Stop Gambling With Your Recruiting Dollars

Think about the investment to hire new employees. There’s an applicant tracking system. An HR department. Outside recruiter costs. Job posting costs, and the time taken to write and edit the approved job description. Interviews plus follow up time. Training & development. Altogether, recruiting costs represent about forty-six percent (46%!) of a new employee’s salary. In other words, it costs approximately $46,000 to recruit one employee who will earn $100,000. Even after all that investment, it’s still a crapshoot – a standard interview is only 19% accurate in predicting candidate success.

Why? Because the standard hiring process – as it stands today – doesn’t uncover temperament. In plain terms, temperament is our personality. It is who we are at the core, it’s generally consistent over time, and it’s formed by the time we’re 3 or 4 years old. Temperament tells us whether we’re competitive, analytical, empathetic or persistent – and much more. Temperament is the key ingredient that identifies whether the person will do what they say, and if they’ll be passionate about their work.

Don’t get me wrong. Behavioural interviewing can be an extraordinarily useful tool in the selection process. Most behavioural interviews can uncover whether the candidate has the necessary skills and experience to do the job. Unfortunately, they’re usually structured inadequately, which means that hiring managers can’t get clear insight into past performance, predicted performance – and most importantly, natural temperament. These issues can lead to the symptoms of a bad hire, like under-performance, low morale, severance and legal fees.

So what’s the solution? How do you find and keep high-performance employees and streamline an often-complicated process? Simple: start using an assessment system. Assessments, like the ones from The McQuaig Institute, provide deep insight into your hiring and development decisions and, when combined with behavioural interviews, empower you to objectively & confidently select the best candidate for the job.

When you’re investing that much money to hire a new employee, why take a chance?