Right person, first time
In these uncertain and difficult times, companies need to make sure that the employees they recruit are the right ones. Your people are the key factor in building revenue, driving down costs and creating customer service excellence. Effective selection is a key element of talent management and ensuring employee engagement.
One way of ensuring they achieve their goals is to hire the right people in the first place. Self-insight can help you execute a robust, objective, selection process that leaves very little to chance.
Why will your organisation benefit from Self-insight?
No company can afford to waste money, and one of the largest hidden costs of any organisations is the price of failing to recruit the right person, first time.
And these are just some of the direct costs of getting it wrong once – multiply this across your business and you are looking at some very large bills.
Research shows that in many organisations, recruitment processes are far from successful:
 22% of new hires leave within the first 6 months [1].
46% of new hires are perceived to have been a mistake within 18 months [2].
Only 19% achieve unequivocal success [2].
Why don’t new hires work out? One study [2] found:
23% have problems with interpersonal relationships.
17% lack the motivation to do well.
15% do not ‘fit’ with the job or organization.
Only 11% of new hires fail because they lack the necessary technical skills.
The universally-used competency based interview assesses (at best) past experiences and skills only.
How will Self-insight help you?
Self-insight offers a range of services to help improve the ‘hit rate’ for new employees and commits to continuously improving your performance. Our work is carried out by chartered psychologists, who take a rigorous, scientific approach. We focus on results, applying evidence-based best practice. Given the extent of legislation intended to prevent various forms of discrimination (e.g. gender, race, age) we also ensure the selection process is legally defensible. Furthermore we help control costs by reducing time-scales and avoiding the expense of re-hiring.
We provide services at several stages of the recruitment life-cycle:
1. What great looks like.
What does “great” look like in your organisation? The first step is to establish what really makes a difference to success in the role. The broad areas to focus are;
Technical skills
Interpersonal skills
Problem solving ability
Personal characteristics such as customer service orientation, adaptability etc. Clarifying what success looks like can be done by:
2. Screening and sifting
When you have a large number of applicants, we can set up an online sifting test to reduce the number of people to be considered in detail. Depending on the type and level of job, we offer the following types of test:
Cognitive ability tests.
Situational judgment tests (bespoke job relevant tests).
Dependability test. This has been designed to identify candidates who will have good attendance records, be effective and positive team members, and who can be relied on to produce good quality work as well as be more customer focused. It is aimed at front line customer service and operational roles.
Scorable application forms. In addition to collecting basic personal details, the form asks about education, experience, behaviours etc. assigning scores to each item. The total score can then be used as a means to rank candidates based on objective data. The form is developed by measuring the relationship between various factors and performance in your organization.
3. Assessments
72% of companies still hire people on the basis of unstructured interviews [1]. It has been known for nearly sixty years that these are very poor at predicting job performance [3]. We offer a range of assessments, for different circumstances, which have proven correlations between test score and performance.
3.1 Psychometric tests
For a short-list of candidates we can provide one or more psychometric tests, taken either online or on paper. Cognitive ability tests are the single best measures for predicting job performance [4]. People need to be smart enough to do the job. We can provide a range of tests covering different types of ability (e.g. verbal, numerical, or abstract reasoning or critical thinking) over a wide range of ability levels and in a range of languages.
We also offer personality, thinking style, motivation and values tools, which are invaluable for predicting how someone will operate in the workplace. These factors are particularly important for managerial, sales and customer service roles. A suite of psychometric tests has been proven to predict performance considerably more accurately than an unstructured interview. For example, the most predictive personality factors are conscientiousness and emotional stability (i.e. the ability to handle stress) [4]. We also offer more specific tests, such as for customer service or sales. We do not view tests as a replacement for the interview. Typically we use SHL’s OPQ32 for personality, MQ for motivation, and the Verify range for ability. However we are not tied to one publisher and can offer a range of tests from different companies to match your needs.
