There are an assortment of techniques to help determine whether a job candidate can perform the tasks, duties and responsibilities that make up their specific core job functions. Tasks, duties and responsibilities should be clearly codified in your collection of job descriptions. There are also contextual activities, beyond performance-related tasks. These are traits like cooperation, a good attitude, altruism, courtesy, a civic nature, or a good work ethic. These contextual activities tend to not be coded into the job description, but perhaps they should. Though many of the contextual activities are voluntary, they describe the qualities that would help a job candidate feel more comfortable working in the position and may minimize the chaos of transition. But take care that job descriptions remain for the most-part task oriented, and reserve judgment on contextual activities for the interview process, as a way to feel-out applicants. The underlying logic to candidate selection is encapsulated in KSAOs – knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics. The more the candidate’s KSAOs overlap job requirements, the better.
A work sample approach where you request examples of work that the candidate completed at past employment is a good way to assess skill and knowledge. Testing can also be a good tool, for example, a candidate for a secretarial position could be asked to generate an example of professional correspondence in a word editing program, or take an online typing test. These are all direct indicators and good predictors of future success. Some jobs require less tangible performance requirements, as with sales and marketing. Tests of cognitive and leadership abilities, peer assessment and employment references are other selection techniques for positions that require more abstract abilities.
How do you select for contextual activities? Currently efforts are more geared towards exclusion than inclusion, for example eliminating potential criminal behaviors like employee pilfering, embezzlement, or even assault. To this end, background and credit checks are very popular tools. Then there is the often-overlooked yet substantial information on ethical behavior that managers can obtain during the interviewing process, by having properly trained interviewers seek examples of how candidates have handled ethical situations in the past, and by having everyone who interviews a candidate share, cross-check, and evaluate the information. People tend to think that everyone shares their baseline level of integrity, so an unethical person will likely NOT lie in the integrity interview process.
The Integrity Interview:
Seek multiple examples of behaviors and ask probing follow-up questions to reveal the thinking behind the behaviors.
Save ethical questions for later in the interview once you have developed rapport.
Empathy does not mean acceptance: when listening to a story about unethical behavior, empathize, don’t react, and be understanding. You’re likely to get a more honest answer if you project empathy.
Ask for two examples of when the candidate had to choose between right and wrong.
Ask them to describe the ethics of their current or previous company and how they felt, personally, about those ethics.
A questionable answer is “I’m not sure.”
Ask for an example of an ethical decision they made, and what factors they considered when reaching the decision.
The only questionable answer is, “I’ve never had to make an ethical decision.”
Ask them their view on stretching the rules at work or exaggerating to customers
Ask the candidate to describe a scenario where they had to go against company guidelines to get things done
Craft your own questions according to your company’s ethical protocol. Make sure to put thought into what answers would be good, and which would be questionable. A good practice is to pose these questions to yourself. None of these answers are black and white, but they can give an indication of the general direction of moral integrity that a potential candidate has.
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