Hiring should be about finding the right person. Too often, though, the tools and methods organizations use actually work against them. Job postings filter candidates out for lacking skills they could easily and quickly learn. Competency checklists based on someone else’s philosophy of what leadership looks like rather than what actually works inside their organization. Assessment tools that aren’t scientifically validated or that screen for average profiles when the role needs something entirely different.
The funnel narrows before employers even realize it. And when a poor fit does get through, the individual can spend months or years struggling against expectations that were never clearly defined.
So how should organizations rethink the way they assess and select talent?
My guest this week is Dr. Stephanie Puckett, founder of SynergyMind Consulting. In our conversation, she draws on 20 years of experience in organizational psychology to reveal where hiring processes quietly break down and the implications for both employers and employees when they do.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The most common mistakes employers make in hiring
• Unintentional restriction of talent pools
• Skill and competency transfer
• The danger of using tools with no scientific validation
• The critical role of talent acquisition teams
• Data science versus psychology
• Finding confirmation bias in big datasets
• The importance of realistic job previews
• How will hiring develop in the next 2 to 3 years
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00:00
Matt Alder
When employers don’t understand the proven science that underpins the assessment process, they can unintentionally shrink their candidate pools. And the people who do get hired often pay a heavy personal price. Keep listening to find out more. Support for this podcast comes from EightfoldAI. EightfoldAI’s interviewer agent is transforming how organizations hire. Powered by Eightfold’s Talent Intelligence foundation, the AI interviewer is an autonomous and assistive agentic interviewer that thinks, adapts and evaluates like your best recruiter, operating 247 across time zones and languages while assessing every candidate fairly and consistently. It works across the entire interview process, from initial screening to final assessment, enabling teams to make faster hiring decisions, deliver a seamless candidate experience and complete interviews in under a business week so you can find your best fit talent. To find out more, just head over to Eightfold AI. That’s Eightfold AI. Hi there.
01:32
Matt Alder
Hiring should be about finding the right person, but too often the tools and methods organizations use actually work against them. Job postings that filter out candidates for a lack of skills that they could easily and quickly learn. Competency checklists based on someone else’s philosophy of what leadership looks like rather than what actually works inside their organization. Assessment tools that aren’t scientifically validated or that screen for the average when the role needs something different entirely. The funnel narrows before employers even realise it. And when a poor fit does get through, the individual can spend months or even years struggling against expectations that were never clearly defined. So how should organizations rethink the way they assess and select talent? My guest this week is Dr. Stephanie Puckett, founder of SynergyMind Consulting. My guest this week is Dr. Stephanie Puckett, founder of Synergy Mind Consulting.
02:35
Matt Alder
In our conversation, she draws on 20 years of organizational psychology experience to reveal where hiring processes quietly break down and the implications for both employers and employees when they do. Hi Stephanie and welcome to the podcast.
02:53
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
Hi Matt, nice to be here. Thank you for the invite.
02:56
Matt Alder
Absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
03:02
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
Yeah, sure. So I’m a psychologist by trade if you want, and worked as an organizational psychologist for the last. It will be 20 years next year, which is a shocking number, but that’s where I am. My doctoral thesis around management diagnostic in the field of organizational psychology and started my career in a smaller consulting firm. That’s basically what I did most the time. Solar consulting firms I worked in HR management in a large international company and had the pleasure to live and work in Germany where I’m based, Switzerland and the US for some years. So was able to see a little bit around. And now I am owning my own business since three years, I think. Yeah, I’ve been out on my own since around five years and help clients in the whole range of learning development up to talent acquisition.
04:00
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
So I do a lot of leadership development or cultural development, do some organizational development. That’s the simple consulting work, of course, highly complex, but you know, the classical consulting things. And then working with leaders through executive coaching or sometimes team development on projects. That’s what I do. And then the big field of assessment, sometimes incorporated and development or coaching context, sometimes in the selection context, management audits or counseling clients and how they could optimize their hiring or selection process. With my focus on really working along assessments or diagnostic methodologies in the process. I am based in Germany, in Augsburg, which is right by Munich. Married, three children and guinea pigs. Yeah.
