I was thinking about this show the other day for no particular reason and it occurred to me how eerily similar it was to how most companies approach their hiring
process and make a decision on which candidate to hire is the “real deal”.

See if any of this sounds familiar. Your company has an open position or multiple positions to fill. A job description with qualifications is pulled together
with input from the hiring manager, HR and former job descriptions that
produced responses. The job is posted to the web, your site and various job
boards. Your internal recruiters begin to source candidates based on the job
description and qualifications. Candidates begin to respond to your posting and
forward their resumes based on the job description and qualifications. Your
recruiters begin to screen and select a few candidates and present them to the
hiring manager for consideration. The hiring manager and sometimes a panel of
those with hiring authority begin to ask each candidate questions based on the
job description and qualifications to determine which one is the “real deal.” A
decision is made to hire and many times the panel of hiring experts “guesses”
the right one. But often they guess wrong and instead of the whole process
being entertaining, it can often cost a company a good deal in wages, time and
lost opportunities.

So, what can be done to make the process more entertaining and help take the guess work out of the equation? Get rid of the job description and qualifications as the
basis for hiring. The job description that companies use today could very
easily have been written in 1956, in black and white and only distributed on a
few channels.

In a recent article for ERE Daily entitled A Zillion More Reasons to Abolish Job Descriptions Lou Adler suggests the following.

· Except for the list of responsibilities, they don’t define jobs at all; they define people
taking the jobs.

· They’re bogus.

· They’re illegal.

· They aren’t used for internal promotions.

· They eliminate high-potential candidates from consideration.

· They don’t predict on-the-job performance.

· They turn off passive candidates.

· They make diversity hiring more difficult.

· They’re designed to weed out the worst, not attract the best.

· You don’t need them for building a pool of candidates.

· They decrease employee satisfaction and increase turnover.

· They make no sense.

So, why are companies still using job descriptions and qualifications as the basis for their hiring process? When our company begins a Recruitment Project Management engagement we work with the
hiring manager to help determine the actual work that the candidate will be
required to perform, especially in the first 90 days, and what experience and
skills the candidate will need to possess in order to meet or exceed those performance
requirements. As Lou Adler would say, it is about fitting the job to the
candidate, not fitting the candidate to the job.

If you are a business leader, HR leader, or talent acquisition professional consider moving away from using the job description when looking for the best talent. Or, you could just bring
three contestants (candidates) in and have your panel of hiring experts ask
questions and then guess which one of the three is the most qualified
candidate, which one of the three is the “real deal”, which one of the three is
telling the truth. Then see which one stands up.