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Hire by Design. Not by Chemistry!
By Gail Finger, Summer 2003
In the end, every new hire will either contribute to moving your business forward, or to holding it back. In an era when there are metrics for almost everything related to business success, why wouldn’t you assess and measure a job applicant’s potential to succeed?
Pre-employment assessment is objective, cost-effective, legal, and it works! It is actually much less expensive to use pre-employment assessment tools than it is to replace a bad hire. Costs of poor hiring decisions can include:
- Outprocessing of employees
- Management down-time dealing with a termination/lay-off
- Severance costs
- Recruiting the replacement
- Training the new employee
- Lost productivity due to learning curves of new hires
- Lowered morale
- Disruption of relationships with customers and suppliers
- Exposure to litigation
- Loss of knowledge capital (often to your competitor!)
To reduce the risk of incurring those costs, develop a competency model for the position and assess the "goodness-of-fit" of job applicants.
What is a Competency Model? A competency model describes a set of behaviors that are necessary for success in a particular role. These behaviors are "soft skills" and are separate from the technical expertise and education required for the job.
For example, a person may need to have an engineering degree and project management skills to be a project manager in your company. A soft skill competency might be the ability to communicate diplomatically with customers.
When developing a competency model, consider the qualities that an individual must possess to fit into your company’s culture as well as those necessary for the particular role. If a new hire doesn’t fit into your culture, they won’t be happy, and neither will you! For example, consider whether your organization:
- Has a fast or slow paced working environment.
- Has a team or hierarchical structure.
- Needs employees to have the stamina to work long hours at times.
Be sure to include these "cultural competencies" in your want ads and develop interview questions that probe these areas.
There are simple to use on-line tools that make it easy to develop a completency model and assess whether a candidate for hire is a good fit for you. You can send your own staff to training programs that allow them to become certified in these tools, or you can use a consultant who is already certified.
Once you have created your competency model, each potential candidate for hire can take a survey that will compare their natural behavioral work style to the competency model you have created.
These tools not only help you see who would be a natural best fit for the position, but they also help you formulate the questions you will want to ask during the interviews to ensure that the person really has what it takes to succeed.
The positive results you will achieve by the simple act of developing a competency model and doing pre-employment testing are too good to pass up! You will have:
- The right people in the right roles at the right time.
- Engaged employees
- Low turnover
- High morale
- Fewer internal conflicts
- Improved customer loyalty
If you are not taking advantage of the science that is available for selecting and retaining top employees, you can bet that your competitors are!
So, what is it costing your company not to do this?
Read more on this topic in our white paper: Hire by Design. Not by Chemistry!