Employee retention is no doubt a key challenge. A recent study by Gartner states that the rate of employee turnover is likely to be up to 75% higher. And in addition, it takes 18% longer to fill any available jobs than pre-pandemic. Not to mention the annoying “quiet quitting” phenomenon, which is white-anting businesses too!

Robert Half’s 2022 Salary Guide states that 78 per cent of employees are prepared to walk out the door if their pay rise request is not accepted. No wonder 31% of employers say their biggest challenge this year will be retaining top performers.

And the reasons why staff retention is affected?

The main reasons employees are leaving and affecting employee retention are:

Inadequate salary, deficient perks and benefits, overworked, lack of support, career progression, better work-life balance, absence of recognition, and unhappiness with management.

What can you do?

Whether we are trying to shift a few covid kilos or improve our qualifications doesn’t matter. There is never a single magic bullet. It’s usually a series of conscious actions and the discipline to implement them that results in the outcome we seek.

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.

– Lao Tzu

Let’s start from the very beginning

Getting back to the basics by reviewing your people processes is a perfect place to begin to improve staff retention in your organisation. Here are a few thought starters.

#1 Realistic Position previews

The talent competition is fierce, and at an all-time high, so your recruitment process needs to be engaging, timely and professional. How you or your team handle the recruitment process can strongly influence the desire for a new player to choose to join your company or not.

Research shows that providing applicants with a realistic job preview during the recruitment process positively affects the retention of those new hires. Selling the job or the business as Utopia is not a good idea.

#2 Professional interviews to increase employee retention

When it comes to interview questions, “where do you see yourself in 5 years?” or “sell me that pen” are way past their use-by date. The objective of the initial interview is to confirm that skills and abilities align.

The goal of the second or final interview is to confirm fit. Is the applicant a good fit for the job? Equally important is for the candidate to verify if the job is a good fit for them.

It’s a lot less costly to retain people than hire new staff, and with retention as key focus, you need objective information to de-risk the selection process. Tools like our customisable psychometric GR8PI assessments will give you these critical candidate insights— insights that are impossible to glean at an interview.

#3 Socialise and onboard for retention

Early failure is often high among new employees, and hybrid work has added further complexity.

Onboarding aims to help your new team member understand how to be successful in their new job. First impressions count: you have one chance to make a great first impression when an employee starts with your company.

So, it’s best to ensure you have strategic onboarding and assimilation processes that can quickly help new people become embedded in your business and the role. And therefore, more likely to stay. Possible approaches here include:

shared and individualised learning experiences, formal and informal activities that help people get to know one another and assigning experienced employees as role models or mentors for new staff.

#4 Managers are key to minimise staff turnover

Those first few weeks and months in a new employee’s job are critical, especially in the new hybrid world. A first-rate manager-employee relationship is vital in delivering the employee experience and connection to the business for retention.

Compounding the challenge, many managers have never received any formal people management training. Frequently, a person has made it to manager due to tenure, success in their previous role, or the desire to retain a person.

While these may be valid, today, managers need access to new tools to lead and manage their employees. Such tools help them foster career aspirations, well-being, and connection to the organisational culture.

#5 Training and development to improve employee retention

CFO to CEO: “What will we do if we train them and they leave?”

CEO to CFO “What if we don’t and they stay?”

This conversation rings true today more than ever.

But not just any old training works. Sending your people to a one size fits all training course is just wasting money. Everyone learns differently, and unless you fully understand what training is appropriate for each employee, you will not achieve the outcomes.

A gap analysis can clearly highlight the specific deficiencies. Our customisable GR8PI suite of dimensions helps you identify gaps. By enabling you to benchmark and compare your staff at a glance, you can customise the thorough training needed across the various groups.

Elon Musk says, “Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.”

If you’d like some help in this area, please reach out or book a call to learn more.

The post Five ways of reducing the risk of dropping employee retention appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

This statement below I came across recently brought a smile to my face as it reminded me of this.

Can you perform under pressure? asked the recruiter. 

No, said the candidate, but I do a mean Bohemian Rhapsody!

Some more standard features you might see employers looking for in hiring an ideal candidate are:  

• Ambitious
• Resilient 
• Bubbly personality or Can-do attitude
• Clear thinker and have a Strong work ethic 
• Share our passion
• Accuracy and Attention to detail
• a Team player, a Strong Leader, and yes, Perform Under Pressure!

As an illustration, the typical wish list for the “perfect employee” often reads something like this:

“We are looking for someone ambitious who will demonstrate initiative and resilience has the maturity always to remain calm and professional. You will have an excellent work ethic and have outstanding communication skills. 

You are respectful and enjoy working in a team in a fast-paced environment in which you will be able to prioritise and handle multiple tasks while meeting deadlines”.

Job advertisements will also include what the work involves, and the qualifications and experience needed to be a successful applicant.

Consider the total recruitment cost of hiring a non-ideal candidate

Despite rigorous selection processes, many studies tell us that up to 50% of new hires fail within 18 months.

For Australian businesses, the cost of these failures is indeed high. Recent research discovered the direct recruitment costs to hire ONE employee are on average a staggering $19,000! 

Add to that another 30% to 50% of the annual salary with the total cost of induction, orientation, training, maintenance, termination, and lost opportunity.

There would be “skin and hair flying” in many management meetings if all these costs showed up on a Profit and Loss Statement line.

