3 HR Policies That Should Be Shown the Door

Sometime today, regardless of your job or industry, you might be subjected to one of three traditional HR policies or rituals: an employment interview, an annual performance review, or an exit interview. The rituals persist because the employer thinks all the time, effort and money spent to do them is worth it because it gets results. Unfortunately, research indicates the contrary and might even cause unintended consequences that are harmful.

I question the value of an exit interview to the person who just received a pink slip. Accenture and Deloitte got rid of annual performance reviews because they found that more than half of the executives surveyed did not believe their employee review systems drove employee performance or engagement. Research has shown that how employees were judged on employment interviews was not related to subsequent work performance.

How about this? Instead of making resident and medical school applicants jump through a bunch of hoops and waste thousands of dollars traveling all over the country so they can say the same thing to 50 interviewers, why not just have a lottery for academically prequalified applicants? It would save time and money, reduce the likelihood of selection bias and subsequent minority representation and we'd most likely wind up with the same results at substantially less cost.

Of course, it is unlikely that those saved costs will be passed on in the form of reduced tuition to medical school, but at least students will have a few extra bucks to pay off their loans.