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 

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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.

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.