Bad Hires Research Articles

Civil Rights Liability for Bad Hiring

Civil Rights Liability for Bad Hiring

Can We Identify Bad Cops Based on History? Base Rates of Historical Markers in Law Enforcement Pre-employment Evaluations

While psychometric police selection processes have progressively evolved, the efficacy of simple background information has not been extensively evaluated. This study examined the utility of base rate information to predict job performance among law enforcement officers. Pre-employment historical markers from bad hires were compared to good hires from a large sample of 1536 officers. Of this sample, 205 officers were categorized as bad hires if they were arrested, had greater than five misconduct episodes, or were terminated for cause within 5 years following hire. Base rates of 40 pre-employment history variables were compared for good and bad hires. Analysis of markers showed that bad hires had a significantly higher frequency of markers across family factors, mental health variables, conduct problems, and criminal justice outcomes compared to good hires. Among the largest differences were history of multiple physical altercations, outpatient psychiatric treatment, and events related to previous law enforcement employment such as employer reprimands, suspensions, or fitness for duty evaluations. Many other intuitive markers occurred too infrequently to analyze or showed no significant difference between good hires and bad hires in law enforcement settings. Base rates in addition to psychological test data are necessary aspects of the police pre-employment evaluation.

Determining effective teaching behaviors through the hiring process

Purpose – One bad hiring decision can lead to low student achievement. Research supports that teachers are the most influential factor in student success. As a result, principals’ current practice of hiring teachers based on intuition and likeability must change. Given the current high stakes era, principals need reassurance that the teachers they hire can indeed meet the needs of the students and the goals of the school. The purpose of this paper is to determine which interview protocol questions would predict high levels of effective teaching behaviors exhibited by teachers in the classroom. Design/methodology/approach – A convenience sample of 600 working teachers responded to a 93-item Likert-scale online questionnaire related to the four domains of effective teaching behaviors: classroom management, organizing instruction, implementing instruction, and monitoring progress and potential. The researchers first analyzed the teacher responses to assess their reliability and validity. A regression analysis was then run to indicate which effective teacher domains (the predictor variables); best predicted average student achievement scores (the outcome variable). Regression analysis was used to predict high-quality teachers (i.e. teachers with high average gain scores) given responses to interview questions (predictor variables). Findings – Successful teachers in this study utilized multiple strategies when handling the area of classroom management and organization. In the area of organizing instruction, key elements such as the objective, individual or group activities, and assessments were included in the daily lesson plan. The structure of the lesson delivery and the different learning styles of students were considered when planning a lesson. In this research, teachers utilized various instructional strategies when implementing instruction to challenge all learners, accommodate different learning styles, and to ensure student success. Successful teachers in this study monitored student progress and potential using a variety of methods. Research limitations/implications – The research was conducted in two districts. Future studies could expand on the research using multiple districts in several locations. Data were self-reported by current teachers and cannot be independently verified. Researchers relied on the information provided by teachers and trusted their responses to be accurate. Future studies could include a qualitative piece to determine why monitoring student progress and potential produced a negative result on student performance, classroom management was not significantly related to performance in language arts, and organization for instruction was not significantly related to performance in mathematics. Originality/value – This longitudinal study will provide hiring authorities with research-based protocols that have proven to predict high levels of teaching quality, which research has shown to be single most important determinant of student achievement.

Selecting the Good vs. Rejecting the Bad: Regulatory Focus Effects on Staffing Decision Making

Although staffing decisions are typically conceptualized as motivated by the desire to select the best employees, many managers and human resources practitioners may be more concerned with avoiding bad hires. Regulatory focus theory provides a rich and well-developed framework for understanding how prevention and promotion orientations shape judgments and decisions. This work is the first to examine this theory's implications for understanding staffing, and it illustrates how these fundamental underlying motivations alter the salience of costs and benefits associated with staffing practices, as well as subjective judgments about individual applicants. Regulatory focus is a function of situational factors as well as individual differences, and predominant motivational orientations also vary with business cycles. This model therefore offers broad cross-level explanatory power for understanding dynamic factors influencing staffing, as well as a novel perspective on ways to improve the quality of staffing decision making. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Competitive Pressure and Job Interview Lying: A Game Theoretical Analysis

We consider a job contest in which candidates go through interviews (cheap talk) and are subject to reference checks. We show how competitive pressure - increasing the ratio of good to type applicants - can lead to a vast increase in job interview lying and in some cases make bad hires more likely. Our model provides a range of testable implications relevant for interview and hiring practices. Finally, we illustrate how the model can be applied to various other situations involving persuasion.

