Objective and specific selection criteria underpin a better workplace (especially for women)
Most employers’ efforts to build a successful organisation stumble at the first hurdle – their recruitment process sucks is inadequate.
Recruitment agencies are Exhibit A for the prosecution.
Having worked with hundreds of recruitment agency owners and leaders throughout my 21 years in coaching and training, I’ve observed only a small minority that have established a robust and consistent process for recruiting their employees. Unsurprisingly their success rate in recruiting and retention is no better than the toss of a coin.
Only last week, a recruitment agency owner sent me a position description for an entry-level recruitment consultant role lacking specific and objective key selection criteria.
General and subjective key selection criteria lead to general and subjective interview questions which produce general and subjective answers.
These answers do not help the interviewer accurately assess the candidate’s suitability, so the interviewer falls back on personal and organisational bias (both unconscious and conscious) and what they can infer from general and subjective answers, primarily whether the candidate sounds intelligent enough to do the job, appears confident, and is likeable.
Sounding intelligent enough, confidence, and likeability are flimsy criteria from which to make a hiring decision for most jobs, let alone one as challenging as agency recruitment. You are much more likely to hire an extrovert, a man, or a narcissist if you fail to have objective and specific key selection criteria.
The absence of objectivity in hiring remains a problem evidenced by a recent large-scale survey in the world’s largest recruitment market; the United States.
In Women in the Workplace (WITW), the largest study on the state of women in corporate America was launched in 2015 and is run by LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company each year. More than 1,000 companies and over 480,000 people have participated in surveys.
In 2024, information was collected from 281 participating organisations employing over 10 million people. More than 15,000 employees were surveyed, as well as one-on-one-interviews were conducted with people of diverse identities to better understand their workplace experience.
The best news was that women now occupy 29% of C-suite positions in 2024, up substantially from 17% in 2015.
However, there was more sobering news elsewhere in the WITW survey concerning recruitment and promotion for women.
- Women hold 59% of bachelor’s degrees and represent 51% of the population yet only occupy 49% of entry-level roles
- For every 100 men promoted to manager in 2024, 81 women were similarly promoted. In 2018 the figure for women was 79.
Even more concerning was, what appears to be, a growing resentment among men about women’s progress (as modest as it has been) in American workplaces as evidenced by the WITW survey reporting:
- Men are 2x as likely to say their gender will hurt their chances to advance as they were in 2016.
- Younger men are the least committed to gender diversity—younger women are the most.
I have no equivalent Australian data to compare; however, the result of the U.S. Presidential election earlier this month should provide some sense of the scale of the attitude problem both these WITW survey results point to with preliminary exit polling showing that 56 percent of men ages 18-29 voted for Trump, up 15 points from 2020.
This rather dramatic rightward shift among young American men and the accompanying ‘DEI backlash’ suggests that greater progress for women in American workplaces is problematic at best and under direct threat, at worst.
Although objectivity in hiring doesn’t guarantee women will receive a fair go during a recruitment process, objective selection criteria are an important guardrail that increases the likelihood of women receiving a fair go.
In the WITW section about hiring practises only 76% of companies said they have ‘developed clear evaluation criteria before candidates are considered’; this was only a 4-point improvement from 2018.
What remains unknown is how effectively clear evaluation criteria are applied during a hiring process and whether employers consistently and objectively review how effectively hiring processes are applied by all their hiring managers.
Why is objectivity, especially as it relates to women, important?
Apart from the moral importance of giving all applicants a fair go during a recruitment process a rapidly ageing population means lifting women’s participation in the labour market is critical, as is evidenced by the latest employment data.
Female labour market participation in Australia is currently 63.1% (male participation is 71.3%), just 0.1% below its record high. The equivalent figures in the United States are 57.6% and 67.8%.
The gap between female and male participation is 8.2 points in Australia and 10.1 points in the United States. It may not sound like much, but in a labour market of 168 million people, that nearly two-point difference represents millions of American women.
Objective and specific selection criteria can do a lot of heavy lifting in improving workplace quality – please use it and advocate for it.
Related blogs
What 1950s corporate Australia offered ‘girls’ who wanted to work
What recruiters need to know about the WGEA pay gap data
Is your candidate just very confident or really a charismatic narcissist?