Why do we continue to recruit our teams based on gut feel and intuition rather than cold, hard facts?

I work with individuals, teams and organisations all over Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia. I am constantly amazed with the ‘laissez-faire’ manner that recruitment occurs, particularly in sales. Quite frankly, we all seem to be happy to:

• have non-existent or poorly constructed job descriptions,
• recruit to generic success profiles or none at all,
• Select candidates for interview based on gut feel and quality of resumes alone,
• have random or non-existent interview plans, and as a result ….

accept that less that 25% of our hires will result in high performing team members.

I see 5 key areas where organisations let themselves down when recruiting for critical roles,

1. Knowing what is truly required to be successful in the role you are recruiting for
   Exactly what key traits are required to make someone truly successful in this role in your organisation? It is not just the skills and knowledge that they require, it is also the behaviours and motivations that sit behind these that truly drive performance.How can we attract, select and on-board the right person for a role if we do not know what we are looking for in the first place?

2. Job Ads that ask the wrong people to apply
   One of our key partners said,“You will have a 100% failure rate of selecting the best candidate if that candidate does not apply for your role in the first place”The combination of a traditional job advert (usually all about the employer not the type of employee you wish to attract) and just advertising in Seek (instead of thinking through where your ideal candidates actually are), results in applicants that are either currently unemployed or dissatisfied with their current employer. These two groups account for 21.5% of potential candidates. This means that the traditional recruitment strategy is doomed from the start because you are not fishing where the quality candidates are!

3. Not researching your Candidate appropriately
   A $70 000 a year employee will cost us approximately $165 000 in year one to recruit, train and manage. These costs do not factor in the opportunity costs involved in them being less than 100% productive for part of their first 12 months either.Time and time again we see organisations refuse to invest $400 or less in some psychometric research into a potential employee that then costs them many $1000’s in a poor hire!

4. Not Using the Facts Available to Increase the Chance of a Great Hire
   The science of psychometric testing can increase the success rate of selecting future high performers by up to 300%.This is empirical, research based testing with high scores for reliability. We do not understand why management teams ignore these tools in their recruitment policies. In all other areas of a modern organisations empirical evidence is the corner stone of decision making and yet when it comes to our people we are happy to run with ‘Gut Feel’.Maybe it is ego…. I am good sales person and therefore I know how to recruit one…..
5. Poor Onboarding, Ongoing Training and Coaching
   It does not matter how good your new starters are, the onboarding and training process, linked to a coaching culture, is critical to long term success. Too many organisations that we deal with have slow, clunky and boring onboarding programs (if they have one at all) and no ongoing capability or coaching program.This is like buying a performance sports card and then refusing to maintain it properly. Our people require ongoing investment to maintain and improve their performance.

The Profiles Sales Assessment and the Profile XT are the latest tools that I am using to help organisations find the ‘Right ‘people for their teams. This tool specifically measures how well a person fits specific roles in an organisation. These assessment are used primarily for selecting, on-boarding and managing high performers.

Using these Assessments along with targeted adverts, interviewing and selection processes increases your likelihood of finding the right person for your team by three times, that’s a 300% improvement!

I utilises different types of testing depending on the circumstances. Sometimes generic testing like DISCTMand HBDITM is appropriate to gain insights into your employment candidates however when you wish to match candidates to a job success profile in a scientific, data driven manner then the PSATM and PXTTM is simply the best tools we have ever seen.

Tim is a Speaker, Executive Coach and Pragmatic Leadership Expert who works with individuals and organisations on delivering results and being more effective. He can be contacted at [email protected] or through his website at www.timothykitching.com.