Why are recruiters failing to get what they thought they hired?
One issue is that there are increasing numbers of Career Coaches whose job is to get their clients hired. Developing the skill to ace interviews is one of the promises of these coaches. What you see is not necessarily what you will get.
In most organizations, there is a tendency to define the “technical” requirements for jobs – professional skills, training/education, work experience, language skills, etc. However, most organizations are not equipped to assess the behavioural requirements of a job. Many failures on the job are not based on a lack of professional skills but on deficiencies in dealing with people and communication problems. A seminal Harvard study attributed 85% of success to Inter-personal skills and only 15% to Technical competence.
What then can employers do?
Employers need to raise their game. We advocate a rigorous 5-Step process:
- Developing a competency-based behavioural “ideal profile” for each role. This step is designed to give the recruiting and selection team clear and concise details on how best to perform this job. In effect, the Ideal Profile is the equivalent of saying if we could design someone to perform this job, this is how they would go about it.
- Collecting Personal Behavioural Analyses of the applicants with benchmarking against the “ideal profile” for the role. Recruiting without psychometric analysis invites a hiring crisis.
- Providing an Interview Map to guide targeted interaction with the candidates during interviews. Many individuals conducting interviews have no in-depth understanding of what they want to learn about the candidates. What kind of questions to ask that are not in Career Coaches script? What are the areas to probe further?
- Creating a multi-person, report that provides line-by-line comparative analysis among the candidates and against the benchmarking template. We use a sophisticated solution on the revolutionary FinxS® Platform from Extended DISC® that allows recruiters to match candidates against directly relevant competencies and among the short-list. This makes a huge difference when you need to choose among candidates that have similar technical qualifications.
- Appending a brief questionnaire to the assessment that requires candidates to provide historical evidence of their demonstration of some core issues. The questions apply leading-edge Behavioural Interviewing techniques to capture information on issues such as Integrity, Commitment, Courage and Goal-focus. The responses are included in the comprehensive assessment package along with the psychometric and competency-based components.
This comprehensive approach actually strengthens the interviewing process, giving interviewers greater clarity as to what they are looking for in candidates and get detailed information on candidates prior to the interviews.
The Ideal Profile is an effective and powerful tool that can be developed by collecting and combining the opinions of key players in an organization about the behavioural competencies that are required to effectively perform a particular job. Alternatively, Extended DISC®/FinxS® experts will create the Ideal Profile based on the Job Description that is provided.
The objective of the exercise is to produce a template for the ideal behavioural style for undertaking the job in question. This analysis provides the template against which the natural behavioural style of candidates is compared to produce a behavioural gap analysis. The analysis also adds value in the following areas:
- Gaining clarity about the job and identifying facets that might not otherwise be recognized up front.
- Aligning the job with the vision and mission of the organization through structured discussion.
- Analysing and working through differences of opinion among key stakeholders as to how the job ought to be performed.
- Identifying areas of responsibility that may need to be taken away from the job or added to it.
- Recognizing situations in which the performer of the job may require specified support.
- Establishing the critical success factors with respect to the job and agreeing on a framework for the performance measures that will govern the job.
Implementation is swift and easy. 5 or 6 individuals who are clear about the requirements of the job are asked to link relative weightings to a list of competencies. These results are input into the FinxS® Job Profile Application to produce the template against which individual behavioural analyses will be compared.
Again, Extended DISC® / FinxS® experienced professionals are ready to prepare the Ideal Template for you at no additional cost.
The Behavioural DNA Analysis uses the preferred multi-phrase questionnaire model and a library of competencies to produce a comprehensive profile of the “natural” style of individuals in addition to a report on how they “perceive” they ought to behave to deal with the current environment.
The report includes a specific analysis of the respondent’s preferred behavioural style and has the unique Role Fit feature that matches their relative comfort with performing the battery of competencies. This allows for direct mapping of the individual’s behavioural orientation with the requirements of the job. This behavioural gap analysis is a powerful tool not only for assisting in the selection process but in guiding the coaching and more effective deployment of the person.
A Behavioural Interviewing-inspired Survey is appended to the assessment. It focuses on the concept that the past is the best predictor of future action. Candidates are asked to respond to open-ended questions that are related to relevant situations.
The Interview Mapping component involves presentation of a multi-person, competency-based comparative report incorporating the result of all the short-listed candidates in a line-by-line presentation. That greatly facilitates the candidate evaluation and interviewing process.
There are also system-generated questions for further probing that are developed in specific response to the profile of the candidate. This has proven to be a very useful service as it brings to light issues that might not have been addressed without the diagnostics.
A comprehensive multi-person comparative report is supplied along with the individual analyses.
The entire process, includes the Ideal Profile development, role-specific Behavioural DNA Analysis, Role Fit – Gap Analysis comparative scores for key competencies, Evidence provided in response to a Behaviorual Interviewing appended survey and the Interview Map Probing Questions.
Upon approval, Option A, we will send the Ideal Profile data collection instrument to be completed by persons who know the requirements of the job. They should be completed by at least 4 and up to 10 persons. The exercise should take about 10 minutes. The exercise should be completed independently and without consultation with other raters. The results should be scanned and e-mailed to us.
Option B, we will prepare the Ideal Template from your Job Description and set up the online assessment for the candidates and send you links that will take them directly to the answering portal. Timelines should be established with the candidates for the completion of the assessment.
We will then process the information and produce the Behavioural DNA reports for each applicant as well as the multi-person line-by-line comparative results.
info@extendeddiscsolutions.org
