Memo to Recruiters and/or Hiring Managers: There is no magic bullet.

Ever since the Great Recession altered the United States job market and shifted the balance of power away from candidates and towards employers, TheAppliedPsychologist has noticed an unfortunate trend: extremely specific job postings.  One website sums this up nicely: "Job descriptions with impossible skills listing You’ve seen the job descriptions when the skills requirements take up two-thirds of the job description. You must have 5-10 years of experience with every programming language under the sun, the twenty-seven industry certifications found for your work and then match up to the fifty other “desired” qualifications as well."

Here is another requirements example.  It's not lengthy -- but it is extremely particular about a couple of things:

• NO less then[sic] 10 years of directly related experience in the fashion industry.
• NO less than five years at director/manager level project learning, training and development experience.
• Background working directly with Buyers, merchants, agents, members of the product development team and IT.
• Former experience in application systems support and maintenance and use of PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) tools.
• Must possess a complete and global understanding of the product development process and improving the process efficiencies.
• Background in gathering data, research and data analysis to build strategies is very important.
• Keen sense identifying what is working, what needs to be modified and/or added.
• Former experience in developing pilot programs.
• Broad base knowledge of IT systems necessary.

What happens if the person meets every other criteria, but only has 9 years of "directly related experience in the fashion industry"?  What if they were only at "the director/manager level" for 3 years and not 5?  Does that automatically disqualify a candidate?  Paradoxically, the rest of the requirements are too vague.

This trend of incredibly specific job postings has increased in recent years.  It's probably due to the bloated labor pool created by the recession.  With unemployment rates higher than what used to be typical, employers seem to feel they can find exactly the right person with exactly the background they want.  Or perhaps this trend is a byproduct of the Internet era -- and era that has given us the ability to satisfy particular shopping requirements to a degree never before seen in human history.  Some job postings look less like an attempt to hire the best candidate and more like someone customizing a car online.  'I need some e-Learning, plus some leadership, plus experience managing people, plus ten years of experience doing the first eight tasks listed in the posting's position description.'

These types of posts look like an overly specific online dating profile: 'The woman I'm looking for has to live within a 10-mile radius, enjoy watching soccer and hockey, be a Cubs fan, and has run no fewer than 2 half-marathons over the past 5 years.'

I can imagine an obvious retort from the hiring organization: "Well, that's our ideal candidate.  We don't expect everyone to meet those ideals." Look, I understand the need to be specific: most job postings suffer from the opposite problem of being too vague.  However!  That doesn't mean the laundry list approach is any more beneficial.  There are several negative outcomes of publishing every possible desirable characteristic of a future incumbent:

• They turn away people who could do the job, but don't meet every listed 'requirement'.  Some candidates are humble and tend to undersell themselves.  Those who do won't apply to your opening if it's based on a laundry list of idealized characteristics.
• Skills don't accurately predict how someone will perform on the job.  The longest list in the world won't solve this problem.  Here's a little-understood fact: lack of skills isn't the most common reason for failed hires.  Organizational fit, lack of support, candidate personality/work behaviors, etc. often play a larger role in hire failures than a candidate's skill level or experience level.
• Your list could be discriminatory.  Did anyone perform a job analysis to determine the necessity of the skills and experiences you listed?  Did anyone validate your analysis?  If members of certain demographic groups are much less likely to meet your requirements when compared to others, you could be setting yourself up for a lawsuit if you haven't taken the time to prove all your requirements are truly essential.

You might be wondering: "How can I look for those qualities that predict job performance?"  There are several different approaches; many of them are ineffective.  Here are a couple that work: formal, validated assessments customized for your organization's open positions, and structured interviewing (which should also be customized, but usually cost less to develop).  Some skills laundry lists make it seem like the employer can't be bothered to schedule a thorough interview with any candidate who doesn't fit their exact mold. This level of inattention to the recruitment process does not reflect well on an organization.

Even with these principles applied, selection is an inexact science.  And I suppose that's our point: there is no magic bullet for selection.  There's no magic list of requirements, tests, or formulas that will enable you to avoid the hard work of applying a variety of validated selection techniques - often including a structured interview - in order to find the candidate most likely to succeed.  There are no shortcuts, no matter how poor the job market is.  Attempts to get around these realities usually leads to the exact outcome employers set out to avoid in the first place. If your list of requirements is the longest part of your job posting (or job description) by a country mile, you're probably doing it wrong.