Your choice

So, what gets in the way of more consistent selection outcomes when it comes to hiring an ideal candidate based on a wish list? Most would agree that even the most basic selection process can get it right with the required qualifications and experience for a role. 

However, when it comes to attributes similar to the examples below, the ability to precisely assess if the person sitting in front of us possesses these is close to impossible:

• Tenacious 
• Ambitious
• Resilient 
• possesses Initiative
• will Remain calm and professional, and
• has an Excellent work ethic.

People tell us what they think we want to hear; after all, they are looking for a job!

Consequently, many of us make our hiring decisions based on our “gut feel” and what we “liked” about the candidate during the interview. In essence, we hire people we like. 

Given that research tells us that more than 40% of Australians think it’s okay to lie during an interview, this stacks the odds against us. We need to add some objective data to our “gut feel” to help us get it right more consistently.

The way forward for hiring more ideal candidates

The next generation award-winning Great People Inside (GPI) customisable assessment platform now available in Australia allows you to choose those specific attributes on your recruitment wish list. 

Therefore, if you want to assess certain attributes, these can readily be selected. For example, attributes like: 

• Resilience
• Tenacity
• Ambition
• Discipline
• Customer Focus
• Closing sales.

Over 60 validated psychometric dimensions are available to precisely evaluate the crucial traits for both your business and the specific role. And if we don’t have what you need, we will build it for you.  We call this full customisation.

With this in mind, no longer are you restricted to relying on your gut feel and hiring people you “like”. You can easily create GPI assessments as short or as long as you wish.

By adopting this approach, specific objective data can be added to your selection process and increase your success rate by up to 300%.

Don’t take our word for it!

We were delighted to recently receive the following feedback from one of our clients who has been using with great success the GPI platform for more than 18 months. This client uses the GPI platform to assess alignment to the company values of both internal employees and new recruits.

They tell us, “We are observing through using the GPI profiling tool to test for values fit, we are naturally defining critical success factors to base our hiring decisions on.

The more we benchmark our top performers and see success in our new recruits, the more we learn about what are the critical behaviours and interests that make a person a successful cultural fit in our business.

Whilst we would like to think we were good at picking this up before, GPI provides us with an evidence-based, tangible tool to confirm this and has been a real value add to our hiring decisions”. 

If you’d like to learn more, we’d be happy to let you try us for free. Click HERE, and we’ll be in touch straight away. 

The post Your ideal candidate when hiring – what’s on your wish list? appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

In Australia today, we are lucky that we have a highly educated and well-trained workforce, which logically means that most employees in Australia have the skills and competencies to perform their jobs well. But if this is the case, why is the hiring success rate so inconsistent?

Most new employees fail – not because they are incompetent or don’t have the required skills – but because they don’t “fit” with the practice owner, the manager, or their colleagues or due to other factors.

What is fit?

Culture fit (the alignment of values, beliefs, and behaviours between the employee and employer) has become another one of those also overused cliches in business-speak. While it is essential, the issue when hiring is that it means different things to different people. As a result, hiring for culture fit alone can be difficult to measure and is not a reliable predictor of high performance. When we speak of ‘fit” we are talking about much more than culture fit alone. Our definition of “fit” is as follows:

• Can the person handle the mental demands of this job?
• Will they enjoy the environment and the people they must work with?
• Are they highly motivated by this type of work?

Hardwiring

Psychologists tell us that our core traits and beliefs about ourselves and the world are hardwired into our brains by the time we are 10 or 12 years of age. Of course, as people we evolve and develop, however our deep-set inner identity and core beliefs about ourselves, others and how the world works are intensely cast in our DNA and are hard to change. 

As we go about our daily work in the business, many of us will have observed our top-performing employees going about their jobs quite differently. Still, despite different approaches, they consistently deliver top outcomes and results.

Achieving these top outcomes and results is the DNA we refer to, the four or five key qualities most important to your business and that are possessed in abundance by your top performers. These qualities are the heartbeat of your company. We call this success DNA and when it comes to hiring new team members, they are non-negotiable.

The importance of fit

The low hiring success rate clearly demonstrates that if the right potential employees who share these critical success qualities are not found and employed, and you select a person who doesn’t fit, it’s unlikely this person will deliver top performance for your business. In fact, it’s estimated that 46% of newly hired employees won’t survive for a year because they aren’t a good fit for the job. Poor DNA matches are the number one reason why people become disengaged, dislike their managers or colleagues, and eventually fail or leave their jobs.

Modify your process by benchmarking your top performers

Unless you understand your top performers’ DNA success attributes, then the traditional selection process will continue to deliver less than 25% of top performers. The science-based Great People Inside customisable profiling tools we recommend will enable you to identify and quantify the success attributes they share greatly contributing to your business. When recruiting, you can measure your potential new recruits against these attributes to ensure they also have the required success DNA fit for your business.

Our easy-to-read plain language reports will also help you take your interviewing approach to new heights. Our Management Coaching and Onboarding reports will make sure your new team member contributes as quickly as possible.

Great People Inside assessments are customisable – so what?

Compared to assessments you may have used or taken yourself previously, Great People Inside assessments are the next generation – think original Nokia phone and iPhone 12!

You may be familiar with assessments that have been around for many years where you measure the dimensions the assessment provider has configured; you have no choice and no control. As a result, you may be measuring (and paying for) what you don’t need. Our customisation feature allows you to design an assessment that measures what you want to measure best suited to your business, which means you are in control, and most importantly, you decide what you want to pay. Even with its unique customisation features, GPI will usually be at the cost of comparable assessments (where they exist).

