The science of talent selection

Are your practices for talent selection primed to help your business succeed?

Increasingly, businesses are finding a simple “skill-fit” resume is no longer sufficient to find the best talent. These traditional processes aren’t providing the level of detail organisations require to pick the right people for their needs.

That’s because candidates are more than the total of job title, degrees or awards on their resume. Hard skills are important, but they shouldn’t overtake cultural fit when looking for candidates because often they are taught on-the-job, through experience and supported by formal training. A better indication of how someone will perform is how they ladder up culturally to your business.

As such, it’s little wonder many large companies are turning to science, using predictive hiring technologies to help them make smarter recruitment decisions through the plethora of candidate data they already have.

Importantly, these hiring technologies are affordable and accessible for SMEs, too. They are often used by businesses without a HR team or recruitment team. And there’s much business value to be had by using them next time you’re looking for the best candidate.

However, we recognise digital recruitment automation has in some instances made things harder for businesses who, thanks to the ease of electronic job board applications, find themselves inundated with applications for each vacancy.

A study from US job search service The Ladder found recruiters only glance at a resume for an average of six seconds. Barely long enough to register a candidate’s experience and certainly not long enough to work out if they fit culturally with a team or an organisation.

This means your highly-paid recruiters or HR team are weighed down by sorting and culling resumes for each vacancy with prime candidates being overlooked. In terms of wastage in time and productivity, traditional recruitment is a huge cost to your bottom line, particularly so for SMEs.

Improving the quality of hires by looking at behaviours and cultural fit is a benefit that translates into saved dollars quickly, as staff turnover is reduced and the costs of having to re-hire for the same roles is cut. Businesses not taking staff turnover seriously haven’t worked out that they are haemorrhaging money.

Cutting staff turnover also has benefits for staff wellbeing with the link between cultural fit and job satisfaction proven across a raft of measures, such as mental and physical health to productivity of employees.

HR can remove the grunt work as well as the guesswork from their roles. With predictive recruitment technology that incorporates psychometric testing, businesses can easily measure the values and behaviours of their high-performing staff members and cost-effectively screen job candidates for similar behaviours and traits at the application stage. Incorporating predictive hiring algorithms in recruitment technology helps anyone doing recruiting and HR, pinpoint suitable applicants faster and manage them along the process more efficiently.

Adopting affordable predictive hiring technology is one way small and mid-sized companies without an HR team, and with limited resources, can also pinpoint talent just like businesses with big budgets.

Predictive hiring techniques will inevitably become the norm for every business, given its superior outcomes for businesses of all sizes. And those businesses who are early adopters of predictive technology will gain a competitive advantage, with the best fit candidates recruited into their businesses.

Carolyne Burns, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Expr3ss!