Improve Your Hiring Process: Bring Objectivity to Final Decision

We’ve covered a lot in this blog series — a variety of ways to make your hiring process more efficient. At the same time, I’m very fond of pointing out to our clients that this process still ultimately boils down to people hiring people. As obvious as that sounds, it’s easy to be misled by various solutions in the talent acquisition space that seem intent on turning hiring into another algorithm. It’s not that simple.

Often, hiring people who have the right skill set and can work well with your team can feel like trying to solve a puzzle. No matter how well you interview or how much you trust your gut instinct, hiring mistakes happen. When they do, they’re painful and expensive. This is where objective data comes in handy.

Discover Behavioral Traits With Pre-Employment Testing

In the case of hiring, I’m referring to employee assessments. More specifically, I’m referring to behavioral assessments that are normed against the adult working population. In addition, these tools should always be validated to ensure that they measure what they purport to measure.

Using tools like these will allow you to get a better feel for how your final applicants are “hard-wired” — not just how they appear to be. Depending upon which assessments you use, you are able to gain insight on behavioral traits like assertiveness, communication style, willingness to change, rules adherence, team orientation, desire for recognition, etc. These so-called “soft skills” almost universally tend to be the reasons why employees don’t stay as long or produce as well as their counterparts.

Just as importantly, most all of the better employee assessment solutions available will allow you to assess your current top performers for these same traits. In doing so, you are then able to generate patterns or benchmarks of what good performers look like for your particular organization. As you can imagine, this significantly adds to the value proposition for these tools.

In most cases, you likely will not use assessments for all candidates — that is often cost-prohibitive. Rather, these tend to serve as another layer of information about your final candidates — information that you typically don’t have until someone has been employed for several weeks or months. Adding this objective data to all of the other information gathered in your process will improve overall hiring results and help you solve the puzzle of building teams.

Regardless of whether your company takes advantage of some or all of the previous efficiency tips offered in this blog series, the use of employee assessments in your hiring process should at least be considered. Getting the right performers in the right positions more consistently will pay huge dividends for your company.

For more information about ExactHire’s employee assessment and job skill test solutions, please contact us today.

Image credit: Rubik’s Cube by booyabazooka by Duncan Hull (contact)