"How long...HOW LONG?!?!?"

A common question faced by those who perform job analyses or develop employee selection processes for a living is, "How often do we have to go through all this?" We're glad you asked.  Believe it or not, Industrial/Organizational Psychologists have asked this question.  Even more surprising, the answers aren't nearly as self-serving as one might expect.  The general consensus indicates that organizations should seek new selection process validation evidence within about five years of the original study.  A paper authored by Schmit, Lundquist and Beckham concludes the following:

"A survey of members of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) was conducted. Experts in test validation (n = 249) estimated the “shelflife” of a validation study is about 5 years. The experts estimated the shelflife of a job analysis study is 5 to 6 years. The shelflife for a cut-score or passing-score study was estimate at 3 to 3.5 years. The results demonstrated some variability by job family and validation study type in these estimates."

Depending on your situation, you might think that's either a very short time or a long time.  Hence, Renegade Psychology feels compelled to offer its own expert opinion on the matter.

If your organization mostly uses structured selection procedures to select employees for positions requiring the exact same skills and requiring use of the exact same tools utilized a decade ago, you probably can get away with waiting longer than 5 years in between job analyses.  For instance, if you are hiring electricians, and the ones you hire today do the same job with the same tools and require the same knowledge required by the electricians you hired 10 years ago, perhaps you can wait longer than 5 years in between job analyses.

However, it's entirely possible that your initial job analysis sucked.  You might have tried to do it yourself, or you might have hired a mediocre vendor the last time around.  Under such circumstances, you might want to consider the idea that your job analysis might require an update sooner than you had hoped it would.

If your organization is small, or is operating with a restricted amount of financial resources (and who isn't these days?), you will have to utilize a high level of judgment and discretion in making these decisions.  But as a general rule, TheAppliedPsychologist feels comfortable saying that you probably want to take at least a quick look-see at least every 5 years or so (depending on how rapidly the job conditions, work environment, and skill-set changes over time), just to make sure your selection process is working as intended.

A Call To Arms

It seems appropriate to begin the posting history of Renegade Psychology with a few words on anonymity. This site was created to provide an advocate's voice for the Applied Psychology fields.  For far too long, the practitioners of Applied Psychology have stood timidly by, watching and waiting until organizations called us in to fix their mistakes so they could avoid getting into (additional) legal trouble.  Renegade Psychology is a fist slamming down on the table to say, "No more."

TheAppliedPsychologist persona should not be viewed as the voice of a single individual.  TheAppliedPsychologist is an amalgam of all the Renegades who have contributed to the cause.  The thoughts published under this persona will attempt to hew to the standards set across the rest of the site -- in other words, there will be humor, anger, and passion behind them.  However, because the character is shared, TheAppliedPsychologist's tone may vary considerably.  Eventually, other voices and personae will join this one.

TheAppliedPsychologist will be honest.  If you are a practitioner, TheAppliedPsychologist will try to help you. If you aren't a trained practitioner, TheAppliedPsychologist will still try to show you what you have to do to get the job done.

If you are in a position to hire consultants, TheAppliedPsychologist will utter the raw truths that your consultants are either too polite or too afraid to share. TheAppliedPsychologist will not spare your feelings or soothe your egos.

As a consequence, Renegade Psychology encourages those who share their stories from the field to remain anonymous.  The Renegades do not wish to contribute to anyone getting sanctioned or terminated for the things they write.  However, anyone who has the guts (or immunity/protection) to contribute to the site using their real identity is encouraged to do so.

Finally, we are issuing a call to all the other Renegades out there who want to be a part of making everyone's jobs easier.  We believe that the fields within Applied Psychology, Human Resources, Industrial-Organizational Psychology, Human Capital, Management Consulting, and Organizational Consulting are the world's fields.  We play an integral role in making companies more efficient, improving jobs, improving workplaces, saving organizations from themselves, eliminating corporate dysfunction, creating better work environments, and by extension making the world a better place to live in.  If you share the same causes, we invite you to join us.