| | September 2023MANAGEHRMAGAZINE.COM8SHAKING OFFTHE SHAKEBy Kamil Luna, CRHA, ECRE, MBA, Manager, Employer Brand & Talent, Psycho BunnyIn MyOpinionAt 9:53 in the morning of May 5th, 2023, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization, declared an end to the COVID-19 Pandemic. A day later, CBC News published an article discussing the push by big employers to return to the office. This push will likely result in a shift towards bringing back in-person interviews as part of standardized recruitment processes in most organizations.Moving interviews back to the office will allow employers to show off trendy office spaces and all those company perks in typical office tours for potential candidates. I remember doing those when I first started my recruiting career. I did so at a University Hospital. It was a fantastic experience where I was able to develop competent interviewing skills in many clinical and technical disciplines. I loved every minute of it, every minute, except for the handshakes!Everyone says hospitals are a breeding ground for infections, which sounds like a nightmare to a germaphobe like me. But then, what to do? Handshakes are vital to the interviewing experience, are they not? I remember professors in the MBA program reiterating the importance of a handshake and the lasting impression it can make on an interviewer. A proper handshake would make or break you at an interview. A quick internet search on how to properly prepare for interviews will yield many results expounding on how to properly handshake, the pitfalls to avoid, and how to properly train yourself to shake the perfect shake.The pandemic solved this problem for me, and several articles discussed the end of the handshake as a cultural practice for greeting. I was elated. But the shake is coming back. Don't get me wrong, I have overcome my issues with microbes and viruses, and they in no way impede me from partaking in established or expected work practices. Still, this is an opportunity to rethink how the act of clasping hands with a stranger may affect your decision to hire or not.As a talent acquisition professional, I understand recruitment and selection is about choosing the right candidate for a job. Choosing the right person is crucial for business success, and doing so should be done to minimize potential selection errors. It is the standard practice of talent acquisition professionals to use measuring tools to that effect, whether standardized interviews, assessments, work samples or tests. Using these selection tools helps recruiters avoid gut-driven decisions. These measuring tools need to be valid, reliable and free from bias. Let us analyze these criteria as they pertain to the behaviour in question. Does a handshake tell me anything about a candidate's capacity to perform job-related functions and its predictive validity, or otherwise, what is the correlation between the grip and job performance?I was introduced to the concepts of validity and reliability when I was first learning about recruitment and selection practices in university; in other words, does an assessment yield consistent results over time and across raters and accurately measure what it is supposed to measure without bias? Only some studies derived from experience or experiments have delved into the validity and reliability of handshakes; one of particular interest looks at the handshake and its correlation with the big five personality traits, specifically on how they affect first-impression accuracy. The study concluded that sharing someone's hand does not increase Kamil Luna
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