Would you sign an insurance contract based on a gut feeling or blind faith…without looking at the terms? Here’s a quick analogy with recruiting a candidate. While CVs, cover letters and references have long been the standard for assessing potential, employers and recruiters have been beginning to take interest in their candidates’ soft skills and personality. What about their ability to make decisions, manage conflicts or learn new skills? Being able to reveal a candidate’s potential before they are recruited offers many advantages to HR and Talent Acquisition leaders, as well as the general future of the company.
Detecting potential, an asset that keeps giving
For a long time, detecting a candidate’s potential during the recruitment process came down the recruiter’s intuition. Today, scientific and technological developments offer HR and hiring teams solutions that facilitate the detection of potential, basing it on tangible criteria to inform your candidate selection process.
Uncovering candidate potential from the interview
The interview is THE key moment to uncover a candidates potential. But without integrating structured interview methods, the interview can be boiled down to a simple meeting from which conclusions are drawn, often hastily. As candidates look to win over their recruiters (and vice versa), natural personality traits and behaviours may be hidden. Interviews are done in a contextual bubble: outside of the working environment or demand, so it is difficult to identify the soft skills that will be necessary on a daily basis without seeing them in a specific scenario. Today, recruiting a candidate must be done with the understanding that everything can change in a short time. The notion of potential detection must be redefined in the light of a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world.
What if detecting potential made it possible to identify the soft skills necessary to perform highly in the face of adversity? Perhaps there is not one definition of potential, but several, just as there are several job descriptions. Similar to skills, an organisation needs a range of personalities, from communicators to empathetic team leaders to assertive decision makers. Identifying soft skills and character traits with precision and objectivity are part of a structured recruitment process designed for this purpose.
The big bad psychometric test
A step that some may be reluctant to begin! Formalising your system for detecting potential goes much further than the typical questions you would ask a candidate or via techniques that observe their behaviour. Psychometric recruitment tests meet both these needs, though it is still at the centre of many misunderstandings, both for recruiters and candidates.
A digital infrastructure adapted to remote work
If your company does not already have one, it is time to equip yourself with an HRIS! Not only to manage teleworking, but also to dematerialise administrative tasks, facilitate your return to the office and the organisation of the various face-to-face versus remote experiences. Before making your choice, we advise you to test the solution to ensure compatibility with existing systems.
Collaborative HRIS platforms with cloud storage are on the rise. According to a study by ISG (Information Services Group), 46% of companies questioned have adopted SaaS or hybrid solutions for their HRIS, a number that has doubled in two years. Additionally, their investments translate into tangible results: 64% of companies derive an ROI from it, particularly in terms of productivity, expenses optimisation and employee loyalty. This choice is driven by several values including data security, ease of use and maintenance.
The advantage of investing in digital transformation while simultaneously making remote working permanent is that it comes at a time when most employees are already familiar with remote collaboration. Firstly, rolling out the program and getting everyone up to speed is far easier. Additionally, HR already have an idea of the performance indicators that they will be able to apply. Finally, choosing an external solution is equivalent to a lessening the work of internal resources, not only in the costs themselves, but also in terms of human resources. HR teams will find themselves freed from this burden, which often falls beyond their own skill set, and can then use that energy for more strategic and engaging tasks.
Psychometrics and the science of soft skills
Psychological characteristics of individuals were first measured in the 19th century. Sir Francis Galton, the founder of psychometrics and an early proponent of psychology, wanted to determine a method of evaluating physical, psychic and behavioural characteristics in order to elevate psychology to the rank of a true science. Since then, the psychometric test has gone through various iterations. Today in the context of HR, these tests are not concerned with technical skills, but explore several characteristics of the candidate: their cognitive abilities, aptitudes, personality and motivations..
While today some entrepreneurs and professionals still choose to present themselves by their Myers Briggs profile, psychometric tests are still often considered a gimmick in recruitment. However, it is well known that a candidate’s performance is intimately linked to their mode of reasoning, their values, their preferences and their motivations. For example, evaluating the natural tendencies of individuals towards others also sheds light on the settings in which talent will be able to flourish.
An HR solution that boosts recruitment
For fans of KPIs and ROI, psychometric tests can improve recruitment figures. Potential detection not only indicates whether or not a recruit is able to perform, it also details the candidate’s true interest in the type of missions and work atmosphere.
Saving time and resources, psychometric tests optimise work-time for managers recruiters. They do so by mobilising the candidate. Then, a suitable HR solution offers data extraction and analysis, a considerable time saver for those in charge of the recruitment. The results of the psychometric test then constitute a basis for discussion and deliberation by all stakeholders in order to arrive at an objective decision.
Updating your employer branding
Revealing the potential of a candidate by methods such as psychometric tests not only optimises the recruitment process, it is also an opportunity to improve the attractiveness of your company.
On the one hand, this objective recruitment phase demonstrates to the candidate the company’s commitment to finding the right match. On the other hand, rapid recruitment using an innovative HR solution that offers a structured, efficient and ergonomic candidate experience (on mobile or computer) paints a flattering portrait of a company that is fit for the modern day.
In addition, the objectivity of psychometric tests help with other crucial challenges within the workforce such as diversity and equality. Because they focus solely on the detection of potential, psychometric tests ignore civil or personal data sets that are subject to cognitive biases. Some psychometric tests can also be adapted to multiple languages.
When detecting potential, Recruitment and HR policy go hand in hand
The effort to reveal potential takes on its full meaning when it is attached to a workforce planning strategy and is integrated into your company’s development strategy. Both an asset in recruitment and retention, psychometric tests contribute to building career paths and fostering candidates’ possibilities for internal mobility. When talent is presented with development prospects in accordance with their motivations, they are sure to pay greater attention to this offer than the competition.
In short, for potential detection to correctly anticipate talent management, it must be integrated into the company’s development strategy. The aim here is to reduce variability and the window of uncertainty during recruitment. A psychometric test informs HR about the directions in which talent is more likely to excel and thrive. Thus, it will be easier to place the talent in the best conditions to evolve and develop new skills.
In the same way that “love is blind”, feelings can deceive us too. Not only can we break away from our human biases in decision making which are detrimental to overlooking real talent, psychometric tests help us optimise our ability to detect potential. HR solutions can take care of daunting tasks, evaluating candidates in a bias free way, leaving it to the recruiters and managers to make final decisions with their analytical talent and knowledge of particularities on the position and the team. It should be noted that this type of HR and Talent Acquisition solution in no way detracts from the value of recruiters or managers; it helps to draw an objective and quantifiable image of the candidate by identifying their soft skills and character traits.