Why Do Some Employers Prefer to Interview Matthew, but Not Samir? New Evidence from Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver

In earlier work (Oreopoulos 2009), thousands of resumes were sent in response to online job postings across Toronto to investigate why Canadian immigrants struggle in the labour market. The findings suggested significant discrimination by name ethnicity and city of experience. This follow-up study focuses more on better understanding exactly why this type of discrimination occurs, that is, whether this discrimination can be attributed to underlying concerns about worker productivity or simply prejudice and whether the behaviour is likely conscious or not. We examine callback rates from resumes sent to online job postings across multiple occupations in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Substantial differences in callback rates arise again from simply changing an applicant’s name. Combining all three cities, resumes with English-sounding names are 35 percent more likely to receive callbacks than resumes with Indian or Chinese names. This is remarkably consistent with earlier findings from Oreopoulos (2009) for Toronto in better economic circumstances. If name-based discrimination arises from language and social skill concerns, we should expect to observe less discrimination when 1) including other attributes related to these skills on the resume, such as language proficiency and active extracurricular activities; 2) looking at occupations that depend less on these skills, like computer programming and data entry; and 3) listing a name more likely to be an applicant born in Canada, like a Western European name compared to an Indian or Chinese name. In all three cases, we do not find these patterns. We then asked recruiters to explain why they believed name discrimination occurs in the labour market. Overwhelmingly, they responded that employers often treat a name as a signal that an applicant may lack critical language or social skills for the job, which contradicts the conclusions from our quantitative analysis. Taken together, the contrasting findings are consistent with a model of ‘subconscious’ statistical discrimination, where employers justify name and immigrant discrimination based on language skill concerns, but incorrectly overemphasize these concerns without taking into account offsetting characteristics listed on the resume. Pressure to avoid bad hires exacerbates these effects, as does the need to review resumes quickly. Masking names when deciding who to interview, while considering better ways to discern foreign language ability, may help improve immigrants’ chances for labour market success.

Finding “The Buffy” Talent Acquisition and Retention in Today’s Market

Human Capital is a company’s most valuable asset and market success is directly linked to employee performance. Adopting best practices for recruiting, hiring, and retaining top performers is critical to successful talent acquisition and sustaining bench strength. A recent survey found that a bad hire can cost an organization anywhere from one to five times the employee’s annual salary. Twenty-six percent of survey respondents reported that replacing an employee who doesn’t work out cost their organizations three times annual salary, and another 42 percent said bad hires cost two times annual salary. Hiring managers who do not utilize best practices will statistically experience fifty percent of their hires as underperforming employees. An “Ideal Fit” is a comprehensive high order match of a candidate’s skills, talents, attributes, and abilities equally balanced with style, culture, values, and environment. Objectively grading each aspect of “Fit” is critical to evaluating potential. Utilizing process based on proven best practices gives employers a statistically higher probability of making good hires; building the company’s talent roster and brand; and producing a positive contribution to the company’s “bottom Line” by on-boarding successful contributors. The focus of this paper is to present best practices, show how to implement these practices with real world examples, and expose practices that produce marginal or poor results

Avoiding bad hires: Using emotional intelligence as a selection tool

AbstractHow to avoid bad hiring decisions persists as a human resource challenge. The use of a role‐customized interview panel designed to probe the subjective factor of behavior fit of managerial‐level job candidates is a potential tool for addressing this challenge. This panel model is based on the integration of competency‐based interviewing, behavior event interviewing, and the four dimensions of emotional intelligence. Details of the panel process, as piloted in five organizations, are presented, along with positive indications and cautions regarding the potential utility of such a hiring tool. Preliminary outcome findings collected between 2004 and 2006 suggest this may be a useful recruitment tool. Future areas for research are also identified.

Bad Hiring Chances for Older Workers

It is often claimed that work opportunities decline with age, that hiring chances of older persons are poor. We investigate this by collecting questionnaire responses of personnel managers of German manufacturing firms, eliciting a hypothetical hiring decision based on three fictitious candidates. We rely on an age-neutral job and a small age-gap of 14 years between the youngest and the oldest candidate. The quasi-experimental design of the questionnaire allows to control for possible productivity differences and other economic explanations for declining hiring chances. The data show a 60 percentage point difference in hiring probabilities between the youngest and oldest candidate.

Into the Fire: Boards and Executive Transitions

AbstractManaging the transition an organization undergoes when one chief executive leaves and another is hired is both a defining responsibility and one of the most critical jobs a governing board faces. CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, which consulted to twenty‐eight organizations going through such transitions, found that three characteristic threats to successful transitions for nonprofit boards emerged: (1) boards underestimate the risks and costs of bad hires; (2) boards are typically unprepared for the task; and (3) boards too often focuson the problems in hiring new CEOs and fail to make full use of the opportunities in CEO transitions. This article describes the development of services to help organizations in transition, gives results from the first two years of work, and offers suggestions for support to boards and for future research.

A Football Coach for Bayou Sara

In this case, a recently-hired teacher is arrested for child abuse. Students are asked to review the school district's hiring process, the teacher's job application, and references to determine whether a bad hiring decision might have been avoided had the district used better hiring practices. The case is designed for a class in personnel relations or human resources management. It can also be used in a course on school law.