This is where the company's overall HR strategy comes into play. Kanata wants to do a few things -- lower turnover rates, improve its managerial candidate pool and build a strong collection of minority employees, especially those with management potential. At this point, there is no specific link between the MAT test and these outcomes. The company does not even know the links between its traditional hiring measures and these outcomes.

3. The hiring process at Kanata is not directly tied to the company's strategic objectives. This is a major problem, because the company is facing a number of issues that could otherwise be addressed in the hiring process. For example, the company does not relate on-the-job performance appraisals to the hiring process and the promotions process. The link between these three should be obvious -- hire good people, watch them do well, then promote them. Yet there are no links between the hiring process and anything else....

Additionally, the company wants to improve the number of minorities but the hiring process only tracks minority candidates. It should either give them preferential treatment or -- ideally -- the company should work on building the number of minority candidates in the system. Currently they account for 23.75% of applicants, and 31% of the most-educated applicants. This means that they are finding good minority candidates, but they are not converting them into managers. Somewhere along the way, they are squandering this resource.
In addition to the strategic issues surrounding the hiring process at Kanata, the company does not appear to place emphasis on any particular area in the hiring process. It has interview scores, experience scores and education scores, but does not appear to know what correlation any of these has with on-the-job performance. Ultimately, Kanata needs to know what the best predictors of success are, and adjust its hiring criteria to…