Best Practices in the Hiring Process

So for today's episode, we're going to do things a little bit differently. We don't have an additional guest joining us today. What we're going to do is look at a specific question that a client recently asked Mike. It is all about some best practices that they could incorporate in their hiring practices. And it led to an interesting conversation about, validity and adverse impact.

And so today what I'm going to do is present Mike with a scenario very similar to what our client offered to him earlier. And just have a conversation around that. Does that sound good, Mike?

Let's just say Acme County has reached out, and they want to hire, or they are hiring for Dispatcher I positions. Now here's some background. Each department in the county determines their own requirements for the Dispatcher I position. All departments are using a pre employment skills test. And after a phone interview, selected candidates take the pre employment test. It's only the highest scoring candidates that are selected for an in person interview.

Acme County has reached out to us and they're concerned that their hiring practices, including the pre employment skills tests, are resulting in adverse impact towards protected groups. Mike, how would you help a client like this?

Presumably they're slightly different from location to location and so one of the things that you always want to be concerned with if you're an employer is the optics in terms of how do things look and feel to the applicant. And in the case of a county or a private organization, often the applicants are constituents or customers.

And you want to be a good citizen in your environment and you want to be doing things that feel good and fair and righteous in terms of their eyes so that you don't, sully your own reputation. And if the Dispatcher I position is different in each of those organizations, it might be better to title them slightly differently. For instance, it could be Dispatcher One Fire, Dispatcher One Police, Dispatcher One EMS, or however they're dividing things up.

And that way you get a little bit of disparity from one title to the next. And I think the reason that I mentioned that is that you have job applicants who are going to talk to one another. And if you apply for a position over here and you're tested or you're minimally tested and you apply for another one over here and you're maximally tested, they really wear you out. That's going to feel weird if they're all titled the same thing.

The same job title within different departments could vary and it could be justifiable to have different recruitment processes. It probably is justifiable to have different recruitment processes for each position. But again, in terms of optics, it might be something to differentiate between the Dispatcher I position at each of those locations. So that's definitely one thing to look out for.

Another thing to look out for, and this comes up very often in these kinds of conversations, is within the recruitment. Let's say your recruitment process is different in each of those three or four departments but your recruitment process within that one particular recruitment at one department, it's got to be the same. You can't do different things for different applicants within the same recruitment. So you want to be really consistent in that regard.

What would be the work schedule, the work environment, what personal characteristics are required in order to perform the job. So it's really all of the technical aspects that have to do with any particular position would be fleshed out in a job analysis and job analyses are really time consuming, challenging tasks to perform. And while everybody's supposed to have current job analyses, they very often don't, and it becomes one of those eating the elephant situations.

How do I do, job analyses when I have 500 different positions within my county or my organization or company or whatever? And so the answer for that is, you basically just do it one bite at a time. It's best in my recommendation, it's best to start with the positions that are most often recruited for, or the positions that are most often hired and then reallocated within the organization.

So you have these entry level positions that people come into and then rather than posting a job externally, they posted internally and then they move people around within their organization. So those would be the ones to start with. And then you keep going, doing the next most high volume positions and until you get all the way through the process. And then it's painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Once you get done, they're really old in three years or when the position fundamentally changes.

And so you really need to go back and do them again. But you can use the existing job analyses for the redo, which can make the process a lot easier. So job analysis is super important in this particular practice and some things that come from the job analysis are the job description and the job description would be a formal paragraph or several paragraphs that talk about what this person does in this position.

And then from the job description, would be distilled, typically a job posting, which would be the text that's put into an ad or a posting online that talks about the job title that's gonna be opening up, some basic requirements, minimal requirements, some desirable qualifications, and then that little summary of the job description. So those, they're a very important part of the selection process.

As we consider this process that Acme County has for hiring Dispatcher I, where are the tests in this process? What are the tests?

And he was at a conference where there were about 500 HR practitioners and the head of the DOJ asked all of the attendees to raise their hands if they agreed that an interview was a test. And it was half or less that raised their hand. And the fact of the matter is an interview is a test. There are a variety of things called PPTs.