Don’t just take our word for it

For the second year in a row, the Great People Inside platform has been in the top 10 best rating tools in the world.

It is a huge honour for us to find ourselves among the best yet again this year.  In July 2020 Great People Inside was also ranked #16 assessment tool in the world by AHRI. 

If you’d like to find out more please click here to contact us or email australia@greatpeopleinside.com

The post Culture fit and diversity – how to hire for your business appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

You might ask yourself, “does this person have the right skills to perform the job?.. the right credentials?.. enough experience?.. will they fit in with the workplace culture?” While some of these questions can be easily answered with a CV and interview, others are trickier. One question that is difficult to answer through the traditional hiring process is “will this person be a high performer and engaged with their work?”

Great managers know that higher employee engagement levels in the workplace translate to higher productivity and better company performance. So how can hiring managers improve the likelihood of hiring highly engaged top performers?

It all starts with thinking about job fit, rather than experience, qualifications, and even age and gender. Studies have shown that these factors are not statistical indicators of future top performance in a job, but that ‘fit’ is what counts if you want a top performer.

Job fit refers to how well a person is suited to their job role and the surrounding workplace culture. Whether or not a person ‘fits’ in a certain role depends on a few factors, for example their attitude, personality and enthusiasm for the work at hand. To find out which candidate is the right fit for the job and culture, hiring managers must check their biases at the door and use objective information to make their decision. This can be trickier than it sounds, but it can be done.

Assessment tools that allow you to develop a customised benchmark or model for the role you are hiring for bring objectivity into the hiring process. They validate data on existing performance, job tasks and results so that you hire individuals who are indisputably right for the role.

How does it work?

Hire someone who is objectively the right fit

Choosing the right person for a role can influence how long they stay in the job and how engaged they are with their work. According to studies of more than 650,000 people by Towers Watson, businesses can expect a 13.7% rise in net income with engaged employees. While this knowledge is fairly widespread with hiring managers, the wrong people still get hired for roles time and time again. Why? Hiring someone through the traditional interview process alone can be a bit of a guessing game. Someone might be highly proficient at talking their way through the interview process, but their skills at talking the talk mightn’t translate to walking the walk in the job. Validated benchmarkable assessments take the guesswork out of the hiring process. They evaluate information about a person that cannot be determined by a traditional job interview. Instead of solely relying on opinions or a hunch, the assessments we recommend provide you with tools which use objective data to determine whether your candidate is right for the role.

Use your top performers as a benchmark for new talent

When a top performer walks out the door, it often feels like you’re back at square one, scrambling to build your team from the ground up again. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Companies, teams and hiring managers have the ability to make the process of replacing top performers easier, while improving their hiring process each time.

The assessment tools we recommend can increase your success rate of identifying future top performers by 300%. These tools use information pertaining to your best talents’ abilities, personality traits, behaviours, and preferred learning styles. Using this information creates a benchmark for hiring new people who can successfully fill the shoes of your existing and past top performers.

Avoid hidden biases

It’s difficult to glean more than credentials and a few superficial personality traits during the traditional hiring process. Because of this, managers often need to rely on instinct when hiring someone new. Unfortunately a person’s instinct can be riddled with pre-existing biases towards certain types of people, whether it’s people from a certain race, gender or even people with similar interests to them.

As much as we’d like to say that this doesn’t happen, it’s more common than you might think. In an experiment by Harvard and Princeton, a blind hiring process increased the likelihood of a woman being hired by between 25% and 46%. This is bad news for company performance. Hiring according to hidden biases significantly narrows your options according to information that doesn’t necessarily pertain to candidates succeeding in the role. The range of assessment tools we recommend remove bias from the recruitment process so that you can choose candidates that will help drive team and company performance and answer the question you had when starting the hiring process – “will this person be a high performer in this role?” Which, after all, is what recruitment is all about!

If you would like to learn more about how Directions Unlimited can help you objectively measure the required attributes for roles within your business and increase your success rate by 300% then contact us: info@directionsunlimited.com.au 

The post How to hire a top performer using an assessment tool appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

Think about the last significant purchase you made. It’s likely that you obtained some objective data to help with your decision making, but what objective data have you available when making recruitment selection decisions?

Recruitment process

So, your business is going well and you’ve decided it’s time to hire a new employee or two. You define the role, quantify the qualifications and experience the person needs to have, place your job advertisement all over the internet, or depending on your business, brief your HR Manager or engage a recruitment company.

The “fun” has only just begun. Research shows we get it right about 25% of the time! By “get it right” we mean hiring a top performer, not just a good or adequate performer. Think about that, a process that delivers the right outcome only 25% of the time – I doubt you would tolerate this in any other part of your business.

Yes, hiring new people is far more than checking a resume, ‘liking’ a candidate at interview, and trusting the rest to luck.

But don’t be too hard on yourself, given that studies show around 50% of candidates embellish their resumes and a staggering 81% tell lies during an interview, it’s no wonder you struggle to get it right.

There’s a science behind the selection of new employees which can revolutionise your process and the way you identify and develop top performers.

