Dr. Charles Handler, the president and founder of Rocket-Hire wellbutrin sr.com, believes that a successful hiring and retention process should include the following heuristic methods and strategies.
- Determine the traits required to complete the job and measure the degree to which these exist in potential candidates.
- Identify individuals who possess the raw abilities and characteristics required. Note it may take time to identify abilities and characteristics critical to desired outcomes.
- Training and experiences can help to refine raw abilities. When seeking to do something that has not yet been done, training and hands-on learning are key.
- Identify applicants who are creative and possess the proper thinking styles. Ideas are required for continued success.
- Assemble persons with backgrounds in different areas and ask them to function together as a team. New innovations and progress require input from those with vastly different backgrounds.
- Match work styles and cultural values between members of the team. Applications allow organizations to measure, model, and optimize fit when creating and aligning work teams.
This HR screening firm incorporates several of these heuristics into its software and supports clients to administer its adaptive, computer-based interviews automatically via telephone and/or web browser, at the applicants’ convenience.
How they will address the localization issues, especially with regard to language and the culturally biased usages of technology, will be most interesting.
At a minimum all text and audio in the user interface must be translated into Mandarin. Although for positions requiring strong English abilities deploying the interviews, at least partly, in English would be an intelligent screening technique.
As the screening firm is sensitive to cultural differences they are proposing a number of approaches. Fortunately they have something relatively solid on which to architect their solution: the start up project team believes their phone technology will be useful in the rural areas.
I wonder, however, how comfortable a typical mainland Chinese plant applicant will be in providing clear, informative responses to a machine over the telephone. While some businesses, like the mineral water delivery companies (i.e. Laoshan), employ automated telephone menus systems, voice mail is used rarely, if at all, in China. In general the Chinese, therefore, will feel much more comfortable sending an SMS than leaving a voice mail. An automated HR application cannot be implemented in exactly the same way that it would be in the U.S.
The application developers may also need to address differing cultural concepts regarding the cooperative use of language. The philosopher Paul Grice proposed four conversational maxims that arise from the pragmatics of natural language. The Gricean Maxims are a way to explain the link between statements and what is understood from them. The Maxims are based on his cooperative principle. The principle describes how effective communication in conversation is achieved in common social situations and is further broken down into the four Maxims of Quality, Quantity, Relevance and Manner.
The Gricean Maxims are only intended to describe the commonly accepted traits of successful cooperative communication. Due to intercultural differences they cannot be universally applied. In Chinese culture, speakers are more reluctant to share information and disregard the Maxim of Quantity by evading direct questions and replying in incomplete answers due to the risk of losing face by committing oneself to the truth.
Since text based communication among the Chinese is typically brief and often vague, the Chinese frequently prefer face-to-face interaction over email. They are liberal users of non verbal communication, as it allows messages to be communicated while simultaneously allowing one to avoid responding to direct questions and over-committing oneself.
Sometimes the Chinese will also flout the Maxim of Quality too when questioned directly, especially with difficult or sensitive topics. In a former role as a project manager seeking status, I occasionally had engineers tell me that they had completed an assignment or that everything was fine when in reality they faced serious obstacles. In these cases I often encountered something which I call the Three Question Rule (* This is a term I coined to illustrate the reluctance of the Chinese to respond "cooperatively"). Sensing responses of excessive brevity accompanied by uncomfortable postures, I would repeat questions with increasing precision and patience. With each repetition the engineer considered his response with greater care and became increasingly reluctant to respond. By the third or fourth repetition a “yes” either became a highly nuanced “yes” or in most cases a “no.” Only in ceremonies, such as company openings, anniversaries, or elaborate drinking rituals have I found the Chinese to err on the side of verbosity. Although in these situations they too scoff at the Maxims of Quality and Manner.
To compensate for the cultural flouting of these Maxims, the HR screening application will likely need to incorporate a greater degree of query repetition. Acculturation makes one better adept at interpreting the mocking of these Gricean Maxims and the accompanying non-verbal cues. The need to repeat a question loses necessity as the acculturated individual begins to master a new, localized set of cooperative Maxims. Nonetheless until the computer-adaptive screening methods can duplicate the intelligence of an acculturated human resources expert in a face-to-face interview, they will need to rely on query repetition of some kind.
For a foreign firm looking to staff a plant in rural China, the computer-based pre-employment recruitment system has some obvious benefits however. Instead of the conventional resume vetting process which filters candidates based on minimum requirements, a computer-adaptive screening process could rank candidates instantaneously on how well they would contribute to the success of the mission.
In Asia, and especially in China, hiring managers tend to filter candidates based on resumes and then use face-to-face interviews to judge the candidate on more superficial grounds, such as whether they have a nice presence and could one work with him or her. Hiring managers rarely ask challenging questions and seek to hire someone not too dissimilar from themselves. This unfortunately does not facilitate the hiring and retention of creative individuals who possess the ability to generate new ideas and effective thinking styles. An unbiased software application which could effectively measure traits such as creativity and initiative would greatly benefit China-based enterprises. Such a system would not only facilitate a time-efficient recruiting process, but would also better match candidate selection to the mission of the enterprise.
HR screening firms aiming to deploy computer-based interviews in the Asia/Pacific region should also begin looking beyond telephone and web browser delivery. In China, mobile users increasingly outnumber PC users, and 62 percent of all cell phone users regularly receive and reply to messages, or update status and profiles on popular networking sites via mobile phone browsers. Thus leveraging the mobile phone browser prevalence among the Chinese would certainly increase the likelihood of technical adoption.
Recently having learned that foreign owned enterprises operating in China have a serious need for HR and Compensation professionals to establish effective HR strategies, I began to wonder whether these computer-based screening and retention applications could help to fulfill this need.
How could these software tools be used, if at all, to help an HR professional establish an entire HR strategy, including job classifications, retention programs, reward systems, and annual work schemes for production?
Given that Chinese workers are now more selective in types of work and wages, and compensation schemes are mismatched, can these applications assist employers in setting optimal compensation levels?
How can firms leverage these software tools to attract and retain the proper talent for their mission in a tight labor market?
If someone can provide an adequate response to these questions, they may be looking at a potentially large and lucrative new market to serve.
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