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Case Study

At Rocket-Hire our research efforts offer us a unique opportunity to preview what's happening in the market. We choose to highlight one or more products or services each issue, not because we are affiliated or compensated by the providers, but because we feel that they represent some innovative thinking or success that we want to let our readers know about.

The following case study of successful recruiting practices at American City Business Journals has some good tips and measured outcomes.

Selection tool helps identify employee talents for successful recruiting

A Kenexa Case Study featuring American City Business Journals

When 50 candidates are applying for a job, how do you select the right person? According to Tom Wood, vice president/group publisher for American City Business Journals, using professional screening tools can help you find the right person nearly 80% of the time. Wood oversees the company's human resources functions.

American City Business Journals (ACBJ) is the largest publisher of local business news in the country with 1,900 employees working together to deliver the most comprehensive, exclusive coverage of local business news through 41 business newspapers across the country. In addition to the business publications, ACBJ also owns the Street & Smith's Sports Group which produces several sports publications as well as "the bible of old car hobby" Hemmington Motor News.

Finding talented, qualified people to serve as advertising sales and classified sales representatives, reporters, and sales and news management as well as publisher-has long been a challenging, time consuming, daunting task. When looking to improve the quality and quantity of candidates applying for a position and a better means of evaluating those candidates, ACBJ turned to in-depth selection interviews to more accurately predict who would perform best in any given position.

"Finding and developing talent is a major challenge," explained Wood. "Our recruiting and hiring process is very decentralized and each manager is responsible for his or her own recruiting and hiring. We use Kenexa to conduct in-depth interviews of job candidates and are a great believer in this approach to help us identify the innate talent people have."

Kenexa provides a suite of comprehensive talent management solutions and state-of-the-art applications for talent acquisition and performance management. Recognizing that hiring the best people is only the first step in expanding their clients' business and that developing and retaining talent is critical, Kenexa tools improve the way clients hire, train and retain their talent.

"Kenexa designed an interview tool exclusively for ACBJ and it helps equip our managers to make smarter hiring decisions," said Wood. "If they use that tool well, they will be more successful and so will the company. Since we started doing in-depth interviews, we have been better at identifying stronger people."

Wood noted that sales people who came through the interview successfully and were hired generated higher levels of sales more quickly than individuals who didna^?(TM)t perform as well during the interview. Sales representatives who were rated as top candidates by the interview averaged $250,000.00 more in sales per year.

"We became believers in the idea of helping identify talent that way," he adds. "We feel the people we have hired who were predicted to be good have been good and the ones predicted to be not so good, weren't. It's not the only way of identifying talent but it's one of the tools we use in the selection process. We still do a lot of our own interviewing, checking references, and finding out as much as we can before we put them in a position of importance."

American City Business Journals partnered with Kenexa to customize an in-depth Insight Interview to improve their recruiting process. One benefit of using the Kenexa approach is the objective data that is gathered during the initial interviewing process.

"Because it's a telephone interview and a professional interviewer is the analyst, listening to how candidates respond to a question rather than seeing them and being influenced by their appearance or how they react other than verbally provides a more objective way of looking at people," said Wood.

The in-depth interview designed for ACBJ is conducted over the phone with candidates for advertising sales positions and is about 40 minutes in length. Depending on how questions are answered, Kenexa analysts are able to provide an indicator on what types of innate talents or traits a person may have.

"If you start with really talented people, you can help develop that talent and be very successful," adds Wood. "We're always recruiting for people who can help us grow as a company and that's what this process helps us do."

The analysts help identify which traits and innate talents each candidate possesses. This information helps managers identify who would be most productive in a given position and which candidates will mesh best within the company's existing culture.

"We have greatly talented people throughout our company and we want to find more people like that," said Wood. "The Insight Interview helps us identify people who have talents that match the very best in our company so we can find more people like our very best."

Information contained in the reports help identify strengths as well as traits that are not as prominent, allowing mangers to maximize an employee's strengths to increase productivity.

"For example, a candidate may be a better candidate for a display advertising position than a classified advertising sales position," explained Wood. "What a person brings to the table in terms of his or her own talent helps him or her to be successful in one position where they may not be in another. Everyone has a certain degree of talent and this process helps us identify what those talents are.

"We also can receive counsel from Kenexa on how to help a person be more successful by focusing on stronger traits and manage around lesser traits," notes Wood. "A person can be more successful, happier and productive on the job and we can know how to coach him to be more successful in what he is doing."

A long time believer in using in-depth interviews to screen prospective employees, Wood advises others to use their instincts to complement the screening results.

"We caution our managers not to rely solely on that interview," he notes. "They have to hire people they like, people they feel comfortable with. But this interview report will give them a better understanding than what they can gain themselves in how successful a candidate may be on a particular job."

"We have been a fast growing company and part of that success can be attribured to the fact that we hired good, strongly talented people and have continued to improve our organization that way. The Kenexa Insight Interview is another tool in our selection process that helps our managers identify the most talented people out there, to recruit them and get them into our company."