Recruitment Roulette – are you a player?

Forget Casinos. Most business owners and managers gamble every time they recruit a new employee and most of them have no idea how much it really costs them. Can your company afford to play ‘Recruitment Roulette’?

Every day, businesses employ sales people who cannot sell, customer service staff who frustrate customers and managers who cannot manage. In any business environment, this strategy is risky. In today’s particularly challenging economic climate, it is totally unsustainable.

Recruitment

Are you a gambler? If you had the opportunity to invest £10,000 of your company’s money and were required to report back on how well you’d done, what would you do with it? Would you place a bet where you only had a one in four chance of winning? Probably not!

Unfortunately the fact is that you do take that £10,000 gamble every time you recruit a new employee. Without using assessments to back up your decision the odds of selecting the right person are one in four.

Research indicates that the traditional methods of recruitment (i.e. interview and references) offer only a 26% chance of success. The problem is, that the costs of recruiting the wrong person are seldom itemised in company accounts. Nevertheless, they are very real.

Current research indicates that a bad hiring costs a company at least six months of that person’s overall cost to the business. In real terms, that means that if you recruit a customer-facing member of staff whose salary is £17.5k per year (with just basic benefits), their real cost to your company is £20,000 per year. Therefore if that person is unsuccessful, you have cost your business £10,000.

How many times can your company afford that sort of recruitment gamble?

Isn’t recruiting the wrong person just bad luck?

Sometimes it is, but as in so many other things in life, the more effort you make to get it right, the luckier you get. Assessments will help you to turn the odds in your favour and allow you to get luckier still.

Some ‘hardened’ managers believe that psychometric assessments have limited value in the recruitment process. But if you are employing people who do not perform to the level you expect, maybe it is perhaps time to reconsider the role that psychometrics can play in the recruitment process.

Why assessments?

Because…

• Two out of three new recruits disappoint in the first year
• Ninety-five per cent of applicants “exaggerate” to get a job
• Most recruiting decisions are made during the first five minutes of an interview

Because…

• All of these cost your business money
• You can reduce the probability of this happening to your business
• The increase in output between an ‘average’ employee and a ‘good’ employee is typically between 17% and 40%…. ’Schmidt and Hunter1983′

These days assessments involve neither lengthy paper-and-pencil completion nor a time-consuming evaluation of the candidate’s responses by an expensively-trained consultant. The long wait for a report at the end of the process has also disappeared.

Modern psychometrics can be completed and evaluated online and reported back within minutes of the candidate completing the process. An assessment, completed before an interview, can be with the interviewer minutes later with highlighted areas for concern and suggested questions to allow the interviewer to probe the candidate’s responses.

Improving the odds of a successful hire

The use of suitable assessments, in combination with a tailored Performance Model, can improve the chances of success from 26% to 75% or three times in four – a huge improvement.

And job matching allows you to match candidate profiles to the agreed profile for the job ensuring that you recruit the right person and at a cost that is significantly lower than getting it wrong.
Isn’t that worth a gamble?

In conclusion

Assessments should not be used on their own to determine if a candidate is the right person for the job. However, as a support to the more traditional methods of CV, interview and ‘gut feel’, they can make a significant difference to the effectiveness of your recruitment process – a process that costs businesses many thousands of pounds each year. If you want your recruitment to be more successful, perhaps you should think again about the use of assessment for the roles you need to fill.

How Pro-actions Profiling can help you:

• Online assessments to enable you to select the right people for the right job and develop them to their full potential
• Helps you select people best suited to succeed in a particular job in your business
• Improves communication and relationships
• Improves team performance and work place harmony
• Builds consistent culture and values throughout your business
• Plain English reports, administered online and available24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days per year

Written by Martin Goodwill 

Pro-actions Profiling