Finding, recruiting and retaining talent: perhaps the biggest challenge for businesses in the late twenty-teens.
The war for talent is over, and talent won. Now businesses are on the back foot, trying everything to find the right recruits that will drive the business forward and stick around long enough to make a significant difference.
The trouble is, the recruitment process hasn’t really changed in the last 50 years – you look over CVs, get someone in for an interview and hire them (or not). With cultural fit, diversity and soft skills becoming increasingly important for employees and employers, we have to question that process.
For one, it’s riddled with bias (whether unconscious or not), secondly, it doesn’t tell you the truth about the person you’re hiring. You can see experience, sure. You can see if you get on across a table, but it doesn’t uncover people’s true motivations or values.
A key weapon in the fight against bias and the drive towards greater insight is psychometric testing or personality profiling. While it’s nothing new, we have made great strides in the last few years towards making it a useful tool in uncovering cultural connections between companies and candidates.
We caught up with Heikki Karimaa, the Customer Executive for Criterion, our psychometric testing partner, to find out how psychometrics can help find, recruit and retain the best talent.
Not all psychometrics are created equal
A note before we begin. You may have a preconceived notion about what a psychometric test is: there are a lot of tests out there which give different results. For the purposes of this piece, we’re talking about very detailed personality profiling, specifically geared towards recruitment and recruiting the right people.
“Psychometric testing has been around for quite some time”, explains Heikki. “And for a long time there have been different types of assessments in terms of their predictive validity. This makes a huge difference to what you can do with the data.
“At one end you have the type-based assessments like Myers-Briggs where they say, ‘this person belongs in this box’. Which is fine for team development purposes because you’re able to see that ‘Izzi is like that’ and ‘Mike is like that’ – they show how people are different and can explain how we get along.”
- You may like: Data-driven recruitment: Should you be doing it?
This doesn’t really work in recruitment, because the truth is, people don’t fit into neat boxes. These tests seemingly work because you’re looking for the connections that fit – it feels right. It’s confirmation bias, and is the same reason people believe horoscopes. People are complex grey areas, you can’t be pigeonholed into one specific character. You’re not INFJ, or ENTJ, you’re you.
“Simply, these results are not specific enough for the recruitment process. When it comes to talent management, and there’s a job at stake, you need to understand what the person is really like”, says Heikki.
A quality psychometric test should be normative, meaning that it compares your personality to thousands of people within the same industry or role who have also taken tests, not to a theoretical standard. A lot of the time, however, recruitment teams are using tests that aren’t fit for purpose.
Psychometric testing in the recruitment process
One of the biggest challenges in psychometric testing – at least those high-quality ones with a high predictive validity – is not in the validity itself, but in how you bake it into the business process. Often the tests are built by psychologists for other psychologists. From an end user perspective, that can be an issue.
“With these tests, you have traditionally had to have a really enthusiastic HR person with a deep interest in psychometrics and spend a lot of time digging deep, understanding the tool and interpreting the results”, explains Heikki. “This doesn’t make things clearer for the line managers, C-level or even the candidates themselves. What we’re good at is making those results clearer, by aligning them with the needs of the business and the needs of the departments.
“It doesn’t help that psychometrics are often pushed back to the latter stages of the recruitment process, once a person has already been offered the role. To get the most out of the tests, businesses need to put them in much earlier than they do presently. That way you get to see the bigger picture: you’re able to use the insight and data from early on.”
So, testing should come into play earlier on, but what advantage does testing give businesses over those following the traditional recruitment route?
“These tests put candidates in real-world scenarios, tailored to the business.”
“From the beginning, we are able to very accurately measure a candidate’s personality and ability”, Heikki tells us. “We’re also then able to build situational judgement tests specific to each company. These tests put candidates in real-world scenarios, tailored to the business.”
This goes beyond simply assessing cultural fit between business and candidate, it looks at the specific role they’ll be doing and finds the candidate best suited to the position. It drills deeper. Seeing how a person reacts in a concrete way in a tailored scenario is a powerful tool in assessment, and one that you can’t get in an interview situation. It’s this depth of understanding that is of real value to the employer.
As Heikki says: “Psychometric testing isn’t easy, many of them can’t drill down deep into a person’s psyche to understand, say, leadership style or interpersonal style, the motivations, values and cultural fit. Where I think we are different is that we can drill deeply and find this stuff out.”
Retaining talent
One of the most valuable elements of testing is in understanding the employees you get on board, helping them fit into the team, and providing ongoing support and training for the duration of their employment.
“When I was working in recruitment a few years ago, we surveyed our candidates hoping to find out their happiness or satisfaction throughout the recruitment process”, Heikki tells us. What we found was that candidates are at their most vulnerable or anxious when they start their new job. We thought this would be the time they’re at their happiest – they’ve just landed a new job, they’re in a new building, meeting new people. Actually, people felt under the microscope and put a lot of pressure on themselves to hit the ground running.
“A lot of clients were aware that they needed better onboarding and better management but they often didn’t have the time. Using the results of the psychometric testing, we developed an onboarding tool which, right from the word go, tailored the candidate experience to their personality type and experience.
“So that’s one small example of using the insight to its fullest. But throughout the role, these tests can highlight areas of improvement, they can refine the way line managers feedback to staff, they can ensure personal issues are picked up early and dealt with appropriately. It’s such a flexible tool.”
The company culture
We’ve talked about psychometrics in terms of recruitment processes, but another key area where it can also work is to assess the culture of the company and showcase to prospective employees the investment the business puts into talent management and the candidate experience.
Having a culture of psychometric testing isn’t solely about filling jobs – it becomes a very visible representation of the company’s dedication to its staff. Candidates can sometimes feel threatened or intimidated by these tests, but they can be an incredible tool for feeding back to the people that didn’t make the cut.
“There is huge demand from the point of view of the job seeker to have things a bit easier – perhaps even a little more humane”, Heikki says. “This might sound counterintuitive as many people think that these tests are a little inhuman. Actually it’s not, it makes things a lot more human.
“This isn’t just helping people that got the job, it’s helping those that didn’t.”
“Testing offers a very clear, detailed and structured way to communicate exactly why they didn’t get the job. Showing applicants that they had specific weaknesses in certain areas gives them something to go away and work on. This isn’t just helping people that got the job, it’s helping those that didn’t. You’re helping people to grow their skill sets, and those people that didn’t make it may well be the high-performing employees you need a couple of years down the line.
“And it’s presented in a way that people understand: candidates can access tests through mobile devices and get the feedback in a way that’s quicker and easier than ever before: They’re not sitting around waiting for a dreaded e-mail that never comes.
This is the kind of thing that can separate one business from another, and the kind of reputation that sticks. The Deloitte Millennial Survey 2018 shows that forty-three percent of Millennials envision leaving their jobs within two years; only 28 per cent seek to stay beyond five years. Gen Z respondents express even less loyalty, with 61 per cent saying they would leave within two years if given the choice.
What matters to this audience?
– Making a positive impact on society and the environment.
– Creating innovative ideas, products and services.
– Job creation, career development and improving people’s lives.
– An emphasis on inclusion and diversity in the workplace.
Psychometric testing feeds into all these ideas and more.
One final point, psychometric testing is not a replacement for existing recruitment processes, it’s an addition. But it’s one that has a massive influence on attracting and keeping talent, on refining your overall candidate experience, and on reducing bias from the recruitment function within the business.
Interested in seeing psychometrics in action, why not have a go at a demo yourself? Or get in touch to find out how identifi is helping to…well, identify, the next wave of great talent for businesses – 01908 886 048
