Stop Hiring Candidates “You’d Like To Have A Beer With” (And other dinosaur recruiting practices to stop using)

After 25 years as a TA leader, I admit that we use many recruiting practices that are simply silly

I call them “dinosaur recruiting practices” because they are now obsolete and should be extinct. But they aren’t, and they are still commonly used.

For a recruiting practice to reach “dinosaur status,” there can’t be much data or proof that it is a valid practice (meaning that it accurately helps to identify or land the best candidates). One of those dinosaur practices that needs to fade away is giving a hiring preference to candidates “that you would like to have a beer with.”

This screening approach may initially sound okay to some. But actually, it’s a discriminatory fit assessment practice that hurts those who don’t like or drink beer. It should never be used for a job that doesn’t require a likable employee with strong conversational skills.

I have my own example of why this practice is silly. I haven’t found a single accountant in the world with whom I could stand having a beer. But as a recruiter, that doesn’t mean there aren’t many excellent accounting candidates!

Understanding Why Dinosaur Recruiting Practices Must Fade Away

You don’t have to be a recruiting insider to realize that this “have a beer with” screening criteria, along with many other traditional recruiting practices, should have ended long ago. But they haven’t.

So, this article aims to expose the bottom 8 of these dinosaur practices, hoping that public awareness will speed up their demise. Eliminating them is important, not just because they are silly, but also because they hire weak candidates (which hurts teams, managers, companies, and customers). Finally, they simultaneously hurt the careers of many excellent but unsuspecting job applicants.

The “Bottom 8” Most Damaging Dinosaur Recruiting Practices (That You Should Stop Using)

The dinosaur recruiting practices listed below were mostly developed during the 20th century when intuition and tradition dominated HR and recruiting. However, corporate recruiting leaders now have a lot of data covering which recruiting practices work, which don’t, and which do damage. There is no longer any reason today why anyone should still be using any intuitive practice that doesn’t have data to support it. Note: the most widespread and damaging of these 8+ dinosaur practices appear early in my list.

Using unstructured interviews (because they don’t accurately identify the strongest candidates) – Unstructured interviews cause the most damage of all common dinosaur recruiting practices. Most candidates go through several of them. This means that this practice provides multiple opportunities to miss the top candidate. Anyone who has seen data on the predictive accuracy of interviews already knows that they are weak predictors of job success. In fact, interviews fail to select the best candidate most of the time. This is because 91% of factors identifying the top candidate are not even covered during interviews. Their ineffectiveness doesn’t mean that you must stop using interviews. However, it should make you aware that you need to add some features to make your interviews more accurate when selecting the best candidate. You can find a list of the five most impactful interview add-ons here.

If you want a detailed list covering everything wrong with interviews, click here.

Using resumes to select those worthy of an interview (Based on the false assumption that they accurately represent a candidate’s work experience and capabilities) Relying on the accuracy of resumes is the second most damaging dinosaur recruiting practice. This is partly because everyone uses resumes as an initial candidate screening tool. That means that if a candidate’s resume isn’t screened accurately, the system will permanently and unfairly screen out the candidate. I find this heavy reliance on the accuracy of resumes to be quite ironic, given the fact that 64% of us have included lies in our own resumes.

Yet, for some reason, most managers and recruiters treat resumes as accurate representations of the candidate’s experience. And that assumption will hurt honest applicants. Their 100% accurate resumes (with less positive information) will cause them to be screened out when their resumes are compared side to side with the “exaggerated resumes” that often contain at least 20% more positive information (that, unfortunately, isn’t true).

Using resumes to screen out the weakest candidates also damages the candidates who have impressive backgrounds but are simply not good resume writers. We learned years ago at Agilent Technologies that the best-performing new hires were the worst resume writers. That meant the best applicants routinely presented ineffective resumes that omitted powerful information.

One way to improve the accuracy of the information you have about a candidate is by requiring them to fill out an application form. That makes the candidate supply all the necessary information with a declaration signature. But at the very least, you should compare each received resume side-by-side with that candidate’s LinkedIn profile to identify any possible discrepancies. And before you hire a candidate with a near-perfect resume, you need to be cynical and do some more checking.

You can learn more about improving your resume screening by clicking here

Using reference checks to identify problematic finalists – References are among the most damaging of dinosaur practices simply because everyone uses them under the assumption that they will identify a bad candidate. That assumption is a mistake, however, because the benchmark validation study in this area only ranked references at a shocking #11 in their accuracy for identifying weak hires for several reasons. First, there are so many different areas in which references can be checked (personal, job, education, criminal, credit). And, of course, some types of references are more accurate predictors than others (e.g., credit versus personal references). As a result, reference checks often end up containing mixed information. 

Also, my experience with reference checks has proven that almost all reference-checking processes can be fooled somehow. In fact, the Internet is full of sites that are willing to make up a mock company website. So, a shady candidate can have a good reference. References are also frequently inaccurate because most people who check them are junior employees who have barely been trained in reference checking. Next, many references (and especially personal references) are inaccurate. Many of those who provide the reference are untruthful or biased, or they will refuse to answer (because they fear a lawsuit). Finally, if you do global hiring, realize that it is also impossible to accurately check the references of some candidates living and working in less-developed countries. 