Those are practices, procedures, and tests that occur throughout the recruitment process in which decision making factors are considered in this employment selection process. An interview absolutely positively is one. People sit down, they talk to another human being or a team of people and they're rated on their responses and some people are moved forward and some people aren't moved forward. And that is part of the selection process and therefore an interview is a test.

But there's other things that are PPTs that also act like tests. For instance, we talked earlier when you brought up the job analysis, one of the derivatives of the job analysis is the job posting and the job posting talks about, hey, here's what you perform on the job.

And if the job posting and its minimum requirements are not valid, that is, they're not matched exactly to that particular position, then anyone who's reading the job posting may actually deselect themselves from the process based upon the information that they've been provided.

And if the information that's provided is incorrect, then you could have just created adverse impact in the very first step of your recruitment process by not making an accurate job posting and especially accurate minimum qualifications. So that's a test too. And every little intermediate step along the way that either allows certain people to continue or doesn't allow people to continue or rank orders people or weights their scores.

Any of those aspects of the recruitment process that make those kinds of decisions are also tests and should be scrutinized in the same way that people and we scrutinize our own tests.

Typically known as an applicant tracking system- an ATS. And the ATS will actually do analysis at each of these steps to let them know where they may potentially have problems so they can dig into it and they can see whether or not there's some adjustments that need to be made. Now every time there's adverse impact against a protected group, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to do something different.

There are instances where adverse impact occurs and that adverse impact is simply a part of the process, the part of living in a real world. And we can talk a little bit later about that as well. But you always want to stop and you want to look and you want to ask ," Okay. Is there adverse impact? Why is that adverse impact occurring? What could we do differently to avoid that adverse impact?" Those kinds of things are questions that you ask.

And let me throw out an example because it's a big thing to wrap your head around. There's a lot of things we're talking about right here. But the classic example is in a job that requires physical ability. Let's say, for instance, there's a person who has to load concrete bags onto a pallet so that it can get shrink wrapped and loaded into a truck and shipped away. So there's a conveyor belt that brings out these, these bags.

And so what you might do in terms of a physical ability test to hire somebody into that position is you might have a conveyor belt. You might have this person grabbing the bags. You tell them how you want them stacked. And you see how many bags they can stack in 5 minutes. Or can they stack the number of bags that come out in a 5 minute period at the same rate that would come out later on the conveyor belt on the job itself.

Now, let's say, for instance, that this particular test is using 60 pound bags. And so HR calls over to the plant and says, "Hey, we're getting ready to do this physical ability test. I want to make sure that. We're still using 60 pound bags in the plant." And the supervisor says, "Oh no, I'm so glad you called. Remember when the risk analysis people said we're going to have far fewer incidents of injury if we use 40 pound bags instead. So we switched over to 40 pound bags.

It's we just dodged a bullet because we would have been testing at a level that is much higher than is required on the job." And that a physical ability test is going to almost always result in adverse impact against women. Generally speaking, men are stronger than women, and so there will be a disparity in between the passing rates for men and the passing rates for women for a physical job, especially one that's really demanding.

And so, there's baked in adverse impact that comes with that kind of position, but by measuring using the wrong size bag of concrete, you're actually creating additional adverse impact that otherwise would not have occurred. And that is an instance that is impossible to defend. You cannot defend that.

You can defend the adverse impact that occurs between natural differences in physical strength between men and women, but you cannot defend against the adverse impact that occurs because you ask them to do more than the job requires.

It's very hard to find a testing process that's more valid or equally valid to actually simulating the job than simulating the job. And as an employer, if I'm hiring people to load pallets, to shrink wrap that material and get it onto a truck because I'm selling concrete, I have the ability to make sure that the pallet loader can load pallets, right? That's just a fundamental thing. So whether or not there's adverse impact- it isn't important.

What matters is that the selection process, the test in this case, is it valid and consistent with business necessity? If it is, then you are justified in having some adverse impact that enters into the process.

Is there a set of key laws or guidelines that govern pre employment testing?

