As we work through the new normal, what better time to evolve your hiring practices and strategy to meet the new requirements of our virtual world? Hiring the right candidate for open positions have never been more critical. Yet, most aren’t doing as good of a job hiring the right candidates the first time.
Companies that continue to rely on resumes as the primary hiring tool will likely continue to struggle with effective hiring and retention. While candidate resumes provide the fundamentals such as, previous work history, education or technical skills, they fall short in assessing a vital factor in hiring successful employees in today’s marketplace – their soft skills and cultural fit.
A Resume Alone Won’t Cut It
According to a 2019 LinkedIn Global Talent Report, there is an ever-growing importance on soft skills – where “machines can’t compete” and are now the most important assets for the success of a company. Due to the rise of automation and artificial intelligence, bad hires are rarely a matter of hard skills alone. Creativity, influence, collaboration, critical-thinking and adaptability are paramount to successful employees today.
Yet, the report pinpoints that 57% of companies struggle to assess soft skills because of a lack of formal and structured processes. Actually, 68% say the main way they assess soft skills is by picking up on social cues in interviews. If organizations want a hiring strategy for the digital future, they must change how they identify, measure and hire for soft skills.
Assessments Key to the Future of Hiring
Utilizing science-backed, data-driven behavioral and competency assessments helps companies measure a candidate’s soft skills and behavioral fit within the organization. These solutions can identify key soft skills like teamwork, initiative and collaboration and also measure those skills against a benchmark of top-performing employees. In addition, hiring managers are better able to tap into a candidates’ strengths and weaknesses so a more informed, effective interview can be employed.
While many companies have used talent assessments when hiring high-level executives within the organization, automated technology has made it possible to apply the same critical assessments in a high-volume hiring environment as well. Most companies with high-volume recruiting needs have several challenges in common – higher than average turnover rates for high-volume positions, a large number of applicants and difficult requisition to recruiter ratios. In that environment, companies can’t afford to have recruiters’ waste time on poor fit candidates.
Modern day hiring needs mandate a solution such as, the XBL Assessment Platform that is automated, affordable and designed specifically to assess
cognitive and critical thinking skills pertinent to best-fit hiring. This hiring practice allows recruiters to simply provide the customized assessments to candidates complete at any time day or night, and receive an easy-to-interpret report that precisely identifies a candidate’s soft skill competencies and those who will be good fit for the job and the company.
It’s Time to Modernize Your Hiring Strategy
The trend of looking beyond hard skills alone to measure soft skill competencies and cultural fit is arguably the biggest evolutionary change in the past decade in the overall hiring process. Instead of guessing the type of individual who will make the best addition to the team and organization and hoping you’re right, use talent assessments to make more informed, data-based hiring decisions. Technical skill can be taught, the right behavioral competencies