Developing a structured interview process for entry-level management positions

¶ … Job

Selection procedure

The role of the human resources department increases at intense rates within the modern day society. In its inception, the labor force was a massive construction of unskilled, underpaid and exploited individuals. In time however, the people gained more and more rights, but were also faced with incremental responsibilities. Today, the staff member is the most valuable organizational asset, but he also represents the party directly responsible for the generation of business success.

The role of the organizational employee is crucial in all firms, but even more so in firms which do not offer a material product, but a service. The satisfaction of the customers and as such the levels of organizational revenues, depend directly on the means in which the staff members interact with the customers and generate satisfaction.

The impressive role of the staff members in the modern day society translates into an organizational need to hire and retain the best staff members. And in order to ensure they are able to support the organization in reaching its objective, the staff members must possess both technical knowledge of their position, as well as complementary skills. This condition is especially applicable for managerial positions, in which the occupants have to be able to both manage, as well as stimulate and motivate.

The current endeavor strives to create a selection procedure by which the firm would identify the most adequate candidate to hire in an entrance level management opposition. This selection process is an interview structured onto four distinctive parts, each of them being eliminatory. The interview is tedious and complex but has been selected due to the various benefits it presents. At a final level, the strategic importance of all four interview stages would be assessed and presented.

2. The situation

The organization employs slightly under 100 staff members and is specialized in offering services of software programs creation to a wide array of consumers. The employees are divided into two categories, as follows: 65 software developers, and 35 administrative staff. The later category includes all managers, human resource specialists, accountants and financial specialists, marketing and sales staffs, cleaning personnel and the other auxiliary positions.

The organizational customers belong to both the private as well as the public sector and they order software products of vast applicability. The largest project belongs to a private library and it revolves around the administration of the database. Other projects include financial administration applications, hospital administration programs or software applications for amusement parks.

The versatility of the software applications indicates that the programmers possess technical knowledge on software development, as well as basic knowledge of the fields in which their programs are applied. This need is also obvious at the level of managerial positions as the leaders have to be able to best interact with the customers. This specifically indicates that their levels of field knowledge are increased in comparison to those of the programmers.

The economic agent is currently faced with the necessity to fill in a vacant position as an entry level manager. This position was created out of an internal need to hire a management specialist and form him / her into the organizational needs and wants. The company has so far hired its managers from firms and has directly integrated them in middle management or even top management positions. The problem was constituted by the fact that these managers had already been formed into various organizational cultures and strived to implement their previous ideas into the context of the new organization. This often led to conflicts or inabilities to increase organizational flexibility. It is expected of the new entry level manager to be formed into the company's culture, to be professionally created with the specific aims and interests of the company at heart and to eventually become promoted into a top management position in which he/she can best promote organizational interests, features and goals.

At an initial level however, the entry level manager within the software firm is expected to fill in the following responsibilities:

1. Constant communications with the customers

2. Full integration of the customers' needs and wants into the software applications

3. The offering of recommendations and professional input to the organizational customers

4. Constant communications with the staff members

5. The management of the project and the offering of technical support

6. The division and delegation of responsibilities and tasks

7. The insurance of adequate communications between employees and organizational customers

8. The offering of support in the professional formation of the staff members

9. The identification of organizational problems and the proposition of innovative solutions which increase the levels of organizational efficiency as well as the levels of customer satisfaction

10. The management of internal conflicts

11. The motivation of the staff members

12. The creation and offering of new software solutions and solution propositions to the company customers

13. The promotion and representation of the firm in various circles with the intent of improving its reputation and attracting more clients.

3. The selection procedure

As it can be deduced from the previous section, the entry level managerial position is a complex one, with a wide array of responsibilities and tasks to be fulfilled. Additionally, the selection of the adequate candidate is essential for the sustained organizational success. Given the specifics of the current endeavor, the most adequate solution for the selection procedure seems the interview.

3.1. The interview as a selection procedure

The interview reveals a wide array of benefits which make it an adequate selection in the current circumstances. At a general level, the interview allows the company and the candidate to directly interact and this interaction reveals not only the technical skills of the candidate, but also the people skills he/she possesses, such as communication abilities, persuasion skills, the ability to make a point, to represent oneself -- and the firm -- and so on.

