Virtually every business has felt the effects of a bad hire. The wrong person for a job can have a detrimental effect on company morale, scare away potential clients, and even cause lawsuits. The real costs of hiring someone who isn’t right for your company can be staggering. In fact, 41% of surveyed businesses say that a bad hire cost them at least $25,000 in the last year. Another 25% say a bad hire cost them over $50,000 in the last year.
So how can your company avoid these costs?
Some hiring managers seem to think these results are just the cost of doing business, but the reality is that poor hiring practices lead to poor hires. In the hurry to fill empty slots, hiring managers will often rely on their gut, take the person who seems like the best fit, or settle for the person who seems like they won’t ruffle any feathers. This unscientific process leads to high levels of turnover and enormous amounts of wasted time and money.
The way to make better hiring decisions is an assessment-based approach. Using proven hiring assessments, your hiring managers can look past misleading resumes and polished interview skills to get a much clearer sense of how well a given candidate will perform within your company.
Your process should start with understanding what you’re looking for. Come up with a job description that is as accurate as you can make it – don’t embellish or promise opportunities that won’t actually exist. Then keep your standards for experience and skills relatively low. You don’t want to weed out great people who have immense capacity to learn simply because they don’t yet have certain technical abilities.
Next, you should use an online system to narrow your pool of candidates. If you don’t have an in-house system, there are a number of third party services that you can turn to. Once you have your group of viable candidates, have them take an assessment of their judgement abilities, such as our JUDGEMENTcompass Screening. This assessment should help you determine which candidates have good decision making skills and present a clear picture of how they see themselves.
Then, the candidates who remain should be interviewed according to a set question list and be given a more comprehensive assessment to measure their work style, personal strengths, weaknesses, and behavior patterns. For this assessment, we prefer the DISCcompass.
Ultimately, you should be left with strong information – not just gut feelings – by which to choose the right candidate.
To better understand this process of using assessments for hiring, we are currently offering a free DISCcompass assessment to potential clients. We’ll give you access to the assessment, then go over your results report with you in detail. To get started, visit our FREE assessment page on our website!
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