Hiring For Job Fit – How to Turn Perfect Candidates Into Successful Employees
Last week’s blog was all about how to find the unicorns in a sea of catfish (aka how to find the dream candidate who is honest and perfectly exemplifies integrity).
If you’re scratching your head at the terms “unicorn” and “catfish,” read the first part of our blog series here.
Today, we’re going to focus on the end of that blog title:
Finding Employees Who Fit Their Jobs.
So you found your perfect candidate, but that is just half the battle! Next, you have to match this perfect candidate to your job opening.
When we’re hiring, we have specific needs. You may have found a perfect candidate who is honest, but if he or she doesn’t fit the job – it’s not going to work out and you will have wasted time and resources.
To find out if any candidate will fit a job, you need to ask three basic questions:
- Does the person have the reasoning skills appropriate for the job?
- What behavioral style will the person bring to the job?
- Will the person be motivated to do the job?
When you match the right person to the right job, you have created a formula for success! So how exactly do you do this? Well, you need to give your candidates an assessment for Job Fit (if they pass the Honesty-Integrity assessment).
Here’s how the Job Fit Assessment works:
- First, you identify stable, valid characteristics that affect success in each job. (Example: Can the person do the job? How will the person do the job? Will the person do the job?)
- Then, you measure the job at hand. Determine the verbal skills, the decisiveness, the energy level and many other characteristics that the person needs to be successful in this job.
- Once you have determined what the successful candidate should look like, you need to measure the individual candidate by giving them the Job Fit assessment. And the rest is magic.
The Job Fit assessment will give you a percentage to show you the degree of match for that candidate. But what exactly do these numbers mean?
Here’s a little break down:
- At 85% or better – Give them their tools and get out of their way!
- At 75% to 84% – Success will require more work on the part of the employee and the manager.
- Below 75%- The hill just gets steeper.
- At 50% match – Nobody works that hard! Ain’t nobody got time for that!
Just remember: Measuring for job fit does not measure the skills necessary for the job (that is something you would need to talk about in an interview), but it will help you figure out whether your candidate has the ability to succeed in that job.
Let’s take a second to review. With our hiring process utilizing assessments, you will:
- Have an expanded selection pool
- Separate the catfish from the unicorns early in the process
- Interview your top candidates without wasting time on the others
- Match your “perfect” candidate to your “perfect” job
- Select your candidate using all of the above information
In the end, these two assessments will help you avoid wasting valuable time and effort training employees who are destined to be low performers. You will have made your decision and hired the person who is most likely to succeed in your job because they fit the job.
Would you like to know your cost of hiring turnover? Download our Cost of Hiring Worksheet and Turnover Calculator by clicking here or filling out the form below.
