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Quality of hire is one of the hardest parts of the recruiting process. Selection is key here, but it can be hard to predict how a candidate will perform.
A bad hire can sabotage your goals and slash profits. On the other hand, a great hire can make your life easier and empower your team.
If you’re serious about putting people at the center of your business, it starts with hiring. At the end of the day, you don’t just want to put people at the center of your business…you want to put the RIGHT people at the center!
Before we dive into candidate selection, it is essential that we arm ourselves with the right tools.
Below are three tried and tested methods for selecting the right candidate and improving the hiring process.
Don’t miss our video on the subject HERE!
Improve Quality of Hire By Asking for Work Samples or Examples
This is a very common step in the hiring process, and for good reason: it’s a great tool for candidate selection. The best-case scenario is asking a candidate for a sample of their existing work. Asking for a sample can help you greatly boost quality of hire.
Whether it’s a project they completed recently or a portfolio of work throughout their career, it gives you a sense of what they’re capable of. In many fields, it also gives you a sense of their unique style.
It’s not uncommon to ask a candidate to create a new work sample either. While this does help get an idea of their capabilities, you should consider how it can affect the candidate experience. Understandably, many candidates view this as being asked to work “for free” without any guarantee they will receive a job offer.
If you do go this route, be respectful of the candidate’s time and under no circumstances should you use the work without paying the candidate. The bottom line is that you shouldn’t let candidate selection harm the candidate experience.
Performance tests, where you ask a candidate to complete a task as part of the interview, are another good option. They allow you to see how a candidate performs on the spot.
Of course, asking for work samples or a performance test all depends on the nature of the job. For some roles, it may make more sense to look to other candidate selection tools.
Improve Quality of Hire With Structured Interviews
Every company uses interviews to support candidate selection. However, the effectiveness of your interview weighs heavily on how you conduct it. In a nutshell, you need to be using structured interviews in your hiring process.
Study after study has demonstrated that unstructured interviews are highly ineffective, and that structured interviews are almost twice as useful at predicting performance.
In short, structured interviews are interviews that utilize a standard set of questions for every candidate. They also provide interviewers with a set of criteria to judge every answer.
Additionally, every question is focused on the requirements of the job itself. This goes a long way towards eliminating bias in your candidate selection process. It lends the interview consistency to help fairly judge candidates.
Use Behavioral Assessments to Improve Quality of Hire
You might think candidate selection stops at structured interviews, but that’s not the case. Structured interviews certainly offer an advantage over unstructured interviews. Unfortunately, they still leave us with an incomplete understanding of the candidate. That’s not enough for improving quality of hire.
The fact of the matter is that we can’t rely on candidates to give us an accurate look at their own competencies and behaviors in the workplace.
The most obvious example is the little white lies candidates tell. For example, if someone really needs a job, they might say they like working independently. After all, they’re giving the answers that will increase the chance of an offer. These exaggerations happen all the time.
But misleading answers can also stem from a candidate’s lack of self-awareness. You might ask someone in an interview if they enjoy variety in the workplace. If they’ve never had a job like that, they might tell you honestly that it sounds nice.
However, once they start the job, they might find they prefer a more stable workflow.
Behavioral assessments cut through these ambiguities. They deliver insights on an individual’s natural tendencies.
They give us data on an individual’s drives and needs in the workplace. This allows us to predict where they will thrive and where they may need extra help.
A scientifically validated behavioral assessment can be paired with a pattern for a specific position, offering objective data to guide candidate selection.
Companies Should Leverage Proven Tools for Candidate Selection
Our handling of candidate selection directly correlates to the success of the business. We need to have the right people at our organization to succeed, and every bad hire will only drag us down.
The hiring process will never be perfect, but with the right tools at our disposal, we can significantly improve the quality of our hires.
Our people determine whether we succeed or fail. Why take chances on a hiring process that’s not scientifically validated to succeed?
If you’re an HR or talent acquisition leader and you’d like to learn more about how you can make sure you’re selecting the right candidates, click here to schedule a consultation with our team.