The success rate of the recruitment process is notoriously poor, with large quantities of successful candidates failing to last six months in their new role.  As such, there is an almost constant desire to make it more effective, with many such attempts striving to better match the skills of the candidate with the role, their personality with the culture, and so on.

A paper from Tilburg University argues that there may actually be a relatively simple way to answer such questions and therefore to successfully filter candidates.

“Our research shows that relying on managerial discretion to evaluate employees (compared to solely relying on objective performance measures) attracts employees who identify more strongly with the organization’s objectives,” the authors say.

Performance evaluations

The key, the authors argue, is for employees to know whether their manager will use their discretion to adjust their performance evaluation and their pay.  If they know this, they’re more likely to choose organizations where they can identify with the goals of the organization.

This discretion from the manager could be based on various things, including the willingness of the individual to share knowledge, offer unsolicited ideas for improving the business, or just general observations about the daily behavior of the employee.

The researchers recruited volunteers to engage with a scenario-based experiment that consisted of three key steps.  Firstly, they were asked to say whether they identified with the aims of the organization, which was to reduce carbon emissions.  They were then asked to role play in a scenario in which they had a choice between either a fixed-wage contract or one that was performance-based, with discretionary adjustment by the manager an option.  Lastly, the volunteers were asked to say on a scale o f1 to 10 how much extra effort they’d be willing to put into meeting the goals of the organization.

The results showed that when people felt aligned with the goals of the organization, they were more likely to put in extra effort, which in turn made them more likely to want performance-based pay.  The reverse was the case for those who had poor alignment with the goals of the organization.

“Working for an organization with objectives that one identifies with has benefits for the organization, employee health, and society,” the researchers say. “Our study shows that when employees expect managerial discretion to be used to evaluate them, they are more likely to sort themselves into organizations with objectives they identify with.”

As such, the authors believe that by adapting the pay offered, organizations could prove more effective at attracting the right kind of candidate over the longer term.