How focusing on the resume alone does not provide a full picture
20 Oct 2016One of the biggest challenges an organisation can face is ensuring its longevity. The answer lies in who you hire and how; new research shows that resume-focused hiring can be doing more harm than good. For success, recruiters need to look beyond a person’s skills to their behaviours and attitudes.
The bigger picture
According to a survey by Leadership IQ, 46% of new hires fail within the first 18 months. The reason? 89% of the time, it’s because they didn’t have the right personality traits. This points to an inconvenient truth in recruitment; too much of it is still focused almost entirely upon a candidate’s resume, and not their ingrained attitudes and behaviours.
These are the things that, while harder to spot, often hold the key to whether an employee will be successful in a new job. Naturally, it can be tough to decide what kind of personality ‘fits’ a business. After all, HR and hiring managers are not psychiatrists. What is possible is to use the data already available to HR to provide a picture as to what’s worked in the past.
Making the right choices
With the increasing amount of data available to hiring managers, the bigger picture is now easier to access. While a ‘gut feeling’ can be valid in an hour long interview, you’re unlikely to fully understand a person’s attitudes to life, work and play within the limited parameters of the recruitment process. That’s why data matters, and why tests using that data, such as those provided by us, are invaluable to understanding who’s really right for your business.
By assessing the choices a person makes and the things they enjoy, you can go beyond their skills and into their ability to adapt, learn and gain new knowledge, for example. Indeed, while someone might have multiple skills on their resume, this doesn’t tell a potential employer about their ability to use those skills on a daily basis or their passion to acquire new ones. The finer details of a person’s behaviours are far harder to change.
Knowledge is Power
That’s why psychometric assessments are so important to use in recruitment. They can assess ‘soft’ skills and personality traits that may not be evident otherwise, such as a person’s attitudes, engagement and social behaviours. A small office might benefit from a vastly different type of person than a large corporate office – even though they may possess the same skills.
Going beyond the resume will ensure more new hires are successful. Using services such as Care Advantage provides businesses and hiring managers with access to a level of insight which allows them to make far more informed decisions in driving long-term business stability.