The importance of “Fit”

Having followed 360,000 people through their careers during a period of 20 years, a major study published by Harvard Business Review demonstrated that a key ingredient in selecting and retaining people is ensuring that they are matched to their jobs in terms of their abilities, interests, and personalities. The study discovered that educational qualifications, experience, age, gender or race are not statistical predictors of top performance in a job. That’s a bit scary, because that’s what we see on resumes and also what most employers use when selecting new people.

The study demonstrated though, that when you put people in jobs where the demands of the job matched their own abilities, where the stimulation offered by the job matched their particular interests, and where the cultural demands of the position matched their personalities, staff turnover decreased dramatically, and productivity increased drastically.

What exactly is “Fit?”

“Fit” is the degree of compatibility between an individual’s strengths, needs, and wants in a particular job and work environment. When interests align, the employee and the organisation experience a good job fit. Establishing job fit helps to identify and place individuals in positions where they are likely to be successful. Job fit determines if a person CAN do a job, HOW they will do a job, and if they will ENJOY doing the job.

Why should you establish fit?

Did you know that employees who are well matched to their jobs are 2.5 times more productive on the job? Studies show that proper job fit improves engagement and job satisfaction, resulting in increased productivity, while negative factors such as job related stress, tension, workplace conflict, and costly employee turnover diminish it. There are numerous studies over the past five to ten years that demonstrate the significant impact increased productivity, reduced employee turnover and early failure have on your bottom line. CHA-CHING! It makes sense to establish fit.

How to establish fit

Do you wish you could consistently replicate high performers? It’s easy to recognise top performers when you see them in action or review their numbers. The challenge is understanding what makes these people successful, and ensuring future candidates share these success factors.

A key component in establishing job fit is to know exactly what the role or position in question demands. The first step we recommend is to create a comprehensive and detailed job description.

Then, using a validated assessment, identify the characteristics of employees who have demonstrated success in that particular position. You can then use this data as a basis for developing a performance model (benchmark) which can be used when evaluating potential applicants to help predict their future success. Our Job fit solutions combine tested and reliable data derived from employee assessments with customised data to create a benchmark, which will match candidates to the job and specific company. In essence, our validated assessments and people analytic tools help you extract the ‘success DNA’ of your most productive staff.

How does job fit help?

Job fit assessments help you make better hiring decisions by helping you understand the core characteristics of your top performers. There is no greater tragedy in business than hiring competent employees into jobs in which they are destined to fail. When this happens, their potential is wasted and its costs you between half and two thirds of their salary!

Our hiring solutions measure the essential behaviour characteristics you need to make the most intelligent hiring and selection decisions. Our assessment tool kits help business owners, professional recruiters and hiring managers predict job suitability, and accurately assist in matching people with the work they will do in their new jobs.

Today, many organisations use job fit assessments throughout the interview process to learn more about job candidates. There are many kinds of employee assessments available, but the most successful hiring assessments use job fit as a tool to increase consistency and success in the hiring process. By including job fit as a key factor in their employee selection and redeployment process, our clients hiring procedure is significantly more effective, and results in an increase of up to 300% in identifying future top performers.

So, whether you are business owner or leader, a HR manager or a professional recruiter, we have a hiring solution tool kit to meet your needs. Of course, you can also stick with that process that works 25% of the time! Contact us to get started finding the right fit.

The post There is a shortage of great talent out there appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

High staff turnover within a business can result in huge costs. The fact is that there is no line in your profit and loss that captures the cost of lost customers, lost opportunities, and dips in morale so it’s very difficult for businesses to track the real cost.

A study conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management found that it can cost the equivalent of six to nine months of an employee’s salary in order to recruit and train a replacement. When you consider an employee with a salary of $100,000, this means it would cost over $50,000 to replace them! When that employee is a high performer, the costs are even greater as a result of lost productivity, lost customers or clients, and other opportunity costs.

Failing to retain high performers also impacts the rest of your team through increased stress within the workplace, dips in employee morale, and drops in productivity that can spread company wide. Even when a new employee has been trained, it can take months, if not years, for them to be as productive and high performing as a long term high performing employee.

So, it makes sense then to do everything you can to keep these top performers in your business. It’s not enough anymore to just assume that people are happy in their job because it puts food on the table. People require much more to be happy and engaged at work, and it’s our job as business owners and leaders to facilitate that.

Retaining your best people

The best way to retain your top performers is by understanding who they are as people, how they fit into their roles and your business as a whole, and what is likely to keep them engaged and happy. Essentially, you need to know what makes them tick.

Would a flexible working arrangement or free lunch bring out the best in them? Would above average pay or an extra week off in the year make your employee work harder? Would promoting from within and offering training and upskilling ensure that your employee remains loyal to your brand?

While all of these ideas are great for keeping employees happy and content, sometimes it can feel a little like throwing it all at the wall and hoping something sticks!

If you knew there was a way to learn everything you need to know about your employees, so that you can help them fit in and stay in your business, wouldn’t that be better? A directed and tailored approach to retaining your staff can help your business soar.

How to know what makes your employees tick

If you’re looking to understand more about your current employees so you can nurture and retain them successfully – a good, objective assessment tool can help you do this, such as the ProfileXT assessment.

ProfileXT gives you a full understanding of an employee’s abilities, personality traits, behaviours, and preferred learning styles. In addition, you also gain insights into the employee’s interests which helps you understand what motivates them and which parts of their role they are most interested in.

