If you’ve ever considered yourself a good judge of character, buckle up. It is not enough to conduct an interview and think you have the best candidate. Far too often, the candidate that looks like solid gold in the interview is a tricky bronze at best, and your organization is left with the fallout. It’s costly to hire, but it’s even costlier to fire. The great question of hiring talent isn’t where it went right but where it went wrong.
The Problem at Hand with Candidate Selection
What we hire for in terms of candidate characteristics vastly differs from why we fire people. What if there was a clearer path to success? There is, should you choose to embrace it. It’s assessments, which do require a bit more time to set up but have multiple benefits within the hiring process.
Assessments for Consistent Results
How do you know if a candidate has hidden behaviors that are potentially destructive to the organization? Asking won’t reveal it, but a battery of assessments can illuminate behaviors that can become quite harmful in the workplace. Don’t let yourself get caught up in choosing only one assessment. While that looks like the most budget-friendly option, it gives such limited data compared to having a strong battery of assessments.
Think of the collection of assessments like this: to see the full picture, you have to look at all of the layers in order to get a truly nuanced picture of the situation.
Unfortunately, what you see may not be at all what you presumed from the interview. This can become quite unsettling, but it’s better to have as much information as possible when it comes to hiring people.
Assessments improve the impartiality factor of the hiring process, and they also reduce overall costs. The organization improves for the better when hiring becomes a more data-driven decision, not a gut decision. If you’re ready to unlock these benefits for yourself, check out A Strategic View of Hiring, the podcast where the audience gets a full breakdown of understanding behavior. The podcast episode is well worth a listen; tell us what you think.
Continuing the Conversation
Next month will feature another podcast from A Strategic View of Hiring, giving you plenty of time to listen to this episode a few times. As always, I’d love to hear what you think. Talk soon!
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