But it was put together by a really large committee of practitioners who operate in this space, and it covers things like job analysis, job descriptions, test validation, also sorts of different kinds, and it really sets forth the practices and principles that are the best practices for doing these things. Now, I don't know that it was ever codified into law. But the courts have relied on it again and again.

And the DOJ, Department of Justice, the OFCCP, the EEOC, all these different governing bodies, including other state bodies, have relied upon it as the standards for doing things correctly. And so it comes up very often in legal trials and adjudications like by labor boards and those kinds of things that comes up very often. So it's a very important document. Another thing that's really important is the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act.

And we won't really get into that here, because it gets into a whole other area of essential functions and those kinds of things. But, yeah, in terms of, dealing with this issue, the Uniform Guidelines is really probably the main body of literature by which everything should be measured in terms of doing things correctly. And that's what we do as well. In fact, in our software and the TestGenius software, CritiCall and OPAC,

we use a validation wizard, which is based upon section 14c and 15c of the Uniform Guidelines. Section 14c is the section that deals with content validation. It's the steps that you need to go through in order to properly content validate a test, and that's how you determine whether or not it's valid and consistent with the business necessity. As well, 15c is the reporting section for the same.

So it talks about what are the things that need to be outputted in a report that will properly document that this validation has taken place. And so in our validation wizard, we're running people through a process.

In this case, we would run subject matter experts, who are performing well on the job for a year or longer or supervisors of those people are trainers of those people who are abundantly familiar with the position, we're going to run them through each of the tests that employer would purport to measure.

And then, at the end of each test will be a survey that will ask them questions about the job relatedness of that test and that the very end of each test that would say, "Jenny Arnez, your score on this test was 96 but given your position and your knowledge of this job what, in your opinion, would be a minimum qualifying score for somebody who's entering into this position the first time?" So you would say, "Hey, I've been doing this for 20 years, and I'm an uber expert.

So 96, it's really good for me but because I directly just felt the difficulty of that test and I'm knowledgeable about how well skilled enabled someone should be coming into this position, I would say that if somebody scored 83 or better on this test, then I would consider them to be eligible to move on from the applicant to the candidate role." And so the wizard will take in all of the subject matter experts opinions, including yours and the suggestions for the cutoff scores.

And it will create a validation report that says of this test battery, let's say it had six tests in there, for this test battery you should only use these five tests because one of them was determined to be not valid for this position. Maybe it was more difficult than the position like the 60 pound bag of concrete instead of the 40 pound bag of concrete. And so for that reason, it gets thrown out. As well, here's four different defensible job related cutoff scores that you could use.

Your average of your suggested cutoff scores, and then that minus one, two, and three standard error of measurement, which is a statistical step downward that one might use to create different significant layers below the high cutoff. If you don't want to use, let's say 86 was the first one, minus one SEM might bring you down to 81. So let's say we didn't have enough people to interview. We wanna step down to the next appropriate layer.

We might use the cutoff minus one SEM, which would be 81, and that gives us five people to interview or maybe minus, minus two SEM and it brings this down to 76. And that might be 10 people to move on to the next step, that, that sort of thing.

You have the job and it's represented by these duties that are performed and the bridge is supported in the middle by this peer. And that is the KSAs. KSA stands for knowledge, skills and abilities. So if you look at this process the test requires certain knowledge, skills and abilities. The job duties require certain knowledge, skills and abilities.

And so what we're doing is we're connecting the test on one side of the river to the job on the other side of the river, and the linkage is the knowledge, skills and abilities.

If we look at the test selection wizard, I don't think we have an image for it, but basically what we're doing on the test selection wizard is we're listing duties that might be performed on the job, and so a person is going to go through, and they're going to check off duties that are performed by the position that's being recruited.

And as they go through, and they check off those duties that have linkages to KSA's- knowledge, skills and abilities- which are linked to specific tests within our system. And so, you check off 10 duties, and that might create a list of eight or nine tests that we may suggest that they use for selection purposes for this particular position. And so that's the test selection wizard.

