Interviews alone not enough, employers told
Thu, 04/28/2016 - 12:00am
Employers must utilise more systematic and scientific tools when hiring staff to ensure that persons are suited to work in the areas for which they are hired.
That’s the view of Senior Lecturer in Management at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus, Dr. Dion Greenidge, who said this would help to improve the employee selection procedures in the workplace and ultimately productivity in the organisation.
His comments came as he spoke on the topic “Reducing Employee Absence and Enhancing Workplace Productivity”, during a seminar hosted by the Barbados Association of Office Professionals at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre to mark Administrative Professionals’ Day.
“The day of just the interview and then the person gets the job must be a thing of the past… We must start to do our psycho-metric testing, we must look at what are the pre-requisites and the criteria, the job related criteria; what are those core competencies for the job and then we must do testing to ensure that persons who are part of our selection pool have those core selection criteria,” he said.
The management lecturer suggested that where job interviews are conducted, they should be “knowledge-based interviews”, such that the process is objective and simply a way of ascertaining knowledge-based information from a prospective employee. With that in mind, he said another aspect of the process must be a test to determine whether the person would fit into the company’s preferred culture.
He added, “Our HR departments must recognise that as part of our selection procedures, we must consider the environment of the organisation…For example, you can have more than one medical practitioner, one person is good for the ER situation, the next person is good for a family practitioner situation and that comes down to their individual difference. So we have to test to see whether that person fits in with the culture of the organisation.”
He warned that if persons are not a “good fit”, they are likely to become dissatisfied employees, and that can lead to absenteeism. To that end, he maintained that each organisation in Barbados should have a recruitment selection manual. Moreover, he suggested that job analyses should also be conducted on an annual basis, as the workplace is not static and jobs can change.
(JRT)