Overall, you’re learning whether or not the employee fits within their role and the overall culture of the team – we call this the JobFit. Now, the goal isn’t to pit your team against one another, but rather to understand them completely so that you can ensure they fit into their role, remain fulfilled, and optimise their strengths and skills.

Ensuring you have the right fit within your business is the most important aspect. When a person is the right fit in their role, they enjoy the work they do and as a result productivity and employee engagement increases. This leads to improved retention, better business outcomes and improved profitability.

The next steps

Once you better understand your employees, you can take informed steps to keep them happy and motivated. This will vary between workplaces and employees, so it’s a good idea to have a few branches to your ongoing retention plans.

You’ll get an understanding of what tactics will work best with your employees once you have assessed them using an objective tool. However, there are some common actions which contribute effectively to retention. According to a study by the Australian Human Resources Institute, the most effective ways to retain employees are through offering effective management and leadership, providing opportunities for career progression and promotion, and facilitating a positive workplace culture.

By implementing a strong retention plan within your workplace, you can reap benefits for your business such as significant cost savings, higher productivity and improved quality of work, along with boosts in employee morale and team culture. In short, everybody wins.

To find out how you can retain your top performers and ensure that they are fulfilled within their roles, contact us today.

Of course to retain top performers, you need to source them in the first place! To find out how, check out our posts on how you can source top performing talent for your business and how to avoid a bad hire.

The post How to retain your best people through understanding what makes them tick appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

This is where things can get a bit muddy. Small to medium sized businesses often struggle with the recruitment process as they may not have to hire often and therefore are not going through the process of recruiting and interviewing enough to keep up a consistent standard of practice.

If a small to medium sized business has a HR department they may have increased success hiring the right person for the job as they will likely recruit frequently and are generally far more accustomed to interviewing. However, regardless of who is managing the recruitment process, using an intuitive hiring approach only; that is, making a hiring decision based on ‘feeling good’ about or liking someone, will mean increasing the risk of making a bad hire. In fact research tells us using this method we get a top performer only about 25% of the time!

Reflect for a moment on the last major purchasing decision you made, for example a laptop, Smart TV or car. It’s highly probable your decision was not solely based on intuition but that you researched and obtained as much data as possible on your potential purchase and a combination of both informed your final decision.

Why should the process be different when hiring someone for your business? Relying solely on resumes (which may be embellished), interviews and references does not provide us with the objective data we need to increase our success rate of hiring the right people.

What is a bad hire?

A bad hire is a person who ultimately doesn’t suit the role or the business. It doesn’t necessarily mean there is anything wrong with that individual – just that they don’t fit that role or that organisation. This could be for any number of reasons, such as a cultural misfit or the wrong skill set or approach.

Why is a bad hire so bad?

Employing someone and then realising they were a bad hire can impact your business in many ways.

Hiring the wrong people who don’t perform as expected can cost your business significantly. When a person has the right fit in their role, they enjoy the work they do and as a result productivity and employee engagement increases. Take the opportunity and employee engagement cost for example. Studies of more than 650,000 people by Towers Watson demonstrated that companies with high levels of employee engagement enjoyed:

– 19.2% increase in operating income in the 12 months (vs a 32.7% decline)
– 13.7% rise in net income (vs a 3.8% decline)
– 27.8% increase in earnings-per-share (EPS) (vs an 11.2% decline)

If you don’t have the right people in your business, you miss out on this great opportunity.

Additionally the costs of recruitment, especially if those people don’t remain in your business, are extremely high. This includes the money and time it takes to advertise, interview and accept a new employee. Then you have to train them, build their skills and invest time, energy, resources and money into doing so. By then you realise that this position for this person was not a good fit or they leave after a few months. This creates a great deal of extra strain on your business and team.

Consultancy Firm Retail Solution recently did a survey that found staff turnover in the first 12 months of hire is costing $3.8 billion in lost productivity across Australia. With those figures it’s easy to see why recruiting the right people is paramount to your business’ success!

Hiring the wrong person for the role, and subsequently losing them, might also give your business a negative brand or reputation hit. Remember that your current and ex-employees are your brand advocates and can have a huge impact on how the rest of the world sees you, especially with social media sharing and employer reviews on the rise.

How to overhaul your recruitment and interview process

Ideally, your recruitment process would look like this: you have identified a role that needs to be filled within your business. Once you have developed your job description you should create a role benchmark for the position. There are lots of tools out there to help you do this but we recommend the ProfileXT assessment as it’s the most accurate on the market and has benchmarking capabilities that allow you to scientifically measure and quantify the critical success attributes of the role unique to your organisation.

Then using the information from the role benchmark you can develop a targeted job advertisement (or we can help!) What do we mean by a targeted job ad? Most job ads these days can be a bit blah and look more like a job description than an engaging, exciting invitation to apply for a role. We recommend really “speaking” to potential candidates in the ad by explaining what is required to be a top performer in the role and by answering the burning question for the applicant – What’s in it for me?

You can include some screening questions in your advertisement to make sure candidates possess those basic skills required to do the role. These are skills you are just not willing to train for, such as email etiquette, English grammar or Microsoft skills. We recommend using an online skills assessment as part of the process. These are cost effective, short online questionnaires that can be customised if you wish and provide a rating on the candidate’s knowledge to help you significantly speed up screening applications.

Once you have reviewed the resumes, conduct the first screening interview either by phone or in person. Then develop a shortlist and invite candidates in for their first face to face interview. It’s in these interviews where you will confirm the skills, qualifications and experience of the candidates.