The next step that one would go to in order to determine whether or not the test battery in this case, a battery of individual tests, is valid and consistent with business necessity is to go through the next part, which is the validation wizard. And in that case, we recommend 7 to 10 subject matter experts, and again, those will be the incumbents that I described earlier.

People who have been successfully performing on the job one year or longer or supervisors at that position or trainers for that position, but people that are abundantly familiar with that job. And you want to go through and you want to cherry pick really high performers, but you also want to get a demographic mix that matches that of your existing workforce and particularly of your recruitment area. But the idea here is that these people are going to go through those tests.

They're going to take those tests with that wizard turned on, and the wizard is going to ask them survey questions, cut off score suggestions, and it's going to result in a validation report that might be 30 or more pages long that's going to have a table at the end. It says, here's the test you validated and each of these marked yes, are ones that you should use on your particular recruitment or could use in your recruitment as well here's the defensible job related cutoff scores.

So that's those two wizards, how they work, step one, step two. And then step three is your recruitment itself. So you take the validated test and you actually employ it for use for selection with your job applicants.

They're doing short bursts of texts, but they need to be able to type relatively quickly and they need to be able to type accurately. So typing with speed and accuracy is an important attribute for that job. The fastest speed that they may need to type might be 35 words a minute, right? So the question becomes, does that mean that somebody who types 70 words per minute is twice as good as somebody who types 35 words per minute?

And in this case, the answer is no. You really only need to do what you need to do and going faster than you need to go isn't necessarily a benefit. And so that would be a good example of a test, the results of which are not performance differentiating. And so what we would do is we would look at everybody from 35 words per minute and above as being equally suitable for the job. So there wouldn't be any rank ordering at all.

And that is really just one of the main reasons why setting the cutoffs is so important. If you have a defensible job related cutoff score then what it does is, let's say you just chose the person who could type 70 words per minute and you hired them. You've ignored all these other attributes of a human being that may or may not make them a good employee. Sure, they can type, but that is not the entirety of any job.

And so by choosing too high, you may have ignored applicants who were equally qualified in terms of keyboarding, but had so many other things that they could apply to this work area. And so that's a really important aspect to keep in mind. Now there are some that people will go through and say, "Yes, this is performance differentiating because, people who do scope score higher on whatever knowledge, skill or ability it is, they may be the best and everybody who's less than them is less good."

But again, that's just one of the many reasons why you make a selection decision. And so again, cutoff scores are really important.

And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. Ready to revolutionize your HR strategies? Head over to TestGenius. com to discover our latest tools and solutions designed to streamline your hiring processes. So I'm going to flip back real quickly add our scenario back on here. Just so we can summarize where we've what we've touched on Acme County. They're concerned about adverse impact.

So the first step really is they need to remember that the testing process or testing happens throughout the whole selection process,

throughout their whole selection plan. And so they have to pull back the lens, not just focus on the pre employment skills test, but also to look at their job posting, their interview practices, and so on. All the other tests as well.

It's our strong recommendation that they do it because of two things. We think about the recruitment process. Think of about it as a coin with two sides. Okay, on one side, you have defensibility. So in the instance where somebody questions the hiring practice, is that hiring practice defensible? Or if you go to your applicant tracking system and you find that your physical ability test had adverse impact. Is that defensible in that particular case?

So being able to answer some sort of challenge to the recruitment process is really important. But when you flip that coin over and you look at the other side from the utility side, or sorry, the defensibility side, utility. And utility talks about how does this test select people who are going to go on to be really good employees on the job?

And the beautiful thing about this, and this is the beauty that comes with the brilliance of the Uniform Guidelines, is because people who were really experienced in the practices that can both have and result in a safe recruitment and hire people who do really well on the job are contributing to this framework that we follow here.

And so that's why it's really important to go through and do the required work or to do the recommended work in order to be able to end up with a testing process that's valid and consistent with business necessity and cut off scores that are defensible and job related. So that's as far as we can say about that.

