Eric Friedman is the Founder and CEO of eSkill, a global leader in skills testing and behavioral assessment solutions for employers.
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As the U.S. economy continues to recover from the upheaval caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, many businesses are finding themselves in a bind. Corporate leaders are eager to ramp up their businesses to pre-pandemic levels, but they are having trouble finding candidates to fill their open positions. According to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, 48% of the small businesses surveyed in May said they could not fill all of their job openings.
This is especially curious, considering that the 5.2% unemployment rate is still well above what it was before the pandemic. For a variety of reasons, there is a squeeze in the labor market that is making it very difficult to find the right people to fill jobs at companies nationwide.
But as this urgency to hire collides with the realities of the labor market, companies must resist the urge to panic and embrace the “warm body” mindset in which they simply hire the least objectionable candidate. Instead, they should focus on the characteristics that are most important to the role and the company.
Of all of the potential factors to consider, perhaps none is more important than integrity. Warren Buffett has said that of all of the qualities he looks for in his employees, integrity is the most important because without it, all of the other skills that they possess can actually work against a company. In essence, the smartest and most determined employees can do a great deal of harm if they use those qualities to hurt the company.
The Importance Of Integrity In Your Employees
To understand why hiring for integrity is so critical, it is important to define integrity. Broadly speaking, integrity is choosing to live by a set of ethical and moral principles that lead a person to do the right thing, no matter what the circumstances might be.
Employees with integrity are trustworthy and are willing to trust others, as well. They are scrupulous about adhering to company standards and policies and value truth and honesty in the workplace.
On any given day, an employee might be presented with several opportunities to act without integrity. So, you want an employee who will make the right choice without a second thought. These employees help create a culture of integrity at all levels of your company.
Interview Questions For Integrity
So how do you determine whether a particular candidate has integrity? One option is to ask interview questions that investigate the candidate’s integrity, both overtly and covertly. These questions run the gamut from straightforward questions about how they would react in a given situation to more philosophical questions, like asking them to define what integrity means to them.
Interview questions that will help you hire for integrity should be open-ended to allow the candidate to explore and explain their point of view. To encourage candidates to answer fully, interviewers should remain neutral during their entire response, so candidates answer spontaneously without trying to curry favor.
While interview questions for integrity are a valuable resource for learning more about a candidate’s character, they can also run afoul of many of the problems that accompany in-person interviewing. One of the biggest problems is unconscious bias.
No matter how neutral an interviewer may try to be, there is still the possibility that their opinion will be skewed by external factors. One way to help counteract this is through integrity tests.
Integrity Tests As Part Of The Hiring Process
Assessing candidates' integrity as part of your skills and behavioral testing process can help you avoid the problem of unconscious bias. You can include many types of questions in your tests to gather the required information. Multiple-choice questions can focus on how a candidate would behave in specific situations, like whether they would report a coworker who was engaging in illegal behavior or whether they believe it is okay to take office supplies home.
You also can require written or video responses so you can solicit open-ended answers and ask hiring teams to review them. For example, you can pose one or more ethical questions to candidates and ask the hiring manager, prospective team members and subject matter experts to read or view responses.
Of course, there is no single foolproof way to measure something as complex as integrity, regardless of how rigorous your testing is. But asking the right questions and leveraging skills and behavioral tests can go a long way toward making hiring for integrity a fundamental part of your company’s ethos.
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