Recruitment – Testing Times
Selecting new people is a risky business. Currently the stakes are higher than ever, with the economic reality and outlook, we are all at stretching point. We can’t afford to make a hiring mistake, but we can’t hang around and muddle through until the perfect person appears and we somehow know that they will just fit in and ‘perform and stick’.
The challenge has always been doing the right level of check so that we can be fully satisfied that we’re making a good decision. A bad match is unfair on everyone of course, even if someone is desperate to join you it’s crucial that you select someone who has the right skills to do the job and critically has the right personal traits to thrive in the role and in the environment.
In my corporate days we would do day-long assessment centres, gathering multiple pieces of evidence for each candidate across the pre-determined set of competencies. We could make good, solid and sensible decisions based on what we had observed and what we had analysed with psychometrics and tests. We were as sure as we could be that the successful candidates would ace the job.
With recruitment campaigns of those ‘olden days’ being as rare as rocking horse do da, what do we do for our current reality where we are more likely to have just one or two on a short list?
Of course, we can do competency-based interviews which gather evidence on previous experience and help candidates to showcase their achievements. Competency interviews are still a good part of the selection mix, but how do we devote decent rigour on the soft skills, those little nuanced elements that make up someone’s full skill set and character which would have been flushed out assessment centre exercises such as group discussions and individual tasks?
Over the last couple of years, we’ve been getting to know an assessment tool from Harrison Assessments which measures behavioural tendencies, interests and preferences and it’s proven to be a real hit with clients and is giving them the edge in recruitment decisions.
Hold on, I’m getting ahead of myself – after years of learning not to get too enthused about a shiny new thing in my orbit, I needed to check it out thoroughly. Or in the words of the assessment tool “my trait of analysing pitfalls is at a good level but the balancing trait of risking is so low that I can be too cautious and might hold out too long when going after opportunities”.
That’s one of the unique things about this assessment tool in that it works with a Paradox model – traits in and of themselves provide good insight but the way they balance together gives us a depth of understanding which can really inform our development, whether in our existing roles or when onboarding to a new role.
So, leaning into this new understanding of myself (just shows you, never too old!) I’ve been researching and testing away in the background and over the past year also using it with clients on select recruitment decisions.
Clients have found it invaluable. The candidates do a twenty/twenty-five-minute online questionnaire, and we then run the responses against what we call the Job Success Formula. This can be one of the 6,400 ones on the system or as I like to do, take one from the system but tweak it a little bit to make it even more accurate for the job role and the culture – turns out I have a high score on experimenting and a pretty decent score on analytical so it’s been fun!
Which leads me onto the core of the theory surrounding the assessment tool – it’s the enjoyment performance theory. Basically, when we enjoy a task or behaviour, we tend to do it more often and get better at it. This means we get positive feedback and a sense of satisfaction, so we repeat that and improve even further. Of course, the reverse is true about things we don’t enjoy and perhaps avoid.
Recruitment is all about matching, and this tool is the best I’ve seen at assessing whether someone is going to thrive not just survive. Wish we’d had this in my corporate days for sure, but we have it now and after my much experimenting I am convinced it’s come along at the right time.
My highest score was helpful so that’s handy because if you want a chat and a demo that would appeal to my traits! Do get in touch: audrey@2macs.com
https://2macs.harrisonassessments.co.uk/
