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Profiles International
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Recruitment Roulette - Are you a player?
Recruitment Roulette - Are you a player?
Every day, businesses employ sales people who cannot sell, customer service staff who frustrate customers and managers who cannot manage. In any business environment, this strategy is risky. In today’s particularly challenging economic climate, it is totally unsustainable.
Recruitment
Are you a gambler? If you were offered the opportunity to invest £10,000 of your company’s money, and required to report back on how well you’d done, what would you do with it? Would you place a bet where you only had a one in four chance of winning? Probably not.
The fact is that you do take that £10,000 gamble every time you recruit a new employee. Without using assessments to back up your decision the odds of getting the right person are one in four.
Research from Profiles International, the world’s leading online assessment company, indicates that the traditional methods of recruitment (interview and references) offer only a 26% chance of success. The problem is, that the costs of recruiting the wrong person are seldom itemised in company accounts. Nevertheless, they are very real.
Current research indicates that a bad hiring costs a company at least six months of that person’s overall cost to the business. In real terms, that means that if you recruit a customer-facing member of staff whose salary is £17.5k per year (with just basic benefits), the real cost to your company is £20,000 – and that if that person is unsuccessful, you have cost your business £10,000.
How many times can your company afford that sort of recruitment gamble?
Isn’t recruiting the wrong person just bad luck?
Sometimes it is, but as in so many other things in life, the more effort you make to get it right, the luckier you get. Assessments will help you to turn the odds in your favour and allow you to get luckier still.
Some ‘hardened’ managers believe that psychometric assessments have limited value in the recruitment process. But if you are employing people who do not perform to the level you expect, it is perhaps time to reassess the role that appropriate psychometrics can play in the recruitment process.
Why assessments?
Because…
… two out of three new recruits disappoint in the first year
… ninety-five per cent of applicants "exaggerate" to get a job
…most recruiting decisions are made during the first five minutes of an interview
Because….
…all of these cost your business money
…you can reduce the probability of this happening to your business.
…the increase in output between an ‘average’ employee and a ‘good’ employee is typically between 17% and 40%’
Schmidt and Hunter 1983.
Assessments no longer involve lengthy paper-and-pencil completion nor a time-consuming evaluation of the candidate’s responses by an expensively-trained practitioner. The long wait for a report at the end of the process has disappeared.
Modern psychometrics can be completed and evaluated online and reported back within minutes of the candidate’s completing the process. An assessment, completed before an interview, can be with the interviewer minutes later with highlighted areas for concern and suggested questions to allow the interviewer to probe the candidate’s responses.
Improving the odds of a successful hire
The use of normative assessments, in combination with a Job Match Profile, can improve the chances of success from 26% to 75% or three in four, a huge improvement.
So what does an assessment measure? It measures a candidate’s profile against the profile for the role that they have applied for.
Profiles’ PXT assessment can be used for both recruiting new staff and for improving the performance of existing staff, using the same benchmark for both. It comprises:
The Learning Index that confirms that the candidate can do the job. The chances of recruiting the right person increase as a result to 42%.
Behavioural Traits indicating how the candidate will do the job. This raises the chance of success from 42% to 54%.
Motivational Interest testing indicates whether a candidate will be motivated by the job you are recruiting them for and if you can provide a career path that will match their interests. The percentage likelihood of success rises to 66% after this.
Job matching allows employers to match candidate profiles to the agreed profile for the job. Adding this will result in a 75% likelihood of your company recruiting the right person and at a cost that is significantly lower than getting it wrong. Worth a gamble?
In conclusion
Assessments should not be used on their own to determine if a candidate is the right person for the job. However, as a support to the more traditional methods of CV, interview, ‘gut feel’, they can make a significant difference to the effectiveness of your recruitment process - a process that costs businesses many thousands of pounds each year. If you want your recruitment to be more successful, perhaps you should think again about the use of Profiles assessment for the roles you need to fill.
Alternatively, there is more than one type of roulette…….
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