04:52
Speaker 3
And I think you’ve got a really interesting kind of lens that you look through things with from that because of all the work you do both on leadership and on hiring. Let’s start with hiring.
05:03
Matt Alder
So what are the most common mistakes.
05:06
Speaker 3
That you’re seeing at the moment in terms of how employers are approaching hiring?
05:11
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
Say, should be something that was much more striking a few years back, but it’s still a topic. I see. So all this talk around the war of talents, right. Understanding that we have a limited amount of qualified people, or so we think, and in some areas and business fields it is still the case. And yet I see companies restricting their candidate pool unintentionally. Right. Starting well before you start screening CVS and their job postings, et cetera, focusing on smaller aspects like skills that a qualified person would be able to attain within a day or two or let’s say a week. And that already leads to a limitation of the candidates we even look at. Certainly overlooking some great people that would bring in different skills we might not even have thought about. So the restriction.
06:09
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
And that goes a little further and it actually comes down to two assessments as well. We have this limited fixation to be a little bit provocative on our checklists. Right. What does the candidate have to bring? And I can name a skill that’s great, a certification or a program experience. And the same though is very true for competencies too. I start coming up with a list of competencies which is usually far too broad and Will not be applied in that job. And I overlook completely underrated field of skill or competency transfer. Right. Somebody might have brought a different set of skills or competencies that could very well be applied in my area. And this is something that really upsets me seeing a little bit. So some companies, they say, you know, that’s true. We try to focus on what we really need.
07:07
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
We’re not so much on skills, we focus on what we think matters. So we look at, you know, what does a candidate bring into our company? The style, the personality, maybe. However, what they end up working with are usually competency inventories. Well, those competency inventories are usually based on personality measures. So they measure your preferences that you show on a green field, right. Who you are and what motivates you. And yet they translate that into competencies. And what we have here is not only a translation, it’s a big interpretation. So I had just last year a client that worked with a big consulting firm and used their so called competency inventory, which was a personality test, but it wouldn’t show the personality, it would show some competencies. And I thought that’s really intriguing.
08:07
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
So I had a closer look at it and looking for competencies around leadership. Those were not scientifically balanced requirements based we have on leadership or those are more, let’s call it, philosophies around leadership looks like. And I started questioning, well, is this how leadership is really practiced and effective within your company turned out? No, not at all. So they selecting leaders based on, you know, some big companies, some big firms, competent idea or philosophy of leadership, thinking they would find qualified candidates and they simply followed somebody else’s mindset and hired, I wouldn’t say hire the wrong people. Right. But used, that’s not the sole criteria they use. But we’re misinformed when it comes down to the decision. Right. If you have equally qualified candidates, who are you going to take?
09:05
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
So that is something, I feel like the intention is good, but partly we really focus on wrong aspects that narrow our scope far too much.
09:16
Matt Alder
Yeah, absolutely.
09:17
Speaker 3
And I think that sometimes it’s even worse than that. People are using, you know, really kind of extreme shortcuts like this person hasn’t worked in the same industry or they work for the wrong company or you know, not even getting into that level of detail. I think it’s, you know, it’s something that really, I constantly rant about on this, on this podcast because, you know, we have science that kind of explains it.
09:44
Matt Alder
And I think that sort of takes.
09:45
Speaker 3
Me into the next question really, which is why is it, why do organizations struggle with assessing personality competencies, behavioral preferences,
09:55
Matt Alder
Why it’s so diff, why is it.
09:56
Speaker 3
So difficult for them to do and what sort of tends to go wrong?
10:00
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
Yeah, I think there is maybe a lack of confidence in really looking at what personality is and how we can describe personality. That is the biggest reason from what I hear, where people use so called competency inventories because they feel like personality. That’s only for a psychologist. I don’t want touch it. And that’s actually untrue. I think we can, you know, each of us has a good picture of what’s extroversion and it’s something we need in the job. What we don’t need or what degree we need. Just going back to the basic data of a personality inventory, we get no interpretation, we just have the data and then we can start the conversation around it. So one aspect that I see, and that is something that gets me very upset is that companies that try to do assessments don’t always use scientifically validated tools.
