CASE STUDY: As the president of a growing mid-sized business you are becoming increasingly concerned about your company's ability to recruit the people necessary for your firm to continue to grow and prosper.

Over the past couple of years you have noticed a growing trend that some of the people hired into middle and senior management positions are not meeting performance expectations. This has resulted in some terminations and the costs associated with them. Your larger concern is that the turnover of mid-level and senior personnel is causing various important strategic and tactical initiatives to flounder and significant opportunities are being wasted.

To address the issue you convened a senior management team meeting and reviewed your current recruitment strategy. A number of important improvements in your recruitment process were identified and actions are underway to correct them.

Some of these tactics include:

• Using a more disciplined approach to properly define job parameters and the corresponding skills, education, and experience base needed for each position.
  
• Instituting a more comprehensive review of resumes.
  
• Broadening the number of internal personnel involved in the candidate interviewing process.
  
• Tightening up the recruitment policies to ensure that full reference checks are done on all final round candidates.

• Use a Case Study: Design and implement an opportunity for each final candidate to demonstrate their skills, education, experience, and critical thinking through analyzing a job-appropriate case study.
  
• Use Normative Assessments: There are outstanding normative assessments available that can help to quantify key management capabilities of individual candidates. Some assessments also include important 'emotional intelligence' ratings. Normative instruments can be invaluable, especially if a validation study has been done so the organization knows what the management 'success profile' is for their company.
  
• Use Structured Interviews: There is a great risk in having a broad cross section of managers conduct interviews if the interviews do not follow a common format. Interviews should incorporate specific ratings on various attitudinal attributes of each candidate.
  
• Evaluate Personality Style and Communication Issues: Handwriting analysis or a good ipsative assessment can provide important insights on the personality style and communication issues associated with each candidate. People seldom fail at a job because of skills, education, or experience. The top five reasons are attitudinal and interpersonal in nature, so it is critical to get insights on these issues during the selection process. The assumption in this case is that the performance issues and subsequent terminations are recruitment process related. There could be other issues such as organizational climate, lack of integration support, ineffective leadership, etc. that could be the real source of the problem.