The Evolution of the Traditional Hiring Process

Several studies have found that work experience is not the best predictor of future job success. Yet, we still rely on the traditional resume as one of the primary assessment tools when it comes to hiring or doing job interviews? It’s time to reinvent and evolve the traditional hiring process.

It doesn’t make much sense anymore. With gaps, a pandemic, and all sorts of different working arrangements, the future of work and how successful a potential candidate will be in your company is about far much more than just a resume.

What can be done about this?

We need to aggressively reinvent the hiring process. Companies like Heineken, Coca-Cola, Honda, IBM, ConstructConnect and others are already doing it and they no longer rely on resumes to identify, pre-screen or evaluate candidates. There is nothing wrong with the resumes but they’re not very useful for identifying motivation, values and behaviors — some of the most critical elements that can tell you if an applicant is right for your company or role.

Instead, some of these organizations are using AI based technology, structured job interviews and behavioral assessments to determine the candidate’s best cultural contribution, as opposed to cultural fit. Also, when they implement these tools correctly, they reduce hiring biases.

Companies are turning to assessment tools, like Humantelligence, to make their hiring process more effective. Organizations truly interested in hiring people who are contributors to their culture and from diverse backgrounds must abandon the conventional practice of filtering by resume. And here’s how to do it.

How to Evolve Your Hiring Process

We all know that if you want to come out ahead of your competition, you need to hire the best talent in the market to help you get there. Your problem: 52 percent of people who apply to a job are underqualified, while nearly 50 percent of companies report few or no qualified applicants for the positions they are trying to fill. And in today’s competitive job market, top talent won’t be falling into your lap any time soon.

So in addition to those who submit applications through your post, consider outbound efforts to strategically source the best talent. According to LinkedIn data, while only about 40 percent of the workforce is ever actively looking for a new opportunity at any given time, 90 percent of the workforce is willing to talk and learn more. To find those whose skills and background experiences align with your open role, here are few options:

• Consider diversifying your sourcing channels. Candidates may be more receptive to outreach messages on less conventional websites, and profiles on such sites can yield unique information that allows you to make outreach more personalized.
• Tap on your current employees to source their networks, and consider an employee referral program.
• Like any good sales pitch, know your audience and customize your messages. As an example, mention offering a flexible work environment if you can (since that is coveted right now!), and always give enough information to pique their interest, focus on what might be most important to them in a role, and explain why you’ve reached out to them.
• Continue building and leveraging a strong employer brand as way to move potential candidates into your talent pipeline.

Recruit for Future Job Success Not Work Experience

Once you have a strong pool of technically qualified candidates, you’ll want to assess and hire for fit. Following (or not following) this tip spells the difference between making the right (or wrong) choice.

 

Culture fit does not mean hiring who you or the team likes but rather being open to hiring people unlike you or any others in your organization. Resumes, LinkedIn, and educational backgrounds only tell some of the story. Besides being self reported, they are limited to only showing past experiences — whereas leveraging psychometrics more clearly reveals a person’s fuller potential when it comes to situational behavior, actions, opportunities for improvement, communication styles, and values — now and in the future.

 

Avoid recruiting cookie-cutter replicas of your current employees and rather hire for culture adds and gap fillers — those candidates who will enhance your culture, as well as bring unique and valuable experiences and a diversity of thought to the team.

 

To do this, you’ll need to form a current vs target profile of the team’s culture and then hire in a way that allows you to achieve your target and the best balance of the behaviors, motivators, and work styles for the team in which the role resides — that’s hiring for fit and managing culture by intention. 

 

The profiles are based on just a quick 12-minute psychometric assessment that unlocks critical information about a person’s behaviors, motivators and values, and work energizers. Once you have this information for your team and ask your candidates to take the assessment, you now have the capability to produce an ideal candidate profile, assess future success in the role based on fit factors, look at similarities and complements between your candidates and the team, and identify the candidate who will make the most significant positive impact.

A candidate’s psychometric profile can give you that multidimensional snapshot of a person, rather than a bulleted list of facts. It includes comprehensive data on a candidate’s critical behaviors, motivators, and work energizers, as well as sought-after skills like communication, creativity and adaptability. When you assess this kind of emotional intelligence data right alongside cognitive abilities, you’ll discover fuller representations of your candidates, be able to remove unconscious biases, and engage in a more inclusive approach to evaluating candidates — all of which can help you predict greater success in the role. 

