If your business grows large enough to hire full-time employees, hiring can be an exciting prospect. You need to seek out the best people to build your vision and take things to the next level.
After a while, however, hiring can be a bit slow. You need to diligently craft the job description and figure out how to advertise it to get noticed by the right people. If you are lucky enough to get a few qualified candidates, there are many interview rounds and tough decisions.
Then, despite your time and effort, your hire may or may not be received. Their actual abilities may not match the promise of their resume. Or the person you hired might not be a good fit for the work culture you’ve established. Or maybe the new employee decides it’s not the right role for them. The hiring cycle begins again.
After a few rounds of hiring, the process tends to lose its luster. Technology has tried to help find employees that best suit business needs; this came in the form of personality tests. These tests have been used by companies for years and are not always useful in the hiring process. But in general, recruiting technology hasn’t advanced much since then, at least not widely.
However, new hiring technology tools are starting to emerge. Two Story, a performance analytics innovator, is looking for a better way to match employers with candidates. This new hiring solution is called Performance Story.
Using a robust combination of behavioral assessment and skills analysis, Performance Story uses the latest findings in machine learning and behavioral science to diagnose what each role needs and predict candidate fit. When used correctly, this tool can change the way businesses hire.
Creating a story, not a profile
A Performance Story, as its name suggests, provides a comprehensive picture of an employee rather than a list of attributes. It’s a huge advance that better reflects the complexity of humans. Performance Story avoids boiling the contenders down for their skills and whether or not they are extroverts, which never gave the full picture.
Performance Story examines a job seeker’s talent profile to assess their predictive job fit and potential. Gaps in that profile can be filled after the candidate completes Two Story’s behavioral assessment. These assessments use non-obvious questions to understand the roots of a person’s behavior, values, insights, and habits. They can also gain insight into how well they handle criticism and confrontation.
Traditional personality tests tend to have obvious and leading questions. Candidates may be tempted to answer in the way they think will get them the job instead of answering honestly. So if an employer is looking at a resume with vague language and an incomplete personality report, it’s harder to predict a job fit.
Knowing what makes a person tick can also help employers communicate expectations on both sides. Maybe the candidate has a history of leaving a job after about two years, which is lower than the US average. Even the candidate may not know why the pattern occurred. Performance Story can play a major role in providing explanation and remedy.
Reviewing the candidate’s history
Performance analysis may indicate that the individual needs a clear progression path to remain engaged long-term. Performance Story creates a list of key questions to ask in interviews to confirm or adjust candidate profiles. In this case, it may not be helpful to ask the interviewee about a time when they overcame difficulties at work. It would be much more insightful to inquire if they ever had a career path in their previous job.
If they never had a clear career path with their previous employers, this can provide a win-win solution. A prospective employer should review and evaluate the performance analysis to see what advancements are possible for that person or position within the five-year business forecast. If progress is feasible, it should be clearly communicated what the employee must do to achieve it.
Additionally, the interviewee has had career advancement outlined by previous employers, and then something else is behind the hiring pattern. If a candidate’s tendency to be short-term is not something employers can easily correct with job changes, then they may not be a good fit.
If an employee succeeds, everyone succeeds
One of the central aspects of the Performance Story is asking candidates a very simple question. What kind of placement gives each person the best chance for success? And this is far beyond the main functions of the job itself.
For example, let’s say a business called Pencil Supply is growing and needs to hire an HR and benefits coordinator. Performance Story’s AI systems can isolate the key traits of successful HR coordinators and the variables related to the internal nuances of pencil supply. While it may seem counterintuitive, the process can actually open up the hiring pool to a greater number of applicants.
In the case of Pencil Supply, maybe they used to require applicants to have a master’s degree or an MBA. Performance Story can reveal that the most successful HR leaders have at most a bachelor’s degree and, more importantly, one personality trait. That vital information could inspire Pencil Supply to lower the education requirement and bring more applicants into the system.
Another game-changing facet of Performance Story is its predictive capabilities. A powerful combination of behavioral analytics and AI predictions will first assess the performance analysis of how a candidate might perform in a particular role. Next, it provides information to the employer on how they can adjust their processes to get the best out of their new hire. From job duties to career paths to educational opportunities, employers will learn what will keep an employee engaged and engaged.
Very rarely is an employee’s success in the workplace one-sided. If an employer has predictive analytics in place to retain an employee for the long term, they can minimize turnover. When an employer focuses on the success of its individual employees, the company as a whole should see the benefits.
Using science, not guesswork
There are all kinds of vague ways that employers or hiring managers make hiring decisions. They can be based on feelings, first impressions, or the candidate being the sister of the local mayor. Those methods may be better than randomly picking up a resume and extending an offer, but data and analytics can be game-changers. Using an approach that offers performance analytics, behavioral analytics, and predictive AI capabilities can make hiring more efficient and facilitate better job/candidate matches.
So if you want to maintain long hiring cycles and high turnover rates, keep doing what you’re doing. Change the way you hire for better results and fewer headaches.
Featured Image Credit: by RODNAE Productions; pixels; Thank you
