Taking Your Hiring and Recruiting To The Next Level, Leveraging Behavioral Assessments

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Dave Brock

Do these stories sound familiar?

• You’ve spent months interviewing candidates.  Finally, you have found the right one.  Everyone involved in interviewing him thinks he is great.  All the references check out, they guy seems to be the ideal fit.  You hire him. Months later things start going wrong.  The person so responsive in the interviews does not listen.  He is not a team player and is alienating everyone in the company.  Things are falling apart.  You come to the painful realization this person just doesn’t fit. You’ve hired the wrong person.

• You have just promoted your best sales person to sales manager.  She has consistently led her peers in sales performance.  She had been creative and aggressive in growing the business.  You figure that as sales manager, she can instill the same aggressiveness leading the sales teams.  A few months later, you find sales people resigning and leaving the company, sales are plummeting and morale is down.  You learn that your (former) best sales person is an autocratic manager destroying the morale and coherence of the sales group.  You’ve been hurt twice, you not only hired the wrong sales manager but you also “lost” your best salesperson.

Making the right hires is critical to all firms. Hiring the wrong people, in particular, can destroy start-ups.  Established companies can lose tremendous amounts in lost opportunity, unhappy customers and recruiting and training costs.  In almost every case, bad hires have a serious impact on the morale and productivity of others in an organization.  It simply doesn’t have to happen!!

How do you avoid bad hires or promoting people into the wrong positions?  First, you must establish a precise profile for the “ideal candidate.”  This profile provides a detailed picture against which you can compare all candidates.  Then you conduct rigorous interviews and reference checks to assure the candidate you are recruiting fits the profile you require and will bring the capabilities you need to the job and company.[i] 

However, even this is becoming insufficient in assuring the right people are hired.   We are finding it important to complement the best practices Smart outlines with behavioral assessments.  These assessments can make sure the individual is “wired” with the necessary behavioral characteristics to succeed in the job. 

Behavioral assessments provide strong predictive capability regarding how an individual is likely to react in various business (stressful/unstressful) situations.  Knowing how a person is likely to react to given situations can help you avoid situations like those highlighted at the beginning of this article.  Effectively used, these assessments can be powerful allies in helping you avoid filling a position with the “wrong” person.

These assessments are also useful in improving the effectiveness of your existing organization.  People react to each other in reasonably predictable ways.  Knowing the behavioral styles of yourself and others allows you to improve relationships, decrease tension and stress and enhance communication.  It can be invaluable information to improve performance across the organization.. 

Properly understood and applied, behavioral assessments are powerful tools in helping people understand their behavioral styles and those of others. These assessments are tools that can be used in improving hiring decisions as well enhancing work relationships.

The behavioral assessments that Partners In EXCELLENCE uses have been validated with 1000’s of people.  We offer a variety of instruments that can be used to strengthen recruiting and hiring practices, build more effective and productive relationships, enhance teamwork and provide managers and executives with critical self-awareness to become better leaders.  Specialized versions test the aptitudes, attitudes and potential for sales and sales management.  These assessments, coupled with coaching on their application can help drive the success of every organization.  For more information on these assessments and to get started, contact Partners In EXCELLENCE, or follow this link.

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