You then develop your shortened shortlist, and invite those people to complete an objective behavioural online assessment.

This process of objective behavioural assessments gives you a full understanding of a candidate’s abilities, personality traits, behaviours, interests and preferred learning styles. In addition you also gain insights into the candidate’s interests which helps you understand if they are interested in the type of work on offer. Making people decisions is about information and this objective data will help you immensely as you make your final decisions and offer the position.

Overall, the best thing you can do for your business is to determine fit, rather than just to verify the details of the candidate’s resume. Your goal should be to use the interview to determine whether your candidate is a fit with the role and whether they will fit into your existing team. This is where our assessment tools such as the ProfileXT assessment tool that measures JobFit can help.

What should I look for in an assessment tool?

A good assessment tool will cover the entire employee lifecycle, from developing the job description, through to the process of selecting, hiring, and developing them.

Ideally the assessment tool should be normed for the population and allow you to develop benchmarks that are unique to your team and culture.

The ProfileXT assessment does this really well as it shows at a glance how the candidate compares to the benchmark of the role and provides you with an interview guide report complete with suggested questions that help you to drill into any potential obstacles to success.

By using an online assessment tool such as ProfileXT, you can determine how well a candidate will fit within your workplace culture. ProfileXT allows you to look at the behaviours, attitudes and personalities of candidates as compared to the rest of your team, and helps you understand whether the candidate will be a good fit or not – this is the JobFit aspect.

JobFit also assesses the mental and physical demands of the role, the atmosphere and environment, and desired personality and behavioural traits, to give an outline of the type of person best suited for that role. This has proven to be extremely useful for businesses in helping them avoid bad hires.

Put simply, the ProfileXT assessment and JobFit give you essential objective data that cannot be determined by a traditional interview.

The facts are that the ProfileXT assessment, the basis of JobFit, has the highest predictive reliability of any assessments in the marketplace. Imagine having such a deep understanding of your new employee before they even begin work!

Where to from here?

It’s important to note that you don’t have to overhaul your recruitment process completely to successfully hire the right person. You can keep doing what you’re doing when it comes to finding and narrowing down to your shortlist of candidates. Then, once you have developed your shortlist, you can assess those people and compare them to the role benchmark to see how they fit. An objective assessment tool, such as ProfileXT, can easily dovetail your existing process.

So, are you sick of hiring the wrong people in your business? Contact us today to start overhauling your hiring and interview process.

The post How to avoid bad hires by overhauling your interview process appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

Many businesses are finding that their recruits aren’t meeting their expectations of performance or cultural fit. There is a clear gap between how Australian businesses recruit and the desired results. What’s going wrong?

The traditional route

The recruitment process has long been undertaken in the same way. You need to fill a role, so you advertise and state your requirements. Most job ads will refer to requirements such as year’s of experience, qualifications, or broad skills.

Let’s say your job ad includes requirements like 5+ years of experience in the particular industry, a university degree and a ‘team player’ mentality.

So, you advertise for the role, you receive applications and you begin to sift through them, hoping the right candidate will jump out at you. As it turns out, once you sit down and review the applications, you realise you know very little about the candidates that have applied. You know whether they fit the criteria you’ve given, but you don’t know how they work, who they are and what they can offer your team. You don’t know whether they’ll perform or whether they’ll be the right fit.

As it turns out the criteria you’ve used to attract candidates – years of experience, tertiary qualifications and broad skills – are not indicators of performance. And when you think about how little we learn when we judge people based on these criteria – doesn’t that make a whole lot of sense?

Not only does the traditional model of recruitment make it difficult to identify the best candidates, it can actually put up barriers to finding the right candidates. Most businesses end up reducing the pool of candidates based on criteria that ultimately contribute very little to the success of that candidate. Just think, you could actually be deterring people who would perform well in your team from even applying!

So, we know the old way of recruiting doesn’t work.

What’s the alternative?

The good news is there are ways to improve your recruitment process and ensure you are doing the most you can to attract top performers for your business. New and bespoke ways to recruit top performing talent can be the difference between your new hire being the right fit for your business…or not.

These days it’s not just about filling a role with the person that has the best university degree or the most highly regarded experience. In fact, big players like Ernst and Young are abandoning such methods, in favour of a new approach of recruiting based on the person themselves, and how they will fit within the team.

Overall, this alternative is about choosing people based on who they are as a person, and whether or not their attitude, behaviours and personality are the right fit for your business, and vice versa.

The criteria used when advertising a job should be more about the type of person you are looking for, and less about the job itself. This will broaden the field of potential applicants, as you’re removing possible hurdles such as a required number of years experience. Many tools of the trade can be taught and learnt, but a person’s attitude and personality are pretty set.

Assessing behaviours, attitudes and personality

The best thing you can do for your business is to delve a little deeper, and look at the behaviours, attitudes and personalities of candidates as compared to the rest of the team. The key is to benchmark your team to allow you to understand whether the candidate will be a good fit or not.

This is where a tool such as JobFit can really help by removing the guesswork. JobFit is a tool that identifies the attributes of a role as benchmarked against the team so you can understand whether the candidate will be a high performer, and also whether they will be a good fit with the team. After all, there’s no point hiring someone who may have the potential to excel, if they’re unlikely to fit into the team – this can be one of the major considerations for people when they leave a role early on.

