So you need to hire a lot of new employees, and you need to do it fast.
Whether you are ramping up a new location, hiring staff for seasonal work, or you just launched a new product that requires an army of salespeople, the need to find candidates for jobs quickly can be a minefield for recruiters. During these times, it is tempting to hire anyone who walks through the door just to meet looming deadlines, but that’s always a bad idea. Harvard Business Review found that up to 80% of turnover can be traced back to bad hiring decisions – and what’s the biggest driver of bad hiring decisions? The need to fill positions quickly according to the National Business Review.
Every new hire should be a thoughtful decision, even when time is of the essence. Thankfully, there are ways to balance speed with considered decisions. With proper planning, it is possible to vet a lot of candidates quickly and thoroughly.
Create a Framework.
To move find candidates for jobs fast and maintain quality, you need a profile of your ideal candidate. You want to understand what skills, abilities, personality traits, and experience is required to succeed in the role. Assessment companies can help you label and quantify the competencies. This job profile gives you a standard against which to compare candidates. Spending time on the front end to define what a top performer looks like will relieve some of the mental burden required to vet candidates. Assessment reports provide quick insights to a candidate’s attitude, problem-solving skills, personality traits, and behavior, and ideally give you a job fit score, so you can instantly know if they are a high, medium or low fit for the job, and why. Pre-hire tests can be especially useful when hiring candidates who have little experience or education, where their resumes or past experiences provide few clues to how they will perform.
One size does not fit all.
To generate the most value from assessments create hiring profiles for each open role. While a business may seek a core set of traits that align with the company culture, each position will require a unique combination of skills and traits. For example, an ideal salesperson may be results-driven, highly sociable, and loves to take action; whereas a construction site worker might need strong spatial skills, rapid problem-solving abilities, and strong attention to detail. Reviewing profiles of a past employee who thrived or struggled in the same roles can help teams identify which combination of traits suggest a quality hire – and which ones pose red flags.
Trust the process.
Unlike the gut instinct that many managers use to choose new hires, assessments provide quantitative data about a candidate. These tools are backed by science and tested over thousands of candidates to verify that the data provided is accurate and meaningful. So don’t second guess the process.
Pre-hire tests provide the information that hiring managers need to rapidly vet candidates and to make data-driven decisions about who will be a great fit and who should be cut loose.
Every candidate tells a story.
Once you’ve got your staff in place, hang on to their assessments data. Even in the best scenario, some new hires will leave or need to be let go. In those instances, go back and review their assessment results to identify the trends among employees that don’t stay. Use that data to hone your hiring profiles, which will improve your process for the next hire. Assessments provide an invaluable source of data about your best and worst employees. The more you leverage that data, the better your hiring process will become.
Pre-employment assessments don’t just accelerate the hiring process. They provide data-driven insights into the unique skills and traits of every candidate, so recruiters can confidently select those applications that are best positioned to succeed in a role. That data delivers a more reliable recruiting process to rapidly scale your team.