonstrate those skills.

Google, among others, has done that. They don’t even care if a candidate has a degree or not --- much less one from MIT or Stanford. They are more interested in what a candidate can do --- not what he/she knows or has done. So they put them through their paces before they hire them by giving them mini-projects that test their skill. It’s not just results they look at but how the candidate achieves those results. In today’s world the how is as important as the what.

Michael Schrage on HBR’s blog calls these projects “projectlications” (project applications) or “applijects” (application projects). The purpose is to see if a candidate can actually produce and work collaboratively with a project team (if teamwork is a critical part of the job).

Yes, yes I know that pulling this off is not easy but it’s better than the current method of selecting “quality” employees. And after all --- since we are unquestionably high quality Compensation pros, we can certainly figure out a way to make this happen.

It’s easy to look at a resume and “assume” quality from where a person has graduated --- but you know what happens when you “assume” . . .

[Chris Dobyns]

I like the idea of the projectications, although you already intimated how the idea may be impractical. I kind of wonder whether a more sophisticated battery of job-related testing and assessments might be an answer also.

Alternately, as the line from a movie goes, and the question asked following a series of bad ideas proposed to solve a particular situation, "Do you have any other bad ideas"? The response to the question of determining employee quality may just be, "This IS the best bad idea that we have".

[Jacque Vilet]

No amount of testing will give you what you want. Testing is just another form of a "grade". I don't think a anything can take the place of watching someone actually apply what he/she has learned either at university or through job experience.

Using mini-projects takes some ingenuity but the results are worth it in my humble opinion.