Eric Friedman is the Founder and CEO of eSkill, a global leader in skills testing and behavioral assessment solutions for employers.
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Most business leaders agree that hiring has become more challenging these past few years. After adjusting their operations to accommodate the Covid-19 pandemic, there was the Great Resignation, when over 50 million people quit their jobs. So just when business leaders thought everything might return to normal, they found themselves in the middle of a global talent shortage. Being able to find top talent in a competitive market is more important than ever.
But it's certainly not easy. According to a CareerBuilder 2017 report, 74% of employers said they had hired an employee who wasn't a good fit for the job. Of those, 37% said it harmed productivity, 32% said it caused time-to-market delays while they recruited and trained another employee and 31% said it caused production problems. This is why employers have determined that effectively measuring candidates' skills is a priority in hiring.
The Value Of Testing Candidates' Capabilities
When evaluating candidates, hiring teams tend to focus on hard skills like computer proficiency or math aptitude. HR professionals know skills tests are important because, when you have the right people in the right positions, everything operates smoothly and more efficiently. According to a McKinsey study, if just 20% of a team's members were high performers, the resulting increase in productivity could turn a three-year project into one that takes less than two years to complete.
However, the average skills test doesn't provide all the necessary information for making good hiring decisions. Even a highly qualified candidate can be wrong for a job if they lack the right soft skills, such as emotional intelligence, collaboration and problem-solving. While productive interviews can determine how a candidate may fit into an organization, another option that recruiting teams can use to support decision-making is implementing behavior assessments.
Working in the space, I know how these tests can help HR professionals evaluate candidates' personalities and demeanor. When properly utilized, the results from behavioral assessments can provide insights into a candidate’s management style or how they approach problems, their communication style and how they might perform on the job. This helps hiring teams determine who can work most effectively in their organization.
5 Advantages Of Behavioral Assessments
There are many reasons that HR leaders may want to consider introducing behavioral assessments into their hiring processes. Here are some specific advantages to determining essential soft skills.
1. Determine Cultural Fit: When you bring new hires on board, you want them to become long-term assets to your organization. Candidates’ personalities and behavior traits can help determine how well they'd assimilate into your organization. It's also important for their personal ethics and values to align with your company’s mission and principles. While you can provide employees with the resources and tools to do their jobs, you cannot teach them to align with values they don't believe in. With behavioral assessments, you may have a better chance of verifying whether candidates’ values, attitudes and priorities will mesh with those of the company.
2. Predict Future Success: Even the best HR professional can't see into the future. Behavioral assessments can be a reliable, valid indicator of a potential new hire’s success at your company. They help you predict long-term performance by measuring traits that have been relatively stable throughout a person’s life, like emotional intelligence, leadership abilities and problem-solving skills.
3. Decrease Time To Hire: According to the Society of Human Resource Management, filling an open position takes an average of 36 days. As most HR leaders will attest, the hiring process is time-consuming and costly. So using behavioral assessments can enable you to review and compare candidates’ results quickly, allowing you to make the best possible hiring decisions while minimizing costs.
4. Find Candidates With Specific Traits: Employees do their best work when like-minded individuals surround them. For example, when Herb Brooks selected players for the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, he didn't just choose the most proficient, technically skilled athletes. He selected players who could form the best cohesive team, ones who had grit and problem-solving abilities on top of their physical skills. His strategy paid off when his team defied all odds and won the gold medal. As an HR professional, behavioral assessments can be a resource to build better teams with members who have complementary strengths.
5. Improve Employee Development: The insights behavioral assessments provide about new employees can support your overall efforts to increase employee retention and build a stable team. For example, sharing the test results with managers can help them decide how to coach team members and provide feedback effectively. They can use the information to personalize their style and approach with employees.
Behavioral Assessments Can Be An Effective Addition
In HR, we know that an employee can have all the right technical skills for a job but lack valuable interpersonal skills. Adding behavioral assessments to the hiring process is one option to help predict how well candidates will perform in a new role. By customizing behavioral assessments to match each job, you can better avoid hiring mistakes that hurt productivity, cause stress for team members and negatively affect customer relationships. With such thorough data on candidates, you'll achieve a higher probability of making best-fit hires that will bring your company success.
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