10:54
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
Yeah, that is really, that’s for the trash we would say in German. That doesn’t qualify as a good assessment method at all. Has zero validity. You can, you might as well look at, you know, handwriting if you want.
11:10
Matt Alder
Yeah, yeah.
11:11
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
Still practice. So that is the one aspect which I think people struggle with to understand what kind of instrument do I really need to assess? And then once you have one, this is where I see actually a recent conversation I had with a practitioner who uses a really scientifically sound test to measure certain interpersonal styles. It’s an interesting, it’s not exactly a personality questionnaire, but it’s really a nice and good and telling assessment. And when I ask, well, this is interesting, it’s great that you use it. How are you using it? Are you defining, you know, a range of what’s desired, what’s not desired? Did you do competency mapping? Oh, no, we look at the range, right. We don’t want extremely low and we don’t want extremely high.
12:01
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
So if we see that we exclude the candidate, everybody else passes that step of the assessment. And that again is somewhat tragic because guess what, you might have a role where you need some extreme tendencies and that might be helpful for you. So they end up using personality to screen for the average profile, which is interesting. Yeah. So that is another thing. Once you have a good instrument in place, how exactly do you use it? And this is in my view the point where Talent acquisition can play such an important role. You know, they have great oversight, they get so many cvs, they talk to people from so many different companies or sometimes industries. So they have a great base intuition, right, how different people are and different backgrounds and all that.
12:54
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
And so they’re confronted with candidates expectations, for example, from their old jobs or descriptions and they constantly do a mental check, well, what’s different in our company? And that knowledge that is key, you are able as a talent acquisition specialist to precisely form words around well, what is different in our company? What are we looking for? What makes people successful here and what is it why people fail. Something you always, you also see, right, being part of a company and then this is the base. From there on we simply translate it into personality traits that might predict that very behavior that’s different, that makes you successful or that derails your career. Within this context, that will be the right thing. And those profiles, they can look wild, you know, they far from the typical. I’m focusing a lot on leadership positions.
13:54
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
Obviously they can differ far off the typical leadership profile we would be looking for. If you have good reasons for it, then that’s exactly the kind of profile you should be looking for. And that becomes then very insightful to use those assessments.
14:17
Speaker 3
What are the consequences of getting this wrong? So when the process doesn’t assess fit properly, it doesn’t really present a realistic, you know, view of what the organization’s like, what are the consequences, I.
14:32
Matt Alder
Suppose both for organizations but also.
14:34
Speaker 3
For the, for the individuals who get those jobs.
14:37
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
You know, that’s a great question, especially bringing in the realistic job review. It’s one of the, I believe also very highly underrated aspects in the hiring process which allows for self selection. So if this isn’t done, I haven’t mentioned it in the beginning, but some of my work also involves psychological counseling and organizational context. So basically speaking to those that say, I think I’ve reached my limit, I think I’m stressed by my capabilities to cope with. I need support, I need psychological support. And it’s not rare that we end up reflecting, you know, how did you start this job? How did you get in? What was your idea of how you would be successful or how you would fit in the culture, the team that you met, et cetera.
15:30
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
And that’s where you see what can happen if a realistic job review was not given and you were selected based on wrong. Wrong traits for example, or wrong skills. It’s people that struggle a lot. That’s what I find with the ambiguity of the role. So they either they are highly qualified experts or they are line managers. And they come in this whole process feeling I must be a great fit. Right. I was selected and my strengths were, you know, mirror back to me. I think they really see what I bring to the table and they thought it’s a great fit. Now here I am five months in, a year in, and I cannot get struggle with, you know, my stakeholders or my manager. There’s no clear expectations.
16:16
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
I think I do the right thing and every time I really try to get it done, there’s something in the way. Why is this and it’s not. It occasionally happens that we really go back and say, well, what, you know, what was that image you had when you started? And then things turned out very differently. And the stories that touched me most is to work with people that tried for months or years to fit expectations that they think existed from management or from stakeholders or from the team. Sometimes still, yes, based on the impression they had when they decided to go for the job. Trying hard, right? Which is a tremendous strain and load on you because you constantly hunt expectations. You never seem to get it right because you’re hunting the wrong expectations.
