Association of Local Government Auditors

When planning to hire new staff a frequent obstacle is how to know if the applicants have the "right stuff" to be successful and help the organization achieve its goals and objectives.  This article highlights the planning phase of the planning-recruitment-selection hiring process and an approach to ferret out and test for key auditing skills. 

The King County Auditor's Office recently recruited for three new auditors at varying levels of experience.  As we go to press, our new auditors are preparing to enter their new cubicles.  This was a very important process for us because the three new staff would constitute nearly half of our total audit staff.  The process was also critical for succession planning since our office has a number of potential retirements over the next 5-7 years.  In light of these factors, we took an enhanced approach to the hiring process and have subsequently hired three exceptional auditors to supplement our team.

Our planning steps included three processes that guided us toward our goal:

• 1. Needs Assessment
• 2. Development of Evaluation Tools
• 3. Rubric for Interpreting Evaluation Responses

Hiring is, at times, more an art than science, but we wanted to increase the chances that our process would have the intended result: selection of candidates that would be successful in our office and would support achievement of the office's strategic goals (for example, generating impact and teamwork).

Needs Assessment

The first step in the recruitment planning involved assessing our needs.  We asked ourselves questions like: What skills gaps do we currently have?  What makes people successful here? Are there strategic outcomes that should be considered in the process?  Using the dot voting technique (Google "dot voting technique"), we determined how critical it was that each position for which we were recruiting have each skill.  A sample of the skills and ratings we identified are shown below for two types of positions (A=experienced/team leader and B=entry level/team member).

We used the results of this exercise to develop questions and develop a scoring tool.

Development of Evaluation Tools

Based on our needs assessment, we built written behavioral test and interview questions.  Behavioral questions ask applicants about how they have handled situations or applied knowledge in the past.  Past behavior is the best predictor of future performance.  Asking applicants to speculate about how they would do something invites an answer that responds to what the applicant thinks you want to hear instead of what they might actually do.

We built both test and interview questions to ensure that we were evaluating the skills and traits identified in our needs assessment.

Rubric for Interpreting Evaluation Responses

Using questions developed in the previous step and the results of the needs assessment, we determined how to score the written test.  The scoring for the written test can be detailed and specific.  Because we scored each skill separately we were able to assess the skill across multiple questions.  Here is an example of the scoring tool we used for our question, "Choose one of the two attached hypothetical questions to analyze."  The answers that we anticipated for our experienced and entry-level positions differed.

When determining scoring for the interviews, we wanted to keep it simple.  We wanted to be able to listen to the applicant instead of having to think about where to make a mark on the scoring sheet, so we made general notes during the interviews from which we drew conclusions later. 

For our interview question, we asked "If selected for this position, describe your strategy and expectations for the first 90 days." Here are some of the questions we asked ourselves after an interview was complete:

• Can the candidate form a plan?
• Can they deal with ambiguity and create structure from it?
• Do they understand a strategic work environment? Do they seem energized by the challenge of the unfamiliar?
• Does the candidate demonstrate a strong work ethic, taking responsibility for achieving personal and organizational goals?

Summary

For us, this planning process helped increase the likelihood that we would identify and ultimately select candidates that would be successful, could hit the ground running, and further our office's strategic goals.  The behavioral written testing provided key information to help us quickly reduce our applicant pool to a manageable number.  The interview approach then allowed us to focus on assessing other applicant skills such as oral communication, critical thinking, team work skills, etc.