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Probably every employer has asked themselves this question at some point. How do I improve my hiring results?

With new hire failure rates hovering around 50%, this puts the odds of hiring a great employee at the same probability as a coin flip. With costs of advertising, onboarding, training and equipping employees continually rising as well as the potential liabilities associated with making a wrong hire, it only makes sense to want to improve those odds.

The obvious actions of looking over resumes for qualifications and background are not necessarily the full answer anymore. Thanks to AI being used at both ends of the resume building/qualifying process, it really serves to only reduce human interaction as well as upping the likelihood of hiring the wrong person or missing out on the right one.

So where is the weak link that if improved, would increase one’s likelihood of getting the correct fit? The honest answer is with the person doing the hiring themselves.

Somewhere along the line in the hiring process, there is a point where a decision is made. That decision is usually made by a person or several people making a judgment based on their experience or feelings. If the interview goes smoothly and the candidate impresses, they have a better shot of getting the position than someone who may be awkward or nervous. People interviewing, also tend to look for people who act or look like them. These are natural impulses, but they can get in the way of making good hiring decisions. The other factor is the perceived pressure the decision maker is under to fill the position. If filling the position is considered urgent, considerations that were previously unmovable tend to loosen.

The answer is objective assessment. Skills tests have been standard for years, particularly in physical or technical positions. But what about soft skills? It is just being realized how influential a person’s personality or tendencies can not only have on their success, but that of the entire enterprise. This was the whole reason behind the DISC assessment. It illustrates the importance of creating interactions that fit in with how particular character types handle different situations. Many companies use the DISC profile to align team members to improve their mutual productivity. However, even DISC has its drawbacks.

The DISC assessment places individuals in four buckets. Each bucket lists various ways the people in that bucket react in different situations. The issue comes from people not usually being the same at all times. This creates a situation where a person can mainly have one type personality but another as well. This makes the assessment less accurate.

A more modern approach is the Personnel Potential Analysis™, which is a trademarked online version of the Oxford Capacity Analysis. What makes this analysis so effective is that it does not lump people into categories but paints a picture of that particular individual. It measures that person’s tendencies on a scale of +/- 100 along ten specific character traits directly related to working in a job environment. The closer the person’s score approaches 100 in either direction, the more they tend to exhibit the positive or negative tendencies of that characteristic. Each characteristic is based on a dichotomy like STABLE vs UNSTABLE, COMPOSED vs SCATTERED, RESPONSIBLE vs IRRESPONSIBLE etc. with the assessment yielding a graph along the ten categories. In this way it paints a portrait of that person opposed to a general group. The character traits measured are STABILITY, GOAL ATTAINMENT, COMPOSED, CERTAINTY, ACTIVE, AGRESSIVE, RESPONSIBLE, CORRECT ESTIMATION, APPRECIATIVE and COMMUNICATION LEVEL

A manager or business owner has a much better idea as to how that individual is likely to handle the environment and relationships they would encounter in a position. This takes a lot of the guessing out of hiring. It also allows for faster sorting of candidates making it possible to spend time and resources only on candidates most likely to be successful in the role. I’ve used the original Oxford Capacity Analysis for years and the new online version is a GAME CHANGER. If anyone has a hiring task ahead of them, reach out for a free, no obligation walk through.

Dave Skipton

Professional Business Advisor

Successful Business Dynamics

I help build winning teams

(206) 387-0764

www.sbdynamic.com

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

https://calendly.com/sbdyn/free-initial-one-to-one-consultation

Bot vs Bot

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Welcome to the new world of recruitment. In these days of trying to increase “efficiency,” it seems like we have only made the problems related to finding and hiring great people worse and the odds of hiring the wrong person greater.

Most business owners do not have time to go through the labor-intensive process of finding and hiring top level talent. That is why they hire recruiting firms. Recruiters, being the go-between, have an interesting job. Afterall, their pay is based on filling a round hole with a round peg. The faster they can weed out pegs that do not fit the round hole they are trying to fill, the more time they can spend on more viable pegs. That just makes sense efficiency-wise.

So enters our first combatant. The Applicant Tracking System or ATS. This AI enabled system, among other things, scours applications for key words related to the job to be filled like qualifications, experience, education, etc. to weed out applications that do not fit. This cuts down significantly on the number of resumes or applications the recruiter must scour through. Only round pegs go through.

Now enters our second combatant. The AI resume builder. AI resume builders, like those used in SEO, look for key words and work to fit script to satisfy the algorithms used by Applicant Tracking Systems to round out the edges of their applicant’s resume.

I have personally never been great at writing resumes myself. I have always tended to go into the weeds detailing something important to me, however, probably irrelevant to a recruiter just wanting to know if I am a round peg. I honestly do not believe I am alone in this. It is people like me who keep professional resume builders and recruitment coaches in business.

Now, the important thing that gets lost here is genuine communication because actual people to people communication is being filtered in both directions. On the side of the company, genuinely great potential employees are being lost to them because their resume does not fit within the algorithm’s parameters. They also get an increased number of AI doctored resumes from unqualified individuals who have merely had AI pump out a resume that would defeat the ATS, much like the kid who has someone else write their term paper because they are too busy partying to study.

For the applicant, I read stories everyday where literally overqualified candidates may be spending many frustrating months trying to find their next opportunity or are forced to take lower paying jobs or hang onto jobs where their talents are wasted to keep things afloat.

Now I am not a paid recruiter and have never worked on commission based on placements. I do have a good history of recognizing when two people or two groups should be able to fit together in a relationship beneficial to both parties. I have usually found those relationships where everybody involved is willing to lay their cards on the table and communicate honestly about goals, limitations, needs, and concerns. Sometimes, it is not a fit. Sometimes it takes off. But the KEY is that everybody comes away knowing there was actual direct communication and honest understanding between everyone involved. While that approach is much more labor-intensive and requires more homework and communication, it makes more successful matches.