If somebody decides that they're not going to go through the validation, that's their choice, but they've taken on that burden themselves in case the hiring practice is challenged, for instance. If it's challenged, then you know they don't have a leg to stand on in terms of the defensibility, if they go retroactively and do the validation process and the validation report shows that the test isn't valid and consistent with business necessity or that they use cut off scores that were too high.

So people are taking that risk upon themselves by skipping that part of the process.

Now, the difference, or sorry, the the caveat for both of those scenarios would be unless the job fundamentally changes. There's been a just a ton of technology that's come into the dispatch world, for instance, which is to follow our scenario here. People can text videos and images.

Let's say somebody gives you a license plate number and you type that into the computer aided dispatch system and they also send you a photograph of a scene and the photograph has the license plate on there and you can clearly see that the person reported the wrong license plate number. So you have to be able to discern the difference between the two. You have to be able to decide which of those has the right data and then you have to be able to update it into the system.

Because if you're talking about putting out a BOLO looking for somebody with this license plate and you use the wrong license plate number, you know that's really CritiCall. So that would be a good example of a fundamental change that happened at a dispatch center that might require you to go back and look at the versions of these tests that you're using.

Maybe before you were using text only versions, now you want to use versions that have photographs, images and questions about those images in there.

And criterion validity is when you have some sort of aspect of job performance on the axis over on the left hand side, and then you plot that against test scores along the bottom access there. So each of these data points would be some sort of measured metric of job performance.

Maybe it's supervisor ratings or could be feedback from surveys or, like tardiness or, all sorts of different things, but each of those data points would be the intersection between how that particular aspect of job performance was and what the test score was. So down in the bottom left, you can see there's two points down there. So that's people who had very rare, relatively low job performance, and they also scored relatively low on the test. And then over at the top you have one blue dot.

That's the hot, the highest scorer who also does very well on the job. And that black line is a trend line that shows, how did those work together. So in this case, it's what you would hope for from a test. The lower scorers have lower job performance. The higher scorers have higher job performance. So this kind of study would be taken with existing incumbent employees. And that would be one way to do it.

Or you could test it against job applicants and then wait A year and measure how well they were doing on the job and then go back and correlate it later. That's a hard thing to do because people don't like to do all that work and wait a year for the results. So it's usually done called a concurrent study that's done with incumbent employees, in which case, you can get the results at that particular point in time.

But what you end up knowing is that people who score higher on the job are going to have a greater degree of job performance. And so you can be very confident finding what your cutoff score is and then interviewing those that are north of the cutoff score. And you can feel very confident that those people are going to be good performers on the job, at least in terms of this particular aspect of job performance.

Now with the content validated skill and ability testing, you don't necessarily find that. Again, to go back to the person who types 35 words a minute versus the person who types 70 words a minute, that 70 scorer isn't not going to be twice the performer that the 35 per minute scorer is going to be. In many cases, what we're looking for is, do you reach or exceed a threshold? And that's really all that we want to know. And that's where you're, content validation approach comes into play.

But in many instances, you can go on and do a criterion validation study that can be very helpful as well.

Personality tests are always criterion validated. So basically you're looking at what are the personal aspects of a human being that would contribute to high performers on the job and what are the personal aspects of, human beings that contribute to lower performers on the job. And so when you're testing for personality, you're going to look for those aspects of personality that match with the higher performers. And so criterion validation is the only way to go.

We we re able to do a criterion validation study with several different agencies who are contributing data to it and then come up with a chart like this one right here for a variety of different tests. And then back to the Uniform Guidelines once again, the Uniform Guidelines in Section 7b talks about how you can transport criterion validity.

And so what that means is that for criterion validation, they will allow you to transport a validation study from one organization to your organization as long as you can establish that the the job performance dimensions or domains that were measured in that original study are very similar to those that exist within your organization. And so it's a very simple survey. You get in the room with 12 people, you go through those job performance areas, and then they rate it on a scale of one to five.

