During the recruitment process one of the greatest risks for loosing talent is within the screening process.
Why? Because this process is time consuming and we often only screen and select based on professional skills and often with a certain amount of human bias. However, there are so much more to any given candidate than their skills. Personality consists of traits, facets, values and culture preferences (PVC). PVC preferences are extremely difficult to qualify and screen manually when all you have is an application, resume, online formula etc.
However, the PVC elements are getting more and more vital to support a good match and to ensure the best possible hiring in order to strengthen the engagement and core foundation in your organization supporting better results (Source: Gallup – Statement of the Global Workplace 2017).
Nevertheless, we still often screen and select from the candidate pool only based on professional skills thereby risking loosing talents that might have a much better personality match. Better personality match might even sometimes be preferential over a perfect match on professional skills. Many of us have seen first-hand the consequences of hiring a person whose personality simply did not match the job or the team they needed to work with. We would then much prefer to make a small investment in enhancing the professional skills of the person with 10-20% to get a person with a better drive, motivation and feel of belonging. Something that will yield higher engagement, creativity and performance.
Therefore, to secure that no talents escape un-interviewed and un-hired within your total candidate pool we need to :
1. Look at each candidate as an individual with unique facets, traits etc.
2. Have a mindset that assume that all candidates and applicants have a talent and potential to join your company, despite “only” having i.e. an 80% match on professional skills
3. Understand and define company values, culture and the business foundation in order to match the rights candidates with your organization and jobs
4. Screen ALL candidates and applicants continually with emphasis on a qualifying a match of PVC in addition to professional skills
5. Keep the screening process short and screen candidates for interviewing fast and stay in touch with candidates via digital communication to expand further on candidate insights, branding of your company etc. making sure to give a good candidate experience.
6. Rank most suitable candidates supported by a comprehensive summary of PVC match and hard skills/competencies for candidate interview – a better understanding of the individual.
This is a good platform for ensuring a better outcome when interviewing and deciding who to hire next.
Hope you found this input useful. Your comments, approach, ideas and additional tips are very welcome. Keep up the good work out there.
You can read more about how to hire the right people here.