Additionally, the interview allows the simultaneous testing of the prospective manager by various interviewers. To better explain, the interview allows several organizational parties to sit in and observe and test the skills and abilities of the candidate. This leads to a situation in which the final decision to be made is better informed and validated by common agreement between the organizational parties which had participated in the interview. The decision in favor of the interview is also supported at the practical and theoretical levels since the process is the most commonly used one as well as the one with recognized benefits:

"The interview has long been acknowledged as the most frequently used selection device. A reasonable case can also be made that it is the most important device in many selection decisions as it is given the most weight. Interviewers certainly believe they can personally do a better job of predicting a candidate's success than they could do by using a test score or by relying on a candidate's educational achievements. Practically, few employers are willing to hire an employee sight unseen" (Gatewood, Field and Barrick, 2008).

Nevertheless, it has to be recognized that the interview is also characterized by a shortage, namely the fact that it implies increased amounts of efforts on the part of the organization. This specifically means that the process is also costly. In spite of these limitations however, the interview remains the recommended selection procedure due to the benefits it generates, as well as due to its strategic importance.

4. Strategic importance of the procedure parts

At an overall level, the selection procedure is extremely complex and it could even prove tedious. Nevertheless, it is required due to its strategic importance. In this order of ideas, the selection process to be set in motion is not only aiming to hiring an inexperienced entry level manager, but it is focused on hiring an individual to be gradually formed within the organizational culture and to eventually come to occupy an important seat in the company's top managerial team. In other words, the individual to be hired would be subjected to impressive organizational investments and would come to play an important part in the company's future.

In a context in which the hired manager is not adequately selected and cannot help the company meet its pre-established objectives, the firm will have lost both time and money on his formation. In such a context, the economic agent would have to start over the selection, integration and formation processes. This feature constitutes the overall strategic importance of the selection process, but fact remains that each individual stage is represented by its own significances. These are revealed below:

a) the human resources interview

The strategic importance of this stage is revealed by the organizational necessity to identify whether the candidate is appropriate for the firm. At a more specific level, several questions would be answered at this stage, such as those below:

Does the candidate possess good communication skills?

Does the candidate possess an adequate and positive attitude?

Is the candidate eager to learn and become part of the team to promote organizational interests?

Is the candidate a team player? (Ganesh and Bangalore)

b) the technical interview

The strategic importance of the technical interview is given by the necessity to test the technical skills and abilities of the future occupant of the managerial position. It is as such necessary for the new employee to possess vast technical skills which help him / her understand and resolve technical issues within the firm. In spite of the fact that the candidate could possess high people skills, the lack of sufficient technical skills would lead to his/her elimination from the selection process.

c) the psychological interview

The psychological interview is strategically important as it allows the interviewers to test the technical as well as people skills of the candidate in stressful circumstances (DeAngelis, 2010).

d) the interview with the top management

Finally, the strategic importance of the interview with the top management is that of revealing the commitment of the candidate to the firm and its objectives. This represents the stage at which sensitive -- yet crucial -- questions would be asked. Also at this stage, the uniqueness elements of the candidate would be tested, such as their niche specializations or their competitive advantages and features which could generate organizational value (Johnson, Langley, Melin and Whittington, 2007).

References:

Armstrong, M., Baron, a., 2002, Strategic HRM: the key to improved business performance, CIPD Publishing

Barrett, R., Mayson, S., 2008, International handbook of entrepreneurship and HRM, Edward Elgar Publishing

Bohlander, G., Snell, S., 2009, Managing human resources, 15th edition, Cengage Learning

DeAngelis, T., 2010, Master the corrections officer exam, 16th edition, Peterson's

Ganesh, S.G., Bangalore, S., Cracking C, C++ and Java interv, Tata McGraw-Hill

Gitman, L.J., McDaniel, C., 2008, the future of business: the essentials, 4th edition, Cengage Learning

Jonhson, G., Langley, a., Melin, L., Whittington, R., 2007, Strategy as practice: research directions and resources, Cambridge University Press

Gatewood, R.D., Field, H.S., Barrick, M.R., 2008, Human resources selection, 6th edition, Cengage Learning