Columnist Caroline Gourlay is an independent business psychologist based in Bath who writes about the application of psychology in the workplace, including its risks and limitations. She is interested in trends in psychological research as well as the nitty-gritty practicalities of using psychology at work. Caroline has worked with large corporations and in the public sector, but her real interest is in medium-sized, owner-managed businesses, including family business. She helps organisations to select the right people to fit their organisation and coaches executives to enable them to fulfil their potential.

How good are your selection processes? You probably put a lot of effort in to ensuring you understand what the role requires and devising assessment methods to determine which of the candidates has what you are looking for. Then you put it into practice and, maybe, things don’t work out quite as you planned.

How many of these scenarios do you recognise?

• You are recruiting for a high profile role and advertise widely, seeing a range of candidates. You put the shortlisted candidates through a rigorous and fair selection process and have an in-depth discussion about the results. The sole internal candidate emerges as the strongest contender and is appointed. Several external candidates and some disgruntled people in the organisation suspect a stitch up, undermining the authority and legitimacy of the new appointee.
• You’re recruiting for a position that someone in the organisation is currently doing on an ‘acting up’ basis. He is not performing particularly well, though he does not recognise this, and is unlikely to get the job. He does badly at the first stage but is shortlisted – raising his hopes and wasting everyone’s time – for fear that otherwise he will see it as constructive dismissal or, at least, be incredibly disruptive.
• You have a well-defined in-depth psychological profiling exercise as the final stage of your assessment process, carried out by an external consultant. It provides really useful information but is a bit pricey. The hiring manager treats it like a reference check and verbally offers someone the job, subject to the assessment. She then withdraws the offer when she doesn’t like what emerges from the assessment.
• An internal candidate believes he is in line for the job and is disappointed it’s even being advertised. He accuses you of designing the assessment process, which is likely to highlight his shortcomings, to deliberately rule him out because ‘someone’s got it in for him’.
• Your beautifully designed assessment process produces masses of useful information about the candidates. Although everyone involved in the decision agrees on what they are looking for, they can’t agree on whether or not they’ve found it, as they each emphasise different aspects of the requirements. Most of the argument is about weighing specific relevant experience against general transferable skills and capabilities.
• The entrepreneurial MD, who prefers to make appointments quite informally, based on his intuition – “I’m a really good judge of people. I can just tell” – gives his favoured candidate the impression that the job is pretty much hers; she just needs to “get through this HR bit”. The candidate is bewildered and disappointed to be rejected following the rigorous “HR bit” in which gut feel plays much less of a role.
• You put your candidates through your well-designed and meticulously executed assessment process and a very clear winner emerges.  However, final approval rests with someone else – the chairman, the charity trustees, elected members of a local authority, people who are not very involved but have a lot of influence. Protocol dictates that you cannot present a fait accompli and you know they do not like to have their hands forced. You put forward the two best candidates, knowing that one is streets ahead of the other, and try to steer the decision. They pick the wrong one (probably the ‘safe pair of hands’ – the internal candidate, the one who’s held a similar role, the one who looks the part).

I’ve come across all these scenarios and no doubt there are others. I’ve been reflecting again recently on just how important it is to understand the political and cultural context in which you’re working.

Your assessment methods can be textbook perfect but if they don’t work with the messy reality in which you find yourself, you still risk getting the wrong outcome. So how do you design with context in mind? Can you be pragmatic without compromising the quality of the process?