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H.R. Opinions on Hiring, Firing and Developing Workers
By Ben Accomando, Ph.D.
Originally printed in The Official Magazine of the Long Island Association - June 2001
An opportunity to gather views on employee issues from human resources personnel (H.R.) present itself during the 2001 regional conference of the
Society for Human Resources Management held on L.I. on April 27, 2001. An informal research project was conducted with about 10 percent of the
attendees (of 900 or so present) who responded to a nine question survey addressing various employee-related practices. The goal was to assess
trends specific to L.I. companies reported by people most likely to know exactly what is gong on - the human resource personnel.
The following are some of the results, interpretations and comments.
Regarding the pre-hiring practices, 95 percent of the respondents said they used the interview, although many (46 percent) reported that their
company uses skills testing to assess job skills. Interestingly, only 9 percent reported using personality testing in their pre-hiring practices,
in spite of the fact that many of the participants believe that knowing what an employee’s personality “is like” is crucial to making a good match
between the employee and the job.
Regarding the success rate for a “good hire” the majority of respondents (54 percent) believe their organization hires the right person 50 to 75
percent of the time. Only a minority (25 percent) believe their accuracy rate to be very high (75 - 100 percent). When there is a “mismatch”
between job and the employee, one third of the respondents reported that the employee would be terminated. Many reported referring the employee
for coaching or training (56 percent) or to a human resources (38 percent). The effort to keep an employee seems quite significant, although it
is not clear as to the motivation behind the actions.
Issues about morale at work were also surveyed. While the majority of the respondents believe that the morale at work is good (53 percent) to
excellent (23 percent), almost one third of them believe that their organization has difficulty keeping its best employees. The reasons most often
provided for poor morale were poor management style (48 percent), poor leadership (44 percent), and the wrong people in key positions (39 percent).
Heavy work load and inadequate pay and benefits were mentioned by one third of the respondents.
How Long Island companies address the enhancement or development of its employees is also interesting. In spite of the fact that the majority
(80 percent) of the companies on L.I., represented by the sample, are small businesses, a significant number (48 percent) of them have a training
department apart from an H.R. department. The programs to enhance and develop workers’ performance were quite comprehensive. Fifty one percent of
the respondents stated that their company offered management training, coaching (46 percent) performance training (44 percent), incentive programs
(40 percent), and employee assistance programs (38 percent). Only 10 percent of those surveyed reported that their company currently did not use
any programs. Clearly, L.I. companies are invested in the full utilization of their employees’ potential and are making a financial commitment by
offering a wide range of performance improvement programs.
The positive attitude about performance improvement programs of the respondents carried over to their view of performance consultants. Many (42
percent) viewed consultants as objective experts for specific areas, others (38 percent) saw consultants as valuable resources to their company.
Only 15 percent had “no opinion or experience” about consultants.
In summary, the research provided some insight as to what are the trends, difficulties and resolutions on employee-related issues on Long Island.
The pre-hiring practices remain traditional with the usual resulting problems including some poor hires, mismatching, and possible costly turnover.
One trend practiced by the majority of the companies surveyed, is the extensive effort to keep the employee, once hired, by the efforts to
improve the workers’ performance.
While the efforts to more accurately hire the right person for the job seems to be a little lacking , the amount of commitment to improving the
employees’ performance is quite strong, especially given the small size of the businesses.
The number of respondents who believe that the worker’s morale is low, report that it is difficult to keep valuable employees, and believe that a
high percentage of “wrong people” are in key positions, suggest that more effort is needed in the pre-hiring process. It is often prohibitive for
small companies to implement objective pre-hiring assessments by matching people and job requirements. However, the overall cost in productivity
may be much higher in the end.
Finally, the care, commitment and the professionalism of the human resources staff on L.I. shows a trend that one can only hope spreads nationwide.
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