Why “Gut Feeling” Doesn’t Scale for Hiring and What You Can Do Instead
Whether you are a business owner or a C-level executive, chances are you’ve used your “gut feeling” when hiring team members over the course of your career. Your success has been built upon choices that were informed by hundreds of thousands of interactions, observations, experiments, failures, and successes. The question is, how do you scale this hiring ability for a growing business?
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Predictive hiring solution
The good news is we now have powerful tools that can help predict how a new hire will perform in a job. You can tailor them to be in-line with your “gut feeling” in regards to your company culture, but without bias so others can successfully hire based on objective assessments of new hire candidates. Work experience can be indicative of success, but quite often, your gut feeling has more to do with how this person will fit into the organization culture rather than how they will check to-do items off of their list.
Here are some steps to translate “gut feeling” into predictive hiring:
1. Define your desired hire characteristics.
The best starting point would be to take an assessment yourself and see what your profile looks like. You may also want others on your team to take the assessment in order to find characteristics that complement their job roles. You can use the results to create a behavioral benchmark in which the new hire behavioral profile should also be a fit for the position. For example, if the job calls for someone who needs to adhere to standard process most of the time, you may not want someone who has a high need for “personal freedom.” At the very least, this can be a talking point for a second interview if you think the candidate brings other strengths to the table.
2.Add the fit with the organization culture.
How would you describe your organizational culture? Cooperative? Cut-throat? Creative? Innovative? Quick to act? Highly analytical? Culture is influenced by your industry, but still has unique variations within each company. What differentiates yours from your competitors? When these questions are answered, you can better create a hiring profile that fits your culture. Using one of the PeopleKeys Behavioral Attitudes of “Power/Political” as an example, if your organization is one that leans toward a regimented, top-down structure, someone high in this behavioral attitude will easily become frustrated waiting for approval from “above.” On the other hand, if one of the company’s competitive differentiators is speed-to-market, and this is driven by autonomy of business units, then a high Power/Political is a good match.
3.Customize the on-boarding process.
Once you’ve selected your new hire, create an on-boarding experience based upon their DISC personality style. Just like you want to feel that you’ve made the right decision, your new hire’s on-boarding experience will answer that question for them. Whether their personality style is bottom line-focused (D), connection-driven (I), craving stability (S), or detail-oriented (C), creating a matching first impression through their on-boarding process will help them know they’ve made the best choice.
Once you’ve taken these steps, you can scale the process so others across your organization can hire candidates who are in-line with more than just your “gut-feeling.” The process goes beyond your emotional decision-making while connecting to important aspects of what you value. Still use your intuition when it comes to a new hire, but adding a predictive hiring tool such as the PeopleKeys 4D assessment helps you impart successful hiring practices by defining an ideal candidate behavior profile, their fit to your culture, and the best on-boarding approach. You’ll find what you were feeling is backed up by objective assessment data that helps to better describe your “gut feeling” so others can scale your successful hiring practices.
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