You can learn more about what’s wrong with reference checking by clicking here

Assessing a candidate’s organizational fit – This dinosaur practice is also extremely damaging. The fit assessment practice is mostly ubiquitous because it is used for most team jobs. It is also frequently discriminatory because a fit assessment aims to determine whether a candidate will fit in (because they are glaringly different from the current team members). But not hiring candidates that “are different” generally means that you won’t hire as many diverse candidates. 

And that lack of diversity will hurt a team’s results. In addition, many innovators, creative people, and perfectionists don’t fit in with the average teammate. However, not hiring them would be a major error because of their positive differences. Measuring fit is also highly problematic. Because the definition of “good fit” is almost always unclear and varies among interviewers. The approaches used to measure each of the fit factors in the definition of fit are highly subjective.

If you need to know more about what’s wrong with organizational fit assessment, click here.

Using a candidate’s past work experience as a predictor of future work performance – The most common hiring requirement in job postings is that the candidate must have X number of years of work experience. This requirement appears even though it’s an old wives’ tale that “the past is the best predictor of the future.”

A recent HBR article reiterated that work experience doesn’t predict on-the-job success. The benchmark study covering accurate new-hire prediction factors only ranked job experience at number 12. Past work experience in a completely different environment will be an extremely poor predictor of the performance of this company for various reasons.

First, the new company will have different values and policies. And the new job will have a manager and teammates with different capabilities and expectations. Next, some time has probably passed since the actions listed in the candidate’s resume occurred. Today, as a result of changes in the competition and other environmental factors. The candidate would be expected to apply new technologies and solutions.

If you need to know more about why past work isn’t always a good predictor of future work, click here.

Requiring “any college degree” (And assuming that will result in better-performing hires) Today, it is quite common for a company to require “any college degree” in almost every exempt job. And that is a mistake because in the benchmark study in this area, a candidate’s level of education ranked a weak #16 (out of 19) in predicting their future job performance.

Requiring “any college degree” is a mistake. For a college degree to have a real impact on job performance, it must be in a relevant major, and the degree must be recent (so that the knowledge gained will still be up-to-date). The degree must also be from a quality university program. Finally, the candidate must have performed well when they were enrolled. They must now remember most of what they learned. So, if you’re going to require a college degree, make sure it is a recent one in a specific relevant major. And as an alternative to college degrees, it ensures that those hiring more closely assess the candidate’s current skill levels.

If you need to know more about the problems caused by requiring “any college degree,” click here.

Using body language to identify a candidate’s hidden emotions – Conducting body language assessment during interviews is a dumb idea not supported by corporate data. This practice assumes that an untrained interviewer can identify and accurately assess numerous small nonverbal body language clues (i.e., a genuine smile, eye contact, and sitting postures). However, the biggest error occurs when you assume that these body movements accurately reveal the candidate’s real emotions and attitudes. This won’t be noticed because the candidate will attempt to hide them during their verbal answers. 

Unfortunately, body language assessment is often highly discriminatory. Many of these body or facial actions the practice focuses on are highly impacted by the candidate’s culture, national origin, gender, age, sexual orientation, disability, and current energy level. Incidentally, during increasingly common remote video interviews, it will be hard to assess most body movements because of the limitations of most remote cameras. Here is one final example of why these assessments are inaccurate. During an in-person interview, a female candidate’s refusal to shake hands was determined to reflect an arrogant attitude by a body language assessor. In fact, it only reflected the candidate’s religious practices.

If you want to learn more about why you shouldn’t use body language assessment, click here.

Using brainteaser interview questions to assess mental agility – The use of brainteaser questions was made popular years ago by companies like Microsoft. These questions are completely unrelated to the job being filled (which could make them illegal). Instead, they ask the candidate to solve a complicated “mental problem” (like how many golf balls it will take to fill up an airplane) to assess their mental agility. The available data covering these questions prove they don’t predict new-hire success. And because these questions are so unique and confusing, many candidates hate them. Finally, it is difficult for multiple interviewers to assess the answers accurately. Other than the person who asked the question, none of the other interviewers will likely have a clue about whether the provided answer was correct. 

If you need to know more about their validity and why they shouldn’t be used, click here.

Assessing Emotional Intelligence (And using it as a predictor of future job success) – Most companies have no data showing that a high emotional intelligence level is required to do most jobs. In addition, no public corporate data shows that emotional intelligence predicts future success on the job. So, even though this practice has been widely used, the evidence suggests that it shouldn’t be. This practice can also be discriminatory because the responses used to measure EQ are tailored after what is expected from an emotionally stable Western or European professional employee. It’s also important to note that many famous historical innovators could never have been labeled “emotionally intelligent.”

If you need to know more about what’s wrong with assessing emotional intelligence, click here.

Final Thoughts

During most of its existence, recruiting has been mostly intuitive. So, it has been quite common for recruiters and hiring managers to rely on candidate screening practices based on faulty assumptions. However, now that recruiting leaders have access to so much data, we now know which of these historical dinosaur practices don’t work. But more importantly, we can now quantify the damage each can do to our hiring results. So, from my perspective, this new data should cause everyone in recruiting to stop using these “dinosaur recruiting practices.”

Note for the reader
Please help to spread Dr. Sullivan’s ideas by sharing this with your team/network and by posting it on your favorite media.

About Dr John Sullivan

Dr John Sullivan is an internationally known HR thought-leader from the Silicon Valley who specializes in providing bold and high business impact; strategic Talent Management solutions to large corporations.

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