True or False: You're Hiring the Right People

When Macy's West rolled out the Unicru system throughout its stores, the VP of operations thought he'd give it a try by applying for a customer-service position on the retail floor. Within minutes, the program told him that there were no positions available for him. Outraged, the executive called Scarborough and demanded to have the system removed. "He wanted to know how it was possible that he wasn't qualified to be a clerk in his own store," recalls Gregg. Adds Scarborough: "The thing is, with the kind of money that he'd been making as an executive all those years, and with the job experience that he had, he wouldn't last a day on the floor. He would quit in an instant out of sheer boredom or frustration." A little sheepishly, the Macy's exec admitted that this was true -- and he noted the value of distinguishing between being capable of doing a job and being well matched for one.

3. There is no such thing as a good or bad employee -- just a good or bad fit.

The key, then, is to match skills with interests.

For example, a front-desk employee could be terrible at her job -- being gruff with customers, barking orders at coworkers -- but might not be motivated to leave the position. As a result, she might stay for years and continue to cause problems for both customers and the staff.

Traditionally, such an employee would be considered bad for the company, and management would fire her or encourage her to leave on her own. Scarborough suggests a different approach. "You have to ask why this woman is behaving this way," he says. "Maybe she's scared of strangers, and that's why she's unfriendly to customers. That doesn't mean that she's a bad employee. It means that she's a bad customer-service agent. Give her a different job."

With the Unicru system, such an employee would be asked to answer a number of true-or-false questions in order to determine her suitability for a position in customer service. ("You are good at understanding how people feel." "You spend your spare time by yourself.") If the employee's responses reveal a poor fit, a red light on the application flags the problem for her manager. "But have that same woman answer some different questions," Scarborough says. "Is she organized? Does she enjoy working on her own? Does she like the product that is sold by the company that she's applying to? If those are all true, then put her in the stockroom. That same terrible front-desk employee could be the best stockroom manager the company ever saw."

4. Always save your data.

According to Scarborough, the single most important element in Unicru's success at speeding up the hiring process and predicting employee longevity is the company's efficiency at capturing data -- resulting in a very large sample size. Any company can build a substantial sample of its own if its staff remembers to store and save employee data from the hiring, review, and exit-interview processes.

Laurie Saylor, director of employee relations and staffing at the Sports Authority, estimates that the automation of her company's application process has saved hundreds of employee hours in clerical work. "We receive approximately 100,000 applications per year through the Unicru system, which allows applicants to complete the tests on their own," she says. "Without the system, our managers would be required to spend approximately 35 to 40 minutes with each applicant to administer the application prior to interviewing." The Unicru system weeds out unqualified applicants -- saving the Sports Authority nearly 20,000 hours of extra interviewing and data-entry time each year.

Once the Unicru system collects and saves the data, the program then hunts for patterns and correlating factors among the responses -- what Scarborough calls "criterion validation" -- to provide clients with statistically significant predictions on which applicants would be good for which jobs. For instance, according to Unicru's analysis, the old belief that only gregarious extroverts make good salespeople simply isn't true. On the contrary, Scarborough says, "even very quiet people can be successful in sales positions. We've found a higher correlation between passion for a product or business and sales success than we have between being outgoing and being a good salesperson. It makes sense, doesn't it? A love for what you're selling will do so much more than just talking a lot."

5. Use interviews to probe, not to screen.

After you've automated phase one of the application process, adding automated parameters for the first-level screening of applicants isn't that difficult. For example, if you know that people who can't work weekends won't be accepted for a job, simply have the system screen for scheduling conflicts. This way, rather than serving as an extensive, time-consuming first-look screening effort, the interview becomes a forum for discussing substantive issues that may have an impact on job performance.