3.2 Situational judgment tests
While standard psychometric tests are generic, we can develop bespoke online tests tailored to your organization and the specific tasks carried out. Situational judgment tests present work-related scenarios in a multiple choice format. They can cover a range of skills from interpersonal to problem solving. They have the advantage that candidates perceive them as more realistic and job relevant than generic tests. They are calibrated to predict performance in your particular organization.
3.3 Assessment centres
In an assessment centre candidates are gathered for a day (or more), and are give a set of psychometric tests and job-specific exercises. These measure factors such as the ability to work in a team, social confidence, persuasion and influencing skills, leadership, resilience and the ability to perform under pressure. Typical exercises are a presentation, role plays or business scenarios. The event gives the candidate a greater opportunity to demonstrate their capabilities than a straightforward interview. The assessment centre is carefully designed in conjunction with you and hiring managers, to meet the needs of your organization.
3.4 In-depth executive assessment
We also offer an in-depth assessment process for more senior staff, who prefer a less public format than an assessment centre. This entails, as above, psychometric tests tapping ability, personality and values. They are followed by an intensive interview lasting two-three hours. Part of the session is feedback on the psychometric tests. The interview builds on these results but goes beyond, using the consultant’s experience to probe the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses and to identify potential. The output is a report profiling each candidate against key leadership dimensions (e.g. judgment, execution, adaptability, drive etc.). The interview can also form the basis of ongoing coaching for successful candidates.
4. Validation studies
We can measure how predictive assessments are in your organization. Where you have sufficient numbers, we can give staff one or more tests and compare the results with supervisor ratings or harder measures such as sales figures. This provides a picture of the relationship between test scores and performance. We can then fine tune the selection process to use the tools that are most predictive of performance. We also ensure the process is not biased to one particular demographic group. This provides you with confidence in the validity of the assessment process, and provides evidence of objectivity if a recruitment decision is ever subject to legal challenge.
5. On boarding
Even if a candidate is the ideal match for a role, the placement may still fall through if induction is poor and more times than not you will lose a potentially great employee to a competitor. New hires may face difficulties integrating into your organization, slowing the rate at which they reach full productivity. We can either work with you (to establish a framework for induction) or the candidate themselves (through coaching) to ensure the new hire gets up to speed quickly.
6. Measuring return on investment
If you don’t measure success, how can you replicate and enhance it throughout your organisation in order to make more effective financial and strategic decisions? We can work with you to establish the return on investment of objective assessment. The difference in productivity between the top and bottom 10% of employees can be substantial. Accumulated over an organization, selecting higher performers can have a dramatic impact on an organization’s performance.
The Importance of Assessment Accuracy
To illustrate what assessment accuracy means, imagine a company that uses a less than ideal assessment method (such as unstructured interviews) and hires all the candidates, regardless of how well they did in the assessment. They rate each candidate based on the assessment and set a cut-off score to determine who should or should not have been hired. Six months later they measure how well each candidates actually performed in the role (e.g. by using a manager's assessment). They set a second threshold to categorize them as good or poor performers (i.e. whether or not they would have hired them in hindsight). The chart below shows the results that would be obtained.
Candidates who would have been rejected as they scored poorly in the assessment yet actually performed well in the job - "the ones that got away". The assessment process failed to predict these high performers. |
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Candidates who were rated highly in the assessment process and also performed well in the job. The assessment process successfully predicted these high performers. |
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Candidates who scored poorly in the assessment and also performed poorly in the job. The assessment process successfully predicted these poor performers. |
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Candidates who scored well in the assessment yet performed poorly in the job. The assessment process failed to accurately predict these poor performers. |
A more accurate assessment process increases your ability to predict candidates’ performance in the job. The better the method, the more the pattern of results changes from the random pattern above to a narrower pattern as shown below. Structured interviews, psychometric tests (especially cognitive ability tests) and work sample tests have all been demonstrated to significantly improve predictive power over methods such as unstructured interviews or simply looking at experience.
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