One means it doesn't match my environment. Five means it's exactly like my environment, and then all the numbers in between. And so if you get 12 people to agree that, it's 52 and a half or better, roughly three, a rating of three or better than you're going to be able to transport that validation study over to your own environment. And then you can just attach your transport ability sheets to that validation study, and you can literally claim it as your own. It's a golden ticket kind of thing.

And I'm really glad that you asked about this because this hits on a point that we didn't talk about it all. One of the main reasons that why we have a validation wizard for content validity is that you cannot transport content validity from one organization to another. You can't do it. Employers are responsible for establishing the validity of specific tests within specific job titles at their organization. And that's the difference.

That's why we can't do a universal criterion validation study, because even if you go with administrative assistant, what does that mean? If you go to a hundred different organizations likely going to be 100 different jobs with 100 different requirements. And so you can't really do that for that particular role. But that's okay. Because what we've done is we've given you the tools that allow you to do it in a matter of a couple hours.

And now you have a validation report that says, for Acme County for the position of Dispatcher I, we've given you to here's our validation report, and it goes page after page, and it gives them, really a blessing to go through and use that test. You go to another county, and they want to go ahead and start testing, they might ask, hey, ACME, send me over the list of tests you're using.

ACME might share those tests with them, but it doesn't mean that they're valid and consistent with business necessity, nor that the cutoff scores are job related and defensible. So that's why you go through the process because, go back to the coin, it's defensible on one side and has a high degree of utility on the other side.

That were measured in the original validation study, and at the top, you have SME1, SME2, SME as subject matter expert through SME12, and then on the far right is the rating scale, where 1 is that it doesn't match, and 5 is that it does, and so basically, with the help of a leader, you go through and you just number the people and you say, number one, five, number two, five, number three, four, number four, five. And you just put the numbers in there.

And then when you get done, it does a calculation down at the bottom. And I don't know if you have that here, if this is just an image, but it will just validate that all 12 have filled it in and that the numbers are high enough. Yeah, there it is down there. So it's all red now down in the bottom where the orange box is. When you fill this out, it'll turn to green, and then if it's valid, then that little red box at the very bottom will turn to green, and that's it.

You print that out, attach it to the validation report again, and you can now claim that validation report as your own. On the content validation side, you get your own validation report. So every validation that you do using the wizard is a custom validation for content validity for a specific position at a specific location for use by those people alone.

I've also heard you mentioned face validity, right?

And so that right hand door ran into you, but it feels like a force. And face validity is similar to that. Face validity talks about it. How does the test feel to the applicant? Does it feel like a good experience? And that's another reason why work sample tests are very important. If you use work sample tests, you're presenting information to people, asking them to do things that are similar to things that would be done on the job.

But we're doing it in a way where we don't require in prior job knowledge. So we're asking them generic things, not things that they would need to know about this particular organization. Like, how do you use Excel in Acme County, for instance? That's something that would be trained and we call it WT and LBO- would train or learned in a brief orientation. And so you don't want to test on those aspects.

But we test things in a generic format that we can expect anybody with experience with that particular Excel, for instance, in this case, to be able to know. And then we translate that to how well they did. And then then it's validated for the particular job. So that's how we do that for that part. And actually we talked about face validity.

So if a test feels like a job and I fail the test, I get a feeling that I probably wouldn't have done a good job on that job, and I don't feel really bad about that. Our personality test for dispatchers was created with dispatch types of items, and so it feels very much like it's asking you questions that if you were a dispatcher. A lot of standardized personality tests have questions like, do you enjoy long, quiet strolls on a beach by yourself? Do you enjoy being in a loud movie theater?

And so it, those things are not very face valid. They don't make you feel like you just asked me something that has any applicability to the job. And so face validity really is not important in terms of a test being valid, but it goes back to the optics thing that we talked about at the begin with to begin with, we now in the world realm of social media, everybody's got a voice.

And if I go and I test for a job at Acme company, and it's asking me about whether I prefer hot dogs or hamburgers, I'm going to talk about that. It's oh, when you take that test, it's going to be stupid, now all of a sudden you're branded as, the people with the stupid test. And so those are the reasons why you want to know about face validity. And that's another thing that you can really capture, not directly with our validation wizard.

