Finding the right person for the job is crucial to your organization’s long-term success. Each member of your team should serve an important role in your organization, so important that in fact, your well-oiled machine feels the heat and needs to overcompensate when one of them is away. 

The recruitment process is not for the faint of heart, there is an ever-growing pool of talent and as a recruiter, it’s your job to sift through it to find the best match for your organization. This also means finding the most effective ways to reach your ideal candidates. Furthermore, you have to strategically market your organization, ensuring it is a compelling place to apply so that you really do have a pool of talent to choose from. It’s a lot of work!

So, you may be wondering, how do you know when you have found the right hire, the perfect fit? 

Well, I will start off by listing some of the main things to look for in an interview, and then move onto some of the different routes HR specialists have recently been taking to ensure they get the best hire, and the best fit, every single time. 

What to look for in an interview:

1. An excellent candidate will have a strong introduction, you will not easily forget them.
2. No matter what role you are hiring for, you should be looking for an effective communicator. Not only in-person, but also over the phone and through email or written word. An excellent candidate should reply quickly and professionally.
3. You have probably noticed the difference between an inquisitive candidate, one that truly shows interest in your company, has done previous research into various facets of your organization and has many questions prepared, versus the candidate that asks the bare minimum. You know, the general questions they researched online 30 minutes prior to the interview. An inquisitive candidate is a prepared candidate, one that is eager and shows interest in the position. 
4. Another important trait to look for in a candidate is their attitude. Attitude is the MOST important trait when it comes to hiring right. You can teach skill, but you can not teach attitude. In order to keep employee morale high and decrease employee turnover rates, you need good people working for you with positive “go get-em” attitudes. 
5. Every recruiter loves that “ah-ha” moment, when you think you may have found the perfect fit for the position, so you call their recommendations and get outstanding reviews. A highly recommended employee means a lot in this day and age. It’s easy for employees to brag about what they’ve done on their resumes (especially with all of the sample resumes that are easily accessible online), but to hear how great or how missed they are from past employers is a true sign that they have potential to be a good hire. 

Though, it’s never that simple, is it? Employees may excel with one company and then fail miserably with another. It’s all about culture fit and employee drive. Many companies admit to having problems with interpersonal conflict, absenteeism, missing deadlines, unauthorized resource usage, employee turnover, dishonesty, arrival tardiness and even drug or alcohol abuse. So, how do you know if someone really IS that perfect hire for YOUR company?

There’s got to be a better way…what are other HR specialists turning to?

The cost of hiring the wrong employee is high (it can cost $1,200 for companies with less than 500 employees and $2,000 for companies with over 500 employees). HR specialists are now screening employees through tests, such as: aptitude tests, integrity screening and personality screening. The ultimate goal of these tests are to assist HR specialists to objectively get to know their candidates, ensuring they really are choosing the right person for the job.

Recruit Rite offers integrity screening (HARM – The Holden Applicant Reliability Measure) and personality screening (ACE). These are self-administered tests that candidates can do from the comfort of their own homes. These tests are made to assess on-the-job counterproductive behaviors and measure key personality traits. 

Screening tests are an incredible tool that allow you to assess if your candidates are honest, have integrity, are productive and have the right personality to match your organization’s culture. These tests give HR specialists peace of mind, because let’s be honest, we can’t always go with our gut instincts anymore. These tests are built to seek out applicants that are exaggerating or inflating their strengths or trivializing their weaknesses. 

So, why not try Recruit Rite today? Find out more at info@recruitrite.org.

For many of us, Fall tends to be a busy time of year for recruiting new staff.  If you’ve ever been the person responsible for hiring a new employee at your company, you’ll know that one of the biggest challenges in the screening process is trying to get as much relevant information as possible from a candidate so that you can feel confident that you’re hiring the best person for the job. Eventually you come to the point in the process where an offer of employment is extended, but for most people there is still lingering doubt about whether or not they’ve made the right decision.   Interviews, resumes, phone screens and references are often poor predictors of how a candidate will actually perform on the job. A well developed, valid and reliable pre-employment test takes the guess work out of hiring by providing an employer with an objective way to gather information about how the candidate will perform in the job. Long story short, pre-employment tests help take the uncertainty out of your screening process and will let you hire with greater insight and confidence.

Hiring correctly the first time will boost employee morale, increase workplace productivity, minimize workplace complaints, decrease employee turnover and ultimately, save your organization time and money.

High employee turnover however can cost 30-400% of an employee’s salary to replace them. That is a significant amount, considering the other costs associated with the recruitment process. Some contributing factors that are costly in the recruitment and onboarding processes are:

• Hiring manager’s time
• Internal / external recruiters salary
• Employee training costs
• Job board and advertising costs
• Lost productivity if an employee isn’t immediately replaced
• Lower productivity while a new employee learns the job
• Employer branding efforts
• Employee relocation costs

Each of these factors can significantly affect your bottom line, which is why it is so important to take the time to properly screen your prospective employees, ensuring they really are the right hire. It’s easy to miss signs that an employee is not the right fit for your company when you are so busy assessing their personality, listening carefully to their responses, and questioning if they are being fully truthful or not.

On top of it all, studies show that applicants tend to exaggerate or inflate their strengths and trivialize their weaknesses, it’s a lot to look out for in one 30 minute interview.

So where do traditional interviews fall short? In the 2018 Global Recruiting Trends report by LinkedIn, 63% of 9,000 hiring managers who participated in the study said that interviews fail to assess the candidate’s soft skills (like communication, collaboration, listening, and empathy). Furthermore, 57% of respondents said that interviews fail to help them identify a candidate’s weaknesses, and 42% thought that interview bias was to blame.

The recruitment process takes time, money, patience and proper screening. A screening test is like a second pair of eyes and ears that every recruiter feels they need throughout the hiring process. It can put your mind at ease, knowing that you hired right the first time, saving your company thousands of dollars on that bad hire that just happened to slip through the cracks.

There are many different types of screening products, such as: aptitude tests, skills tests, background checks, integrity screening, physical ability tests, job knowledge tests, cognitive ability tests and personality screening.

Recruit Rite, a division of Limestone Technologies offers The Holden Applicant Reliability Measure (HARM) integrity screening test and ACE personality screening test. HARM is a 30 minute, 100 item true/false self-report measure that assesses on-the-job counterproductive behaviours. ACE, is a 30 item, 10 minute screening tool that measures the 5 key personality traits, with specific focus on the top 3 traits that are transferable across cultures. These can be used separately, but deliver the best results when used in tandem.

Hiring right the first time can provide your organization with long-lasting value, which is why augmenting your hiring processes with pre-employment assessments is the best route to take. Screening allows you to objectively get to know a candidate and make more informed hiring decisions, with the ultimate goal of reducing employee turnover rates and the potential to save your organization thousands of dollars.