Integrate Culture Management Technology into your Hiring Process

Consider using an interview guide to structure a consistent interview experience for your candidates. When you use the same interview method, you can also use the same scoring to assess them. This reduces the risk of bias in the interview process. While the exact content of the interview guide will differ per organization and role, one of the most important components is the kinds of questions you ask.

 

A common interviewing question method is the STAR method. This method offers a structured way to retrieve information from the candidate. Asking all of your candidates a question using this method allows you to easily compare the depth of experience each has in key competencies. The next step in preparing the right kinds of questions is being able to dig more deeply into potential gaps but also alignments between your candidates and what the role calls for.

Using Psychometric-based Questions

Interviews alone are notoriously poor at predicting culture add or role success. To reduce subjective bias during the interview process, you can leverage psychometric-based questions that draw from the candidate’s own behaviors, motivators, and work energizers — that talent profile mentioned earlier — to highlight the most important gaps and alignments when compared with your ideal profile.

 

From here, the system generates focused questions to ask, along with interpretation guidelines, so you can quickly gain a deeper understanding of how a candidate will contribute to the team’s culture and perform in the role. 

By leveraging psychometrics to guide your interviews, you’re making the most data-informed choice for your role. It’s why organizations that do infuse psychometrics into their recruiting and hiring process are able to: 

 

• Consistently evaluate candidate attributes

• Automate competency, question, and evaluation criteria

• Quickly begin interviewing and evaluating candidates against ideal profiles

• Reduce unconscious bias & create fairer hiring outcomes

• Increase diversity of thought for their teams

 

You can divide interview questions into several categories such as job-fit and organization-fit. The former involves questions that aim to determine how compatible a candidate is with the requirements of the job they apply for, while the latter involves questions regarding a person’s compatibility with the organization. The weight of each category will vary depending on your requirements but figuring out these scores is easy when you have a system in your hiring toolkit to do it.

Make the Hiring Process a Collaborative Event

You could have all the data in the world, but if you don’t involve those who will work most closely with your new hire, you’re missing critical inputs. If your company is one that values people as your most important asset — the asset that sets you apart from your competitors — employee feedback is vital. 

 

When you involve the employees who will collaborate most with your new hire both within and across functions, you’ll be gathering a pool of feedback that can help validate your own and the hiring manager’s feedback and the data. Involving your current employees in meeting potential new hires helps increase transparency, keeps communication open, and provides employees with an opportunity to have an impact on decisions that affect their jobs — all helpful for their own engagement and retention. If an employee is part of the selection process that picks their new colleague, they will be more committed to making that co-worker succeed. 

 

Plus, when you use psychometrics to hire, your interviewing team members can see how the candidates compare to themselves! Combine your employees’ input with the psychometric assessment and culture fit data, and you’ll get to who’s best for the role faster and more easily than ever before.

The Result: Better Hires

In a now global workplace unconstrained by location or time zone, competition for talent is fierce, and your organization must focus on an integrated digital recruiting experience that incorporates deep analytics as well as intelligent automation capabilities. The result will be a more strategic HR function that propels the business agenda through the lens of an organization’s people agenda. 

 

With psychometric-based recruiting technology (part of what is known as Culture-as-a-Service), you can leverage culture analytics about your teams to deliver talent more efficiently while you:

• integrate, modernize, and streamline employee experience platforms, starting from application all the way through to onboarding and retention
•  eliminate subjectivity and streamline up to 80% of traditional recruiting processes
• reduce turnover costs caused by mis-aligned hires by at least 20% using predictive success factors
• ensure better organizational effectiveness by making personnel decisions based on data you can trust
• improve overall team and organizational performance through hiring

We all know that great talent isn’t available for long. By evolving your hiring process using psychometrics, you can both increase the confidence of your hiring recommendations and accelerate your time-to-hire. When you combine these top tips with the traditional background and reference checks, work sample requests, and standard LinkedIn review, you’ll be well on your way to making more informed hiring recommendations that are a better fit for everyone.

If you’re interested in learning how we can help you shift your hiring process so you can find better fits faster, we’d love to connect with you.