Employees who show initiative are much more likely to become leaders within your organization. Initiative is a key component of employee engagement, which is essential to creating business value. Without strong employee initiative, your company is likely to be stuck in the mud with no clear path for moving forward. In fact, studies have shown that disengaged, unmotivated employees cost US businesses not millions, but billions of dollars every year.
Unfortunately, most HR departments have few or no ways to measure a potential hire’s initiative during the interview process. Initiative is something that is difficult to show on a resume or in an interview. Whereas a traditional hiring process may give you a solid understanding of an employee’s skills, their essential characteristics – including their sense of initiative – are much harder to understand on a comprehensive level with interviews alone.
That’s why at Level Up Leadership, we do things a bit differently. Our company uses employee assessments to look beyond a potential hire’s skills and gain a sense of their values and character. In many cases, the best person for the job might not be the most qualified on paper, but they’ll make up for their lack of knowledge with a sense of personal motivation, drive, and willingness to learn.
An important aspect of pre-hire assessments is that they create a detailed profile of a potential hire. Rather than looking at generic overarching qualities like judgment or loyalty, an employee assessment can ascertain how a new hire will handle a particular type of task or decision. For example, when it comes to initiative, you probably want to hire someone who is willing to contribute new ideas and go above and beyond, but you may not want someone who is likely to assume too much authority or impose their ideas upon other team members.
Make sure that you are hiring for the skills and the qualities that you value most in your workplace by utilizing employee assessments in your hiring process. Whether you need a self-assured salesperson or a detail-oriented number cruncher, pre-hire assessments can help you find the person who is both a good fit for the position and for the future of your business.
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