6 Benefits of Job Fit Assessment that make the difference in your hiring decisions

Job Fit Assessment ensures that you are getting the right person in the job by using psychometric testing techniques that offer valuable hiring insights into candidate personality traits and their organisational fit.

Bernadette Eichner

Oct 6, 2020

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Getting the right person in the job is about more than whether they can actually do the job or not. Organisational fit, that is whether the person has the values, the work ethic and the personality to succeed in the company, is critical to someone thriving or failing. And recruitment activity that doesn’t get the right person in the right job costs you money. So, how can you ensure your recruitment is really getting it right?

Skills testing has always been a fairly common occurrence in recruitment, but psychometric testing, through which organisational fit and candidate personality traits are explored, has generally been the reserve of executive-level recruitment. The costs of such tests, and the restrictions placed on those who can administer them, have meant they’ve historically been out of reach for general hiring purposes.

Not any more. There are now many empirically validated and reliable Job Fit Assessment tools on the market that have been developed for roles ranging from entry-level admin right through to C-Suite. They are fit-for-purpose, fast to access, easy to administer and deliver quality information to validate (or not, as the case may be) what you’ve discovered yourself through interviewing and reference checking.

How is a Job Fit Assessment different to Skills Testing?

When we’re hiring we’re looking for people who not only can do the job but will do it to the level expected.

Skills testing looks after the first bit – tests someone’s skills to determine competency – the can do piece of the recruitment puzzle. A candidate’s self-assessment on their resume or in an interview may be over (or under) rated and the only way to be sure they have the skills level you need is to test them for it – whether it be their skills level with Excel or their competency with a particular piece of software – e.g. Adobe, Xero, etc.

Skills testing is usually done early in the recruitment process as part of putting your shortlist together. We first want to ensure the person can do what is required before we invest time in considering them as a potential hire.

A Job Fit Assessment, best applied to your short-listed candidates, will give you confidence that your preferred candidate will actually fit into your organisation’s values, team and work expectations.

What does a Job Fit Assessment measure?

Depending on the tool you use, a good Job Fit Assessment will give you insights into a person’s honesty and integrity, verbal reasoning skills, their capacity to learn new things quickly, team communication skills, initiative, problem-solving skills and how they communicate as part of a team. All the things that tell us they WILL do the job to the standard expected.

Job Fit assessments are developed by Psychologists to uncover how well a person is suited to a particular job, based on millions of data points gathered over time and across different organisations.

Take a Customer Service Representative for example. We need to know they’re able to process sometimes complex information quickly; they must have naturally well-developed interpersonal skills but not to the point they empathise too much and end up spending hours on the phone promising all sorts of things that cannot be delivered; they must have good attention to detail but not so obsessive that they get down into the weeds and stay there; they must be oriented towards effective problem solving; they need to be able to recognise and manage conflict; and they need to be able to move on healthily and quickly from a bad interaction, so as not to negatively impact productivity.

While we can “test” for these things with clever and diligent interviewing and reference checking, the truth is that most hiring managers and recruiters often don’t have that depth of psychological training or the time to spend with each candidate to confidently cover off on all these aspects.

The assessments we use even provide you with suggested interview questions to use at that all-important final interview – questions based specifically around the scale the candidate may have performed less than well on. You can’t ask for more help than that!

What are the benefits?

The 6 benefits of implementing a quality Job Fit Assessment are:

1. Reduces the risk of a poor hire due to interviewers falling into the all-too-human trap of applying subconscious bias throughout the recruitment process.
2. Increases the success rate of selecting future high performers by up to 300% – this means that the chance of you hiring someone who is not only going to stay with you but go on to be promoted is about three times greater than a hire which has not included psychometric testing.
3. Increased certainty that new hires will perform above the acceptable level.
4. Improves the opportunity to identify future leaders in your organisation.
5. Dramatically increases the chance that the candidate will be accepting a role they will enjoy, perform well in and be engaged in.
6. Reducing staff turnover – employees want to respect their manager (people leave managers, they don’t leave companies) and by recruiting candidates you know to have the people management skills required to motivate and inspire, you reduce turnover risks.

A simple Job Fit Assessment can be the difference between a satisfactory hiring outcome and a great one

We all know the costs associated with poor hiring outcomes. What we often don’t consider are the attendant destroyers of team harmony and productivity – time and energy spent managing a poor performer, reduced team morale when the new team member turns out to be a burden on others rather than a blessing, and the reputational damage when an organisation is perceived as not being able to keep staff.

By including a Job Fit Assessment in your recruiting tool kit, you increase your chances of not just recruiting someone for the “now” job but a person who is going to stay with you for years to come – someone who will significantly contribute to the organisation’s future success.