But you've got a group of people and it's asking them questions like, is the, here's the knowledge, skill or ability that's being measured. Does it feel similar enough to the way that the knowledge, skill or ability is in use on this particular job? So you do end up getting, that litmus test as to whether or not there was a face validity or not. And that can be very helpful just in terms of your reputation.

In fact, you know what happens with the CritiCall test is people like me who are not multitaskers will typically get up and walk away from the test rather than getting hired and get up and getting up and walking away from the job after. Somebody spent 60 or $70, 000 to train them. So it's a very useful attribute of the testing process to make people like you and me uncomfortable and let the real multitaskers get the job.

And then also we have tests that have been criterion validated as well.

But what it does is it requires that somebody has a degree of EQ to be able to empathize to the person that they would be talking to so that they can understand how that they were feeling. And in many jobs, it's a really important aspect, particularly if it's front facing or, interacting with members of the public is just a really important thing. And that, and that brings up did we bring up the image with the the test? The person the testing, the,

So basically, when you're testing, that would be your job applicant over to the left there. And so as you add tests to your test battery or things that you're talking about in an interview, you're going to get little tiny slivers of job performance from each one. And so by having a multifaceted testing strategy, you actually continue on through this battery, and it might not all be TestGenius. It might be personality testing. It might be the Logi-Serve situational judgment testing.

It might be the interview. It might be all sorts of other aspects, training and experience. But each one of these things is going to contribute to the picture of how job ready this person is. And as you continue on going through this recruitment process, you're going to learn more and more about them.

And if you pause for just a second right here, what you want to really remember about this, is that you want to get as many different pieces of the pie as possible, but it's equally important to make sure that you're measuring it in the right way. For instance, audio comprehension. You could call something audio comprehension, but it's not, if it's not valid and consistent with business necessity, it's not going to give you the results that you would expect.

So that's just to something, something to consider and you can go ahead and fill it out. You're never going to, you're never going to know everything that you need to know about a person, but you get to a point where, you've measured all that you can measure. And what it does is it helps to mitigate the risk.

I know 80 percent of what I can know about this person from having spent time with them, talking to them reading their, job application, their experiences, testing them, looking at those results. So my, my risk is very low in terms of what I don't know about them. And, so you can make a hiring decision with a greater degree of confidence when you have a testing strategy that fits very well with the particular situation.

And then you administer and you have a really good, holistic recruitment strategy if you follow this process here.

That is going to hit the ground running that has the requisite skills and abilities necessary that can be trained up quickly, and then it's going to fit with that organization and fit is something that maybe, maybe only a human being in an interview can determine. So you want to make sure whoever you're interviewing is somebody who has the requisite skills and abilities already, because if you find that fit. And you fall in love with that person and they can't do the job.

You have done a huge disservice to your existing employees. And they will get so depressed at having gone through that process, waited for somebody, got them all trained up only to find they can't do the job. And so the order is very important. In fact, if you go back to that first Acme slide that you have there. A lot of people will do this after a phone interview and that third brown box selected candidates take the preemployment test. Our recommendation is, ask people on the application.

Everything that you can ask. Are you willing to work nights? Are you willing to work? Evenings, holidays. Whatever is appropriate for that job. Ask them on the application. Then take the people who are qualified applicants and then give them testing. Don't ever even talk to them because you risk falling in love with the human being who is not able to do the job. And in fact, you're using human resources. And I'm saying that term generically human, the resources of human beings.

You're using them to talk to people, who might not even take the pre employment test. So why not save that valuable human time with only the most highly qualified applicant or candidate pool so that the things that, that software cannot discern, that a human being can discern get sorted out in the interview. And that will result in, the, a really great hire with really great benefits.

You know what it is that they can do or should do, but the recommendation is definitely leave the humans out as long as possible and only employ the human beings time when you know you're working with a really highly qualified list of candidates. Applicants apply, candidates are the people that you move forward. And that's a differentiation, but that's where you're, where you humans should jump in and start measuring the things that only humans can measure.