17:08
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
So when we, you know, if we get down or basic, we look around, but what are the challenges you’re facing, challenges teams are facing, and what do you think would be a helpful trade, a helpful skill, a helpful approach? Then all of a sudden we come up with completely different answers that take less energy because they’re usually close to what I can do and would like to do. And from there on things go much more smoothly. And that’s great, right, to be able to see this development. But it’s that at the same time that the beginning, you know, I include the onboarding this, since that is your, you know, pretty high intense phase where you get to know the company, where you are really fast in trying to map expectations in order to, you know, be at your best, etc.
17:57
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
It could have been very easily avoided and help people to avoid a lot of stress and get started in a job focusing of what they think is right. Right. Just orienting yourself on what’s the need in my position, trying to apply your strength, what we preach in occupational psychology. And that is something where, you know, I also see the other way around. I see great hiring processes and people that show up with a certain amount of resilience saying, I still see it. I still see what I need to change or need to do based on the initial impression I had. And that is hiring that went really well. Right. That’s get the right direction for the candidates.
18:43
Matt Alder
Yeah.
18:43
Speaker 3
And I can massively empathize with this. Having been in a situation like that much earlier in my career where I.
18:50
Matt Alder
Kind of took a job that, you.
18:53
Speaker 3
Know, my abilities and my expectations of.
18:57
Matt Alder
That job were so out of line.
18:59
Speaker 3
With what the job was.
19:00
Matt Alder
And from an individual perspective, it can.
19:02
Speaker 3
Be, you know, devastating in terms of stress and confidence and things like that. And you know, interestingly, I left that job and then the next job I had was a much better fit and.
19:12
Matt Alder
I stayed in that for seven years. I wanted to just ask you sort.
19:16
Speaker 3
Of briefly about some of the new technology that’s coming into the space. So very disruptive time. No one’s really quite sure what’s really happening with, with AI, but there are, you know, a number of providers out there offering, you know, AI into the kind of the assessment and the hiring process.
19:36
Matt Alder
What’s your, what’s your kind of opinion.
19:38
Speaker 3
Of what perhaps some of the dangers of that might be?
19:42
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
Yeah, yeah. You know, that was about 10 years back where I was in a company where we replaced a classical assessment center with a tool, a digital assessment. We replaced it, we looked at the numbers, the validity and all that. It was fine to use. And of course, you know, we saved a lot of resources and all this. Now did anything improve from there? Not really. It did not. See, we had a good pre selection going on. So really the candidates that landed in our assessment for leadership positions were usually pretty well qualified. So we had a relatively low rate in excluding candidates or where we had to give a negative aptitude feedback, pretty low.
20:37
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
Now using this tool, first of all, the amount of rejections got even lower and the critical amount of feedback that we would really use to mitigate risks was not included. Right. You get your standard again, competency profile spit out by a machine. We didn’t exactly know what was measured. Is that really relevant? It comes from a stock, Right. So it’s not specifically cut for your environment and for your company. So you start trusting data that simply shows up and presents answers to you. You forget to go ahead and question the database. Right. You forget to question, well, wait a minute, is that relevant? And then with this, and that’s some other experience I made as companies that now because it’s relatively also cheap to gather data, you know, with AI you get more sources and you can automatically analyze all kinds of things.
21:40
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
You have a vast amount of data now the bigger the amount of Data I have, the higher the probability that I find confirmation for my theories, my hypothesis, my biases. So that’s something else. I see you get companies present me. So we’ve got all these things, we measure this and this and this. But I’m like, wait a minute, that’s a vast amount of data. What do you really need? And it dilutes our judgment. And now point that scares me is, and that is me consuming social media, reading articles from some cool data scientists that say, yeah, I went back, I analyzed our candidate pool, I found out the great way of predicting who’s going to be successful and our job. Here it is. And then there comes a list of certain aspects.
