For the most part, today’s recruitment services claim to help organisations hire job seekers more efficiently and effectively. The majority of them invest their time and energy in recruiting efforts to get as many candidates as possible to apply for employment opportunities.
Once a large pool of candidates has been created, these recruitment services offer a number of solutions to help hire managers with some parts of the selection process. Many provide their clients with certain screening tools and applicant tracking systems that focus primarily on the candidates’ job experience. In other words, they help employers select the candidates with the most relevant experience for the job.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? Or does it?
Most, if not all, of these solutions fall short in actually assessing the work styles and competencies of the job seekers. In our recruiting efforts with hundreds of both public and private sector employers, we have determined that the best predictor of job performance, and the one that matters the most, is the ‘attitude’ that an employee adopts at work, even more so than his or her experience.
Key Work Competencies and Work Styles
As such, measuring work styles that are related to a ‘positive attitude’becomes a primary goal in order to select the ‘most qualified” or “best’ employees (i.e. individuals with both the most positive attitude and required work experience).
To be successful and increase the likelihood of hiring the right candidate for a job, it’s important to assess the key work competencies that are important for most jobs and to ensure that there is little likelihood that the candidate will engage in negative or counter-productive work behaviours. These include lateness, taking unplanned breaks, substance use on the job, etc. In addition, it is critical to also assess the motivation that an employee has to actually work within a specific work domain. This allows the employers to focus their training and development efforts on employees who actually would like to have a desired career path or work, for a significant period of time, in the same line of work.
iRecruitment
Y2 Consulting Psychologists’ online recruitment system (iRecruitment) quickly evaluates a number of key competencies using our Work Style Assessment. A competency is the combination of observable and measurable knowledge, skills, abilities and personal attributes that contribute to enhanced employee performance and ultimately result in organizational success.1
Our Work Style Assessment evaluates the following competencies:
- judgment
- stress tolerance
- achieving results
- working with others
- client/customer service
- motivation/career objectives
This assessment tool also evaluates:
- counterproductive behaviours (punctuality, absenteeism, drug/alcohol consumption in the workplace, etc.)
- socially desirable traits (determines if the candidate has exaggerated on their self- evaluations)
In addition, our Situational Judgment Test, which is completed by the candidate during the job application process, quickly assesses the required judgment to solve work-related problems and situations. The questions are adapted to the level of the position in question (non-managerial, supervisory or management).
You can also improve the assessment of pre-qualified candidates using our structured interviews and automated reference checks.
If you don’t have time to post and promote your job offers, and assess your applicants, let our team do it for you. We offer a comprehensive – and affordable – solution that allows us (on your behalf) to assess and properly screen all candidates’ work competencies and experience.
1 http://hr.unl.edu/compensation/nuvalues/corecompetencies.shtml/
