Thinking of contacting an agency to help you with hiring? You owe it to yourself to read The 7 Truths Recruiting Firms Would Rather You Not Know first.
The reason you hire is because you need to.
You have an open chair due to turnover or growth and your objective is to fill that chair with the best possible person.
As a result, the pain of the empty chair fuels your hiring criteria leading to short-sighted decisions with long term consequences.
The purpose of hiring however should be to protect the engagement level of those you already have.
A 2015 Harvard Study found that avoiding a toxic worker creates 235% more financial benefit to an organization than successfully hiring someone deemed to be in the top 1% of the available talent pool at that time.
Culture is defined as, "the sum of values, customs and beliefs that separates one group of people from another".
In other words, your culture needs to be your 'line in the sand' against which you measure all whom you invite to join you. A failure to define culture in quantifiable ways that can actually be measured in an interview is the first fundamental flaw in most hiring processes.
There's a difference between an applicant with 10 years of experience and one with "1 year of experience 10 years in a row." The only way to know this difference is to have a visceral understanding of the problems you need your new hire to solve on your behalf.
Many companies are unclear on the problems they have. Even more mask their problems, fearing it will scare away top talent. In truth, the best people are attracted to the problems they get to solve as working on these problems increases the three primary psychological factors required for job satisfaction. You must define your problems through the lens of organizational psychology to know the true Competence you should be seeking (and that which should be seeking you).
Your organizational climate is the atmosphere created on a day-to-day basis. It is derived from the mix of engaged, disengaged and toxic people you have.
Engaged employees are aligned with the values of the culture, thus being part of culture itself is intrinsically motivating for them. They are there for what they give.
Disengaged employees are misaligned with these values, therefore lack intrinsic motivation, and thus require extrinsic motivation to be engaged. They are there for what they get.
Toxic employees are threatened by the culture and feel compelled to act out. They feel they're actually 'fighting the good fight' by being disruptive.
You can have a strong culture (Values & Beliefs) yet a poor climate if you fail to respect that culture when hiring. You need to be clear before you hire whether an applicant is someone you should Target, someone you must Train, someone you must Tolerate, or someone you will most likely Terminate.
Using our proprietary Functional & Frictional ValuesTM we quantifiably define your culture. Using Job Design Theory, we determine the right behavioural competence required and use our Behavioural Colours system to determine the ideal match. Establishing these baselines de-risks the process for us by eliminating the guesswork of identifying candidates who will grow to be engaged employees with you.
It reduces your risk by eliminating the turnover and toxicity that comes from inadvertently hiring someone who is poorly aligned with your culture.
Conventional firms have not developed these tools, forcing them to de-risk their business in other ways like sending as many resumes as possible and encouraging their clients to hire quickly to increase the odds of a placement.
We build a custom online assessment for each and every role. This ensures that applicants have been measured against your unique needs, not averages from arbitrary databases. Your culture drives the engagement level of your people therefore it must be the benchmark. Once again this decreases your risk and increases our efficiency.
Conventional recruiters are forced to go on gut. This increases the risk they will need to go back to market and submit new candidates if and when the first line up fails to impress.
We produce detailed reporting that allows all parties to see if they are a fit for one another before they invest time in interviewing, once again removing risk from the entire process.
Without this reporting, conventional firms are forced to rely heavily on their clients to assess how strong the candidate is in an interview. This would be fine if you were trained in organizational psychology, but odds are you're not.
This is why we also create individualized interview questions for each candidate, based on their assessment scores. Not only is this one more contribution toward assessing 'fit', it makes our clients better interviewers themselves. "Interviewer anxiety" and the blindspots it creates, is a major cause of poor hires. Our process has eliminated it.
Once hired, we provide every new hire and their new leader, with a detailed on-boarding package built on the principles of emotional intelligence, psychological safety and servant leadership. This level of support practically ensures zero risk of a poor placement.
