Recruitment and retention is an ongoing issue for businesses big and small, across sectors. Finding the right person can make all the difference to the culture and success of a business, resulting in less turnover, increased profits and greater overall morale. According to one source, remarkably, one in eight organisations reported recruitment difficulties last year. Though the hospitality sector is the most likely to face challenges when recruiting, other sectors (including manufacturing, construction and professional services) aren’t far behind.
HR professionals and business experts are constantly on the lookout for ways in which to optimise recruitment and keep hold of top performers while avoiding issues such as quiet quitting. There is no silver bullet – everything needs to come together well. However, there are certain tools that can be utilised which can help employers hire employees that are well-suited for any given position, based on skills, personality and interests. One of these tools is known as psychometric testing, usually carried out through recruitment software. Let’s take a look at the potential benefits of psychometric testing and how it can be used to enhance and strengthen the recruitment process.
With accurate psychometric testing which delves into a candidate’s cognitive abilities, skills and personality, you can take a data-led, scientific approach to recruitment which will ultimately provide you with the best possible candidates. Taking the time to ask the right competency-based questions at the right time will ultimately improve employee and company performance in the long-run, while improving retention rates within the organisation.
It’s a well-known fact that, despite the very best of intentions, the recruitment process can still involve a great deal of unconscious bias. One of the biggest benefits of psychometric testing is that it can rapidly increase objectivity by focusing on a candidate’s skill rather than their background or education history. This form of testing can anonymise the whole process, and with advances in artificial intelligence, the ability to reduce bias while highlighting promising candidates improves by the day.
Recruiters love to ask the ‘what’s your greatest weakness’ question, and for good reason – it’s important to know where a potential candidate could stand to improve. Nobody is perfect, after all, and filling in skill gaps will only result in a more well-rounded, valuable employee. However, the reality is, candidates are bad at answering this question, and all too often they simply respond that they are too much of a perfectionist – an answer which isn’t really much help to anyone.
Psychometric testing can do the hard work for you and actually highlight areas of concern. The answers to these questions might reveal them to be ill-suited for the job, or they might simply provide useful information for the employee’s development strategy once they come aboard.
It’s important for companies to have a clear identity brand, including company values, objectives and priorities. Through this, company culture develops, and this culture will be a deciding factor in many instances, including who gets hired and who gets promoted. Skills and ability are, of course, important but recruiters must also consider how well the potential candidate would fit in your workplace – do their values match? Would they feel happy as part of the team? Are they motivated by the same factors?
Psychometric testing will provide companies with information including what type of environment the candidate prefers to work in, their personality type, how they are motivated and how they prefer to communicate with their coworkers, to name just a few. Hiring the wrong person will only result in frustration, unhappiness and, ultimately, high levels of employee turnover.
Recruitment can be a time-consuming process – testing can help to expedite matters, saving time and resources by focusing on the most promising candidates and weeding out ones that, for one reason or another, won’t work for the position or your company.
When we recruit, we want to know about the skills and ability of the person as they stand – but we also want to know about their potential. Unfortunately, recruiters so often lack crystal balls that will predict how well an employee will grow, adapt and learn – but an employee is an investment, and we’d rather hire someone who will provide increased value as the years go by.
Psychometric testing is able to reflect inherent ability, giving insights into how easily a candidate acquires new skills and processes information – all of which can be used to assess whether or not a candidate is the right fit for your business.
The cost of high employee turnover is staggering, and can ultimately tank a business. Making the right decisions early on about who to hire and who to pass over can make all the difference and save companies money. Recruitment is pricey, incurring costs from advertisements and time spent interviewing to training and loss of productivity while the candidate is getting up to speed. Psychometric testing stands to save companies a lot of money by ensuring that the right, and most promising, candidates are hired from day one.
Ultimately, psychometric testing is like any other tool that can be used within a business – it can benefit an organisation massively, but it needs to be used right and you need to partner with the right people to make it happen