22:33
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
Really it’s not necessarily trades since we don’t measure them, but it’s a list of things that some in that data correlated significantly with the success in this company. And that is a scary, let’s say black box for me. Because we know like that’s what we psychologists are trained on really well. How do we make assessment and hiring decisions fair and ethical? How do we, how do we avoid using a discrimination, applying that on the level of even data selection and these kind of school that, you know, psychologists have or everybody has and has aptitude diagnostic education data scientists don’t, they are great at looking at the data. And now AI and automation and all that helps us to get just simply huge amount of data that we go ahead and exploratively analyze.
23:33
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
That was something I learned, you know, getting ready for my doctoral thesis. No exploration. Come up with a hypothesis first and please ground it. Well in theory, we don’t start asking random question or we will get random answers based on statistics. So that is a part where I feel like left and right you see more and more of those things popping up. That’s me personally. I feel like I can’t catch up. There’s too much data. I can’t go, you know, look at every piece and then go back into theory, go back into aptitude, ethics, et cetera and you check every little thing against their actual validity and fairness in the hiring process. So I feel like there’s great potential.
24:21
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
But we as psychologists, we’re not in the position yet to really use it in a good scientific way to the advantage of making better hiring decisions.
24:35
Speaker 3
I think that’s really interesting and you really sort of highlight the tension that’s going on around this at the moment and it’ll be really interesting. And I really hope that there kind of is sort of significant psychology input into this as it moves forward so we can get to a place where the humans and the machines are working together perfectly. And I suppose that kind of anticipates my next question really, which is how do you think hiring is going to develop over the next two or three years?
25:07
Matt Alder
Or how would you like to see.
25:08
Speaker 3
It develop over the next two or three years?
25:11
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
Yeah, that’s it. There’s two distinct questions, right? So going back to what you said, the machine and the human in hiring were taking decisions that immediate, have an immediate impact on humans, on the candidates, apply for positions on the team that the new person is going to join. Sometimes it’s a leadership position. So the personal impact on people is even higher in our company and all those aspects that qualify to me as human based decision making. This is a decision you have to take with a lot of responsibility, take a decision that changes somebody’s working life or even beyond that. So I feel like this is a, that’s a field where the human judgment and steering always has to beat the machine. I don’t see this as mass automation business.
26:11
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
Right, where we do again, vast databases of candidates that we run through all kinds of filters that we don’t even know what they filter for and then we get some amount dropped out in the end and we kind of feel okay, if the machine says that’s right, you, it’ll be fine. That will be the exact wrong aspect. Especially given the individuality, you know, how different each company is and assessing fit or defining fit and then you have an existing environment where the person joins in. What’s the fit within the team? Does that work? Does it work with our working style, our ways of working? The hiring manager, is that a good combination? And this to me that is a really good talent acquisition expert, right. That’s close to the business that knows what’s important in this job.
27:05
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
And I’m sure that we can take advantage of some AI Certainly, you know, in the classic field of personality testing, aptitude testings, cognitive tests, et cetera, we already see the impact tests are being much shorter. Right before you have to fill in a questionnaire, 240 questions. And thinking of a classic personality questionnaire, the New Per It’s 240 questions. You sit there for 40 minutes, you get a really good profile and then you have AI Supported Personality diagnostic 7 minutes where you rank some adjectives really different experience. I don’t think we’re there yet in matching the good test diagnostic standards with AI supported but we’re really close and I do see that this will be achieved within the next few years. It’s only going to take five minutes, maybe three minutes to fill in your personality assessment and we get really good results.
28:12
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
So that is something we can certainly then take advantage of. The costs will go down, availability is increased. So we’ll have this. But that doesn’t help us with the question we started our podcast with, right? Only because I can access the data more easily, it doesn’t mean that I make better use of the data. I’m torn. I do see the advantages, but at least around the same amount, I do see some risks that we simply being swamped by data and by random.
28:47
Speaker 3
Correlations, a million percent is going to be a really interesting period of evolution.
28:53
Matt Alder
Stephanie, thank you so much for talking to me.
28:56
Dr. Stephanie Puckett
Thank you.
28:59
Matt Alder
My thanks to Stephanie. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
