Use employee assessments to recruit employees who’ll forward your goals.
How do you find employees who really care about your organization, your mission and even your bottom line? Naysayers claim it’s impossible. But I don’t think so. Steve Jobs said, “If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.” You want more of those people on your team, right?
This comes naturally for entrepreneurs, but not always for employees. So how can you identify which candidates are going to passionately drive your organization forward with full speed?
Many executives tend to look at the resume, school background (such as being a graduate of Harvard) and work experience when evaluating a candidate. All of these are important. However, if you focus too much on any one of these, you may miss other components of performance success and culture fit. You can tip the odds in your favor by using assessments that scientifically measure how well a candidate’s traits match your organization’s positional needs, as well as your overall culture.
The right assessment measures more than personality
In addition to education and demonstrated experience, we know how important a candidate’s personality, behavior traits and personal and professional interests are when acclimating. It turns out, however, that we’re not especially adept at gathering real insight to these variables during the interview process. And, in fairness, candidates can’t be expected to self-assess issues such as how they’ll fit with the team, the leadership and the actual job itself. The bottom line: each position requires certain personality traits and cognitive abilities.
The best way to identify ideal traits is by assessing your highest performing employees and compiling the results to create a benchmark of job and culture fit. In your screening process, use this benchmark to identify those who are a close match and focus on interviewing them. According to Harvard Business Review, the job matching approach more accurately predicts job success than any other commonly accepted factors, such as education, experience or training.
When using assessments, think about your culture as a whole, but also pay careful attention to each role. Like many organizations, perhaps you have a very sales-driven culture. You might be in a very competitive industry where technology changes often and innovation is required. The kind of employee who thrives here is likely to be comfortable with change and needs very little day-to-day guidance.
Let’s drill down even further. In most sales positions, a top performer scores between a five and an eight on the competitiveness scale of the PXT™ (an assessment that measures job fit with cognitive, personality and interest scales). But perhaps your industry and culture is extraordinarily competitive, and you find your top sales people score between a seven and a 10. By having this data, you’re in a better position to identify sales people who have the right traits to succeed.
Assessments aren’t tests to be passed or failed
Assessments like the PXT™ place the candidate on a scale in comparison to the population (norming) giving you valuable insight into how closely the person matches the role. Let’s remember that humans are complicated, so don’t place too much emphasis on any one scale. Because we’re a combination of traits, it’s how those traits come together that provide a better picture into a candidate’s potential performance.
Incorporating career assessments into the hiring process is the norm
Eight of the top 10 U.S. private employers now use pre-hire assessments in their hiring process according to The Wall Street Journal. And, small and mid-sized employers are following suit. The risks are simply too high without the “x-ray vision” that a validated and reliable assessment provides. These employers have learned to minimize poor hiring decisions, which can be the difference between gaining critical market share and falling behind. In fact, a recent study showed that 46 percent of new hires failed within 18 months, and a whopping 89 percent of those failures were directly related to poor cultural fit.
More encouraging for every employer, a major study published by Harvard Business Review followed 360,000 people through their careers during a period of 20 years. It found that a key ingredient in retaining the right people is to ensure they are well matched to their jobs and culture in terms of abilities, interests and personality.
If you’re not yet using assessments as part of your selection process, and your turnover is higher than you’d like, consider how these tools could help you hire the right employees the first time.