Here’s the Secret to Hiring Better Fitting Employees
Hiring an employee is knowing what you are looking for and how to find it in an applicant
Considering hiring a new employee?
Despite what we see in the movies, meeting an interesting stranger, hitting it off after a few hours and flying to Vegas to get married is not usually a formula for long-term success. Does it happen and can it work out?
Sure, but the odds are stacked against it. Yet that is how most of us hire a new employee. A couple of dates and we pop the question.
In an article entitled Cost of Making a Bad Hire? A Lot, But only if You React Slow and Never Change, Lance Haun demonstrated how the financial cost of a bad hire can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not only does the wrong hire cost money it can waste time and energy, damage your reputation and harm the morale of other employees.
Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, in his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, pointed out that our first fast thinking impressions, while necessary for daily functionality, do not always provide the best decision-making information. Even when your impression turns out to be fairly accurate, there may be a disconnect between the characteristics you were attracted to and what is required to succeed in a role.
At the time a hiring decision is made you usually believe you are making the right decision.
Yet data shows that 30-50 percent or more of hiring decisions are not successful. Hiring decisions are usually based on limited data.
Often, we do not really know what impressions we should be looking for and rely on our gut feelings or the recommendations from others, including our friends and maybe family. And, while you may trust their recommendations if they are not intimately familiar with the job and your company their judgment may not be enough.
Candidate Assessment
To augment your existing hiring process, you may want to consider incorporating the use of more objective screening measures such as psychometric assessments.
I am not talking about a deep psychological assessment, as can be done for jobs in highly sensitive areas, but the more simple screening for general characteristics. The two I have used most frequently include screening for personality characteristics and for emotional intelligence.
Screening for personality characteristics is among the most common and accessible tools available.
Personality characteristics can provide insights into the preferences and behaviors an individual is naturally inclined to exhibit. These insights can provide you with information to assess how comfortable a candidate will be working in your organization, with the team and in the role.
When you combine this with the skills and qualifications you are already assessing you can obtain a more accurate picture of ability and fit.
How does this process work?
Here are four key steps to determine employee fit:
1. Clarify your organizations personality and/or the personality of the relevant manager and team it is not enough to assess the personality of incoming candidates.
You must understand what you want and need. This does not mean hiring in the image of your leaders or to match members of a team, because as with other things in life diversity is important when considering the personality make up of your team.
Understanding the personality culture of a team can help you identify which candidates may be a better fit.
2. Identify the personality characteristics that match for the role technical qualifications and skills are important but do not tell the entire story of success.
The best job description incorporates not only qualifications but also the required characteristics of a role.
3. Design recruitment materials that will attract the right candidate you want to attract the attention of the best fitting candidate by reflecting the characteristics of the role, team, and organization within the recruiting process.
On the downside, by presenting too much information publicly you run the risk of candidates trying to mirror what you are looking for and not presenting their true selves.
4. Evaluate the personality characteristics of candidates once you know what you are looking for, it can be easier to spot.
You can design questions that help identify desired characteristics and/or you can ask candidates to complete screening assessments. (I use one called Typefocus.) No screening tool is without flaws, but these tools can provide you with more objective data to add to your decision-making process.
No Guarantees
Candidate personality profiling does not guarantee there will be no future problems.
However, a bonus of this method is that the information you acquire can be used to gain insights into your employees and organization and used to contribute to effective employee management, training, communication, and relationship building.
Does this seem like a lot of extra work?
It need not be, and it need not be expensive. You do not need to be a large corporation to include more comprehensive screening and assessment processes. Small and mid-sized business can implement some of these steps for only a few hundred dollars.
Before eloping with that new hire take a step back and determine who you really want and need on your team and include those insights in the hiring process.
Related articles:
3 Considerations Before Hiring a New Employee