JobFit assesses the mental and physical demands of the role, the atmosphere and environment, and desired personality and behavioural traits, to give an outline of the type of person best suited for that role.

It gives businesses the opportunity to better match the role with candidates that fit the profile, for the benefit of both the business and the candidate. The process gives insight into the candidate and tells you whether or not they have the attributes to successfully do the job, enjoy it, and how they are likely to perform. By utilising this tool, you’ll not only have the best chance at securing a new hire that is a fit for the role, in every sense of the word, but you’ll also have a clear indication of what lies ahead with that person and how they will approach the role and their tasks. What an insight!

If you’d like to talk about how we can help build your high performing team, contact us today.

The post Why you’re not sourcing top performing talent and what you can do about it appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

Have you ever taken part in one of those ‘team building’ exercises involving Kumbaya songs and choosing the fruit, dog or piece of furniture that most resembles you?

Even worse, the totally inappropriate ‘therapy groups’ or bonding sessions involving extreme sports, splatter guns and excess alcohol?

If so, this blog should be music to your ears.

Genuine team development is a strategic, long-term process which blends individuals with different and complementary talents into a high-functioning unit which is constantly evolving.

The best teams are dynamic, with members always seeking to understand each other more fully, contribute more effectively and function in a more productive way – both individually and as part of the team.

The process of building and developing a high performing team never happens by accident.

And neither does excitement.

Smart managers know that teams need the right guidance, motivation and behavioural assessment to fire them up and get them moving to the next level.

Authentic leadership is the key

Behind every successful and innovative team is a true leader – the more authentic, the better.

Authentic leaders know and value who they are, living and working according to deeply held ethics and beliefs.

The idea was popularised by American management guru Warren Bennis in his 1989 book On Becoming a Leader, gaining further attention through the 2003 publication Authentic Leadership by Bill George, a professor at the Harvard Business School.

Such leaders know and accept themselves, presenting a genuine and empathetic face to their staff and teams.

They embrace their weaknesses and own their mistakes, never blaming others for their own failings or covering up to save face.

Communication is truthful and direct, leading with the heart and not just the mind.

But they’re no softies. Truly authentic leaders always keep their goal in mind – the good of the organisation they work for. Mission-driven, they are able to separate out personal feelings from work imperatives.

How to use authentic leadership to excite the team

The smartest leaders know that teams can only thrive in a conducive work environment.

The company they work for must provide the springboard of strong culture, sound values and true determination to succeed – taking their staff with them, rather than using them up and disposing of them down the track.

But there’s no magic bullet when it comes to getting maximum productivity and innovation from your teams.

Instead, authentic leaders and managers tailor their own, unique team-building solutions aimed at increasing engagement, identifying opportunities and creating an atmosphere where team members can rejoice in collaboration.

• Show recognition and respect

Real respect comes from valuing your employees on bad days and good. It’s about never looking down on your staff, sneering at them, making unfunny jokes or invading their privacy.

It’s knowing that every member of the team has something unique to bring, and needs to be recognised for their achievements, however lowly.

So recognition and respect lay the foundation necessary for a team to build its confidence and start getting excited about what lies ahead.

• Take interest in the individual

A productive, fired-up team is built from happy workers. And workers are far happier when the boss treats them as a valuable human being rather than a money-making machine.

Expressing genuine, ongoing interest in the welfare of your staff is a sure way to help them feel secure and appreciated, encouraging loyalty, a sense of belonging and increased productivity.

• Give plenty of positive feedback

Tell them when they’ve done a brilliant job. Encourage them to do better when they haven’t. Hold the criticism where possible and always look for the nugget of positivity lurking in every performance. It’s a great way to maintain the individual’s passion for their job.

• Ask, don’t tell

We all hate being told what to do. Asking is usually sufficient to get the job done. Being bossy, authoritative and demanding is the quickest way to sour a team’s motivation and morale.

• Discuss, don’t argue

If asking doesn’t get the required response, it’s time to find out why. Get to the root of the problem by starting a conversation and discussing the issue rationally. Avoid being argumentative or confrontational – it will hinder, not help.

• Question, don’t teach

You don’t have to give explicit instructions for every task. Encourage critical thinking and creative problem-solving by asking a series of questions designed to help the team member find their own solution. They might discover a better way of doing things – which is something to get excited about!

• Listen hard

There’s nothing like real listening to help your team advance their own cause. You might find that members of your team are staggered when you start genuinely listening to what they’re saying. It’s something of a dying art!

• Lead by example

Don’t just tell your team how to behave – show them how it’s done. They’ll be watching your every move, so you need to practice what you preach. If you want your staff displaying politeness, respect, willingness to admit mistakes and decorum at office parties, you need to show them too.

The importance of behavioural assessments in firing up the team

It goes without saying that teams are made up of vastly different personalities, all with their own unique passions, backgrounds, views and work styles.

With the best will in the world, misunderstandings and differences of opinion can create friction within the group.

Left unchecked, this can put a damper on excitement and enthusiasm, leading to conflicts which may be hard to resolve.

So how can you harvest the best each team member has to give – using their attributes to maximum benefit – while managing those behavioural traits with the potential to upset team dynamics?

The answer is people or psychometric assessments, which give you detailed information about each employee’s skills, behaviour and personality traits.

These smart tools provide valuable pointers about the way employees can function to optimum capacity at work – both as individuals and within the team.

Unless you really know how a person thinks, and what environment brings out their most creative thought, you won’t be able to tap into that employee’s true potential.

