You have an ethical responsibility to invest in your selection and assessment process. How good recruitment can make the world a better place.

That title sounds pretty dramatic but bear with me. In this article I will tell you:

·      The financial benefits of good recruitment

·      The benefits to you as a company owner or leader

·      The benefits to you as a candidate

·      The benefits to humanity as a whole

I often get asked why I am so passionate about companies using assessments pre-hiring and my response is always the same “because if any of the companies that I applied to work for before I went back to Uni to do my Masters had done the reports I do for companies, I wouldn’t have been given any of the jobs that I applied for”. If you look at my LinkedIn profile, you will see that I had A LOT of jobs between 2009 and 2014 (and I missed a few of them out). I graduated in 2008, just after the financial crash. I thought with my first class psychology degree companies would be calling me up begging me to come and work for them- hilarious! There were quite a few sales jobs and I like people and am good at understanding what people want so I found it quite easy to get my first sales job and my second sales job and my third, forth, fifth, sixth… I could go on. Every time I left a job it was because “I don’t care about phones”, “I don’t like my boss”, “I don’t fit in with the people there”, “I don’t care about banking”. I didn't realise it was because I just shouldn't be in sales and don't like selling.

Miserable employees are bad for business

When I had those jobs I was not a very good version of me. A lot of the time, I was miserable when I was at work. As much as I tried to put on a front and pretend I was happy, a lot of the time my smile didn’t quite reach my eyes. Miserable employees are bad for business; internationally renowned psychologist and author Daniel Goleman describes how contagious moods are due to evolutionary factors. Human beings are experts in picking up on the moods of others as in the past being able to quickly recognise negative emotions could alert you to potential danger, whereas recognising positive emotions indicates that everything is fine and that the environment is safe. Employees who pick up on the negative emotions of others do not perform as well as those working in a positive environment. Negative stress reduces mental abilities, decreases employee engagement and reduces emotional intelligence, which many studies indicate is the biggest predictor of success in both the workplace and life in general. 

Also people who are not engaged at work are less creative, provide worse customer service, make fewer sales, are off sick more often and are more likely to leave. Disengaged employees can cost an organisation 30-50% of their payroll costs.

Poor hires often won’t make you much money and cost a fortune to replace

There is a regularly cited figure from the Harvard Business Review; a bad hire costs on average £30,000, that is on average. A report from the Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC) found that a mid-manager level with a salary of £42,000 can cost a business over £132,000 due to the costs of training, poor productivity, two lots of recruitment costs etc etc. I was speaking to the owner of a great recruitment company recently and he told me that they have done some analyses and “it takes two years before a recruiter starts making money for the business”. I then realised that if that was the case in the businesses I worked for, I had never made any money for any of the companies I worked for in the past, as the longest I was ever with one company was 20 months… Oh dear.

Unhappy employees tend not to be the best citizens of the world

This is probably not the case for everyone, but now that I love my job, I can honestly say I think I am a really nice, kind, caring, thoughtful, patient person. I was still those things when I was working in the various jobs I didn’t enjoy, but as I was spending 40-50 hours a week doing activities I didn’t like and feeling like I didn’t fit in, these nice qualities were sometimes well hidden. I didn’t want to spend the weekends doing things for other people, my weeks were rubbish, so I wanted to have fun at the weekend. I was not a patient driver, if I was driving home from the job I didn’t enjoy I wanted to get there as fast as possible. If my mum or sister were having a bad time, I might not have called them often enough, because in my mind, I had my own problems… I have worked with a lot of coaching clients who say they are not being the mother, father, son, daughter, friend, aunt, godmother that they want to be because they are not happy at work and it is taking over their lives. 

New employees should be able to feel confident that their employer has done everything in their power to ensure this job is going to work out for them

When you’re looking for a job, you can look at the company website and job description to help you decide whether or not you are a good fit for that company and role. If you get to the interview stage, you can ask questions to provide further insight. If there is a two-stage interview process, you will probably spend a maximum of two-four hours interacting with people from the company you are applying to, based on that you then are expected to have all the information you need to decide whether you want to spend 1500-2000 hours/year at that company for the next X number of years.

It is difficult to know whether you are a good fit for a role or a company. I like to think of myself as a self-aware person, but it is only with hindsight and the assistance of great psychometrics and preferences assessments that I have realised that what was keeping me in sales was people. I love working with people, talking to people, find it easy to get to the core of people’s issues and help them find a solution. But if someone had run an assessment on me, where they ran my preferences against those required in a sales job they would have seen that I should not be hired as a sales person. They would have also seen that there were other roles within the companies I worked for that I would have been great at.

Companies can give their candidates greater insight. There are various options, including assessment centres, psychometrics and work preferences assessments, all of which give both the company and the individual greater insight into the candidate’s strengths, areas for development, remote working abilities, values, behaviour under pressure and cultural fit.

Using assessments to improve your chances of recruiting the right person first time

Although there are many ways to improve hiring decisions, I would argue that the best way is through pre-hiring assessments. They are quick and easy for both the candidate and organisation and provide insight that can then be used in the interview to get a much clearer picture of whether that candidate is the correct fit for the company culture and the job role. There’s a reason why 70% of FTSE 100 companies use them.

There are many different types of pre-hiring assessments out there. My preferred method is preferences testing. The theory behind preferences testing is that if someone enjoys doing something they will do it often and performance will improve, but if someone does not enjoy something they will tend to avoid doing that activity and won’t get better at it. 

Pre-hiring assessments at Brighty People

I use a system called Harrison Assessments to provide the data on the candidate and I use that information to provide an overview report on the role and cultural fit of that employee to the organisation. I take an in-depth look at your company culture and the role you are hiring for. Then I send an assessment to your candidates and provide you with a report that covers; cultural fit, strengths and areas for development, role fit, potential performance “risks” specific to the role, behaviour under pressure, remote working and remote leadership abilities and personalised interview questions based on the candidate’s risks and role.

If you want to increase your profits, improve candidate experience, make the working lives of your existing employees better or just make the world a better place, get in touch.