If You Don't Hire Using This Technique, Your Team Will Fall Short

Nobody wants to make a bad hire, not even the worker, so why do employers keep using the same old methods yet expecting better results?

Placing the wrong candidate in a role can be one of the most damaging actions an employer can make.

Not only will the employee underperform, they can drag down the performance and morale of everyone else on their team. And if they quit or are let go, the turnover for that role costs a lot of money. It's a fail/fail situation.

There is one hiring method that can prevent this. Without it, your team will fall short.

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The Parable of the Football Coach

Imagine you are a coach of an NFL™ football team. You need to fill out your roster of top athletes, each individual specialized and highly trained to be the absolute best at their game. Your recruiting efforts identify college athletes from around the country who have excelled and stand above the rest at their respective positions.

This is not a one-person job, though. Top coaches have an entire recruiting team. Each person on that team has special experience and knowledge honed over the years to identify players based on position. You have recruiters for defense and offensive squads. Some specialize in finding the best kickers and quarterbacks. Others even focus on hiring support and training staff.

Each recruiter is selected because they have the tools (hint) and experience needed to find and sign the best athletes within their particular area of expertise.

Building Your Team

You've built your team of recruiting experts. They travel the country scouting athletes within their purview and begin the recruiting process. What your recruiters don't do is make the mistake of operating out of their wheelhouse. You don't have your quarterback scout wasting time and energy (and money!) recruiting kickers or 320 pound linebackers.

The worst mistakes you can make when building a team is assuming that all top candidates are the same, that all roles demand the same qualities in the people that fill them, or that a uniform and generic recruiting process will attract every person you need.

A one-size-recruits-all approach is where most employers fail.

How do you make sure you aren't filling each role on your team with people unsuited for their specific demands?

The Hiring Secret

It's one thing to select candidates that have the required experience and skills listed on their resume. That is absolutely a requirement in your effort to put the right people into the right roles. Keep doing that.

There is another level of scrutiny and selection that you need to implement that takes your hiring accuracy to a whole new level, however. This is the not-so-secret technique you absolutely must be using to build the top team you need.

The hiring method that helps you lower turnover by 50% or more is the same method that can fill your team with top employees that are 200% more productive, and it is surprisingly easy to implement.

Here's the hiring technique you need to start using for all future hires:

Identify the psychometric profile of the role, then select candidates who have the same psychometric hardwiring to match it.

If you've never heard the term psychometric before, don't let it intimidate you. It's a big word for a rather straightforward concept. A psychometric profile represents the emotional hardwiring of a person. In other words, it is the unchanging, innate DNA of a person's personality.

Using the athlete analogy, if you need to fill a defensive tackle position on your football team, you want someone who is physically large — we're talking 6' 5" and 280 pounds or more — quick enough to sprint 40 yards in 4.5 seconds or less — and at the peak of strength, enough to overcome the onslaught of the opposing team's offensive line.

By establishing these physical and performance characteristics of that position on your team, you have essentially defined the athletic profile of the role.

What if you're not recruiting a tight end but are instead hiring a bookkeeper or medical assistant or graphic designer?

These positions don't have physical or athletic requirements. Instead, they have optimal psychometric parameters that define the kind of emotional hardwiring needed to excel in those particular duties and requirements within your particular organization.

You don't want to make the mistake of hiring someone who is highly creative or innovative for a bookkeeper's role (Nikola Tesla would have been a terrible accountant). Instead, you want someone who can follow the numbers accurately and consistently. Someone who has the mental and emotional hardwiring that drives them to never miss a decimal or to spot inconsistencies in expense reports and won't get bored or burned out doing it on a daily basis.

If you are hiring a medical assistant, you want someone who can think on their feet because every patient is different. You need someone with the emotional empathy and caring nature to ensure the comfort and health of the patient comes first. They also need to be on their toes to make sure proper safety and health procedures are consistently and thoroughly followed at all times.

Graphic designers? The good ones have a psychometric profile that could be described as the exact opposite of the bookkeeper who processes their expense reports and paychecks. You want someone who is creative and can envision new ideas and then implement them with innovative style.

Defining the Role

To fill these positions, you would first work with your hiring team and supervising manager to define the needs of each role. These needs are translated into the emotional and mental characteristics needed to excel in the position. The output of this effort is a psychometric profile of the role. Keep reading to learn how.

Candidates are recruited and asked to complete a psychometric assessment, the same one used to define the needs of the role. Assessment scores are compared against each role's profile and highly matched candidates are selected to move to the next phase where experience and skills from their resume are evaluated to ensure minimum requirements are met. Interviews are conducted and a job offer is made.

How Do I Psychometrically Profile a Role or Candidate?

If you've come this far, good job. You are clearly motivated to improve your hiring processes, with the goal of filling out your team with top people who are hardwired and motivated to excel in their roles.

What if you have no idea how to define the psychometric needs of a role, or to compare the psychometric profiles of your candidates to it?

That's where eRep.com comes in.

Every service in eRep's suite of employer hiring tools is based on the foundation of the world's most accurate and reliable psychometric assessment, the Core Values Index™. Our Top Performer Profile™ service (TPP) produces the psychometric profile of the role in 2 hours or less. Job candidates complete a CVI assessment — which only takes about 8 minutes to complete — and their scores are automatically compared to the role's TPP score using our Applicant Tracking System (ATS) system.

It's that easy, and it is perhaps the most accurate way to hire on the market today.

The only things you have to lose is 200% higher productivity and 50% or lower turnover.

Call eRep today to learn more about the TPP+CVI hiring suite.

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Core Values Index™ and CVI™ are trademarks of Taylor Protocols, Inc. NFL is a registered trademark of the National Football League.