So what can people assessments achieve?

• Greater understanding. Maybe a team member is perceived as detached or lazy, while in reality they are shy, calm and do their best work in a quiet environment.

• Less team conflict. Assessments help both manager and team members to know each other more fully, so different personality traits can be accommodated and clashes are more easily resolved.

• Better communication. Once a manager knows what makes their team members tick, they can find more effective ways of communicating with them – and encouraging them to communicate with each other.

• Increased productivity. With greater understanding comes greater team work. The manager has a far clearer idea how to get the best out of team members, morale is improved and members start working together and pooling resources rather than pulling in different directions.

Result? A team which is not only working in harmony but is genuinely excited about what they’re achieving. And what is still to come.

Interested in how people assessments can help you? Contact us for assistance in unlocking the potential of your teams.

The post How to Excite Your Team to Achieve Greatness appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

Finding high performing staff involves a specific hiring approach which targets those with precisely the right attributes for the job in hand.

Once you have the right players, it doesn’t stop there. It’s a question of matching them to the right sales roles, managing them and developing the sales team in an ongoing way to ensure maximum efficiency.

Remember the old maxim ‘If you can sell, you can sell anything’?

Well, times have changed. Not all sales jobs – or reps – are created equal.

According to studies analysed by Herb Greenberg, Harold Weinstein and Patrick Sweeney in their book How to Hire and Develop your Next Top Performer, around 50% of those working in sales lack the fundamental traits necessary in effective sales people. A further 25% are selling the wrong thing, for the wrong managers, in the wrong place.

That leaves just 25% of sales people operating to full capacity and producing great results.

So one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to finding the right sales person to sell your product or services.

Financial benefits of hiring the best sales people

Having a sales team composed of star performers can make a significant difference to your bottom line.

In a study of 100 businesses, Sales Force of Top Producers – A Manager’s (and Owner’s) Dream, reported in Employer’s Advantage, the company’s top performer outsold the bottom performer by a whopping average of 5.7 to 1 – with a range of 3:1 to 9:1.

Just imagine what kind of results you’d get if your entire team worked at the lower margin of 3:1, not to mention 5:1 or above.

Salesforce Work.com and the TAS Group drew some more shocking statistics from their own research. These include:

• Two-thirds of sales people miss their quota.
• More than half of all sales people close less than 40% of potential deals.
• Top performing sales reps are 250% better at qualifying leads.
• High performers are 2.5 times more likely to be effective qualifiers than the general population.
• Around 40% of sales people don’t understand their customer’s ‘pain’, addressing problems they don’t even have.
• Revenue can be up to 25% greater at companies where sales and marketing are well integrated.
• High performers are 57% more likely to come from companies where sales and marketing work in harmony.

Measuring individual productivity

All this begs the question, just how productive is your own sales team? Can you measure individual productivity? And once you’ve measured it, how do you replace or improve poor and mediocre performers?

A range of smart assessment tools is now available to figure out how efficient and profitable your sales people really are.

Our JobFit assessments for example unlock the critical success attributes of a role, enabling you to match it with the right employee.

Using JobFit, we can scientifically measure your existing top performing sales people and identify their innate traits, abilities and behaviours.

These measures enable us to create a customised high performance role benchmark for your company. This means you can clearly see what makes your top performers tick.

The assessments also help you determine which staff have the potential to improve – and which need to be replaced with new blood.

How to hire the best people

The right assessment tools can help you find the right people for your sales jobs.

Applied correctly, JobFit tools can reduce sales department turnover by up to 47%, as well as making your recruitment of future high performers up to three times as successful.

Which should be music to any employer’s ear when considering the statistics.

Figures from Performance Resources and Profiles International, as reported in Employer’s Advantage, show that three out of four new sales employees don’t last the distance. They have, in fact, only a 25% chance of staying with the company for a full year.

Of those that do stick, only one in 10 go on to become a genuine top performer within three years.

So what is the essential DNA of these star performers? Many have fundamental traits and attributes in common which help drive their peak performance.

JobFit tools can extract and compile these traits into a high performance role benchmark which becomes the real, customised measure of employee success in your business.

It can be used to great effect when recruiting new sales staff, ensuring that candidates fit these rigorous criteria and carry the ‘work genes’ critical to success in their roles.

What to look for in sales job candidates

There are plenty of things to consider when hiring, but it’s vital that new employees are a good fit with company culture and embrace their new work environment.

They must be able to cope with challenges, build great relationships with work colleagues – especially in the marketing department – and understand the needs of your customers.

So what attributes do star sales performers typically have?

• Real energy and stamina.
• Assertiveness when clinching a sale yet flexibility when accommodating clients.
• Ability to think creatively and problem-solve on the hop.
• A relaxed, welcoming personal manner.
• Innate ability to know when and how far to bend the rules.

The right recruitment tools help you weed out unsuitable candidates and identify the cream of the crop.

Other benefits of hiring great sales performers

Financial benefits are not the only advantages of building a high performing sales team.

You end up with staff who love working together, foster innovation and all contribute to boosting and maintaining morale.

Which makes your biggest problem who to choose – out of all those prime contenders – for that prize promotion.

If you’d like assistance in identifying top candidates for your sales positions, get in touch to see how our JobFit tools can help.

The post The Benefits of Hiring the Very Best Sales People appeared first on Directions Unlimited.