Wouldn’t it be great if you could pick the right candidate, every time? Relying on resumes alone won’t get you there. In fact, academic research (Schmidt and Hunter 1998) shows resumes are one of the worst ways to select candidates. Combining interviews with assessments improves accuracy of hire by over 3x (.63 correlation with work performance vs. .18 correlation without testing).
One of the best ways to improve the quality of your new hires is to get scientific when it comes to selecting from among your candidates. The science of candidate selection centers on a branch of industrial psychology known as psychometrics.
Developed and enhanced over the last 100+ years, psychometric testing consistently delivers high return on investment by ensuring that every new hire has the correct personality and aptitudes to be successful in the job in question.
Understanding Personality Fit
Getting a handle on using personality testing to determine job fit is easy: think of a ring announcer and a librarian.
Ring announcers can all read and organize books; librarians can speak into a microphone. Yet, neither is likely to want to switch jobs!
Ring announcers are highly extraverted – they are outgoing and gregarious. Librarians are introverted – they thrive only with substantial alone time and don’t require external stimulation.
If you’re hiring a ring announcer, it can be challenging to determine if your candidate has the requisite personality for success (extraverted). Candidates may put on a brave face in an interview, and interviews are very expensive in terms of recruiter and hiring manager time.
But with a short, simple survey – benchmarked against hundreds of thousands of people – you can sort your ring announcers from your librarians, without any additional work as a recruiter.
Now, instead of conducting 15-20 interviews to fill a role, you can hold 5-6, confident you’re meeting only with candidates primed for success.
Aptitude – What are You Good At?
If personality tests measure “what you’re like,” then aptitude tests measure “what your talents are.”
For example, attention is an aptitude that is critical for both accountants and air traffic controllers. However, accountants don’t often work under extreme time pressure. Air traffic controllers, in contrast, do often make split decisions, and therefore reaction time is a key attribute to look for among candidates.
Each job has specific aptitudes that lead an individual to either succeed or struggle in that role. Because struggling employees are often the first to quit – causing high employee turnover cost – it’s hugely important to hire only those candidates who have the right aptitudes for a particular role.
Use ConnectCubed to assess your candidates within the SmartRecruiters platform. More on the launch of our new Assessment Center.
