The art of Situation-based Hiring

The cliché “Hiring the right person for the right job” continues to be loosely used by the HR industry. In order for HR to recruit “mister/miss right”, HR would need to put emphasis of conducting a job analysis, which will help HR in understanding the current and future situations that impact the position. Unfortunately, this seldom happens.

Once HR understands the situations that surround a position, they will be able to reduce the risk of a wrong hire, which subsequently increases the chances of a right hire. At HireLabs, we call this Situation-based Hiring (given that there is no violation of EEOC).

Let us look at an example of situation-based hiring:

A leading airline wants to start a low-fare program, and needs to hire a cabin crew.

The first step would be to conduct a job analysis keeping in mind the situations that the new cabin crew will encounter. Some of these situations include:

1. Passengers include families with children, who are taking advantage of the reduced fares. There will be tears and diapers, as well as aisle traffic during inappropriate times.
2. Passengers also include lower income travelers for whom traveling has become more affordable. There will be lowered level of travel etiquette, which could include oversized hand-carry luggage, as well as an increase in change-of-seat requests.
3. Disgruntled passengers, because low-fare programs usually involve over-bookings.
When using situation-based hiring for a cabin crew, HR would reduce the risk of a bad hire if they put less emphasis on talent who are accustomed to catering to first-class passengers, or talent who dedicate a significant amount of their personal time towards aesthetics. This talent would not be as equipped, to managing the situations where there are energetic (to the point of being unruly) passengers.

Instead HR would significantly reduce the risk of a bad hire if HR focuses on building a team, which is lead by an experienced and/or mature talent. The team members should include talent who come from a background where they have experience working with children (in the education sector), or someone with social work experience. HR could also focus on older talent who have a higher tolerance level when dealing with problematic situations.

The second step in situation-based hiring is to assess and test the talent that HR has identified. Talent assessment works extremely well when they are assessed for the right criteria. In this case the appropriate criteria would be to assess for personality traits such as stress management, conflict resolution and hospitability. If the talent possesses these traits, then HR has successfully reduced the risk of a wrong hire.

If you are hiring for a position in the near future, try implementing situation-based hiring, and let us know if you notice a difference and if this strategy helped you in “hiring the right person for the right job”.