By C. Lee Smith
Do you know how many businesses use behavioral assessment for hiring? Nearly 66%, according to NACE. Some of these tools are simple behavioral assessments for hiring. Others, like TeamTraitTM, are comprehensive psychometric assessments.
Regardless of the type of assessment you use, the resulting information will allow you to see your applicants in a new light. That’s because the data is objective. Instead of relying on enhanced resumes or brilliant interview sessions, you’ll make a hiring decision based on a complete profile of each candidate.
Why Your Applicants Should Take a Behavioral Assessment
1. Streamline Your Hiring Process
Over time, your organization will hire people to fill new positions and to replace employees who have left. In some cases, your new hires will work out. In other cases, they will not, and you’ll have to help them exit the company.
One way to increase your rate of hiring successful new employees is to consider how well they will fit with the job and the company. When the objective behavioral assessment results indicate one candidate is clearly a better match than another, your hiring decision becomes easier.
2. Reduce Managers’ Preferences for Specific Candidates
Hiring managers can sometimes get stuck on wanting a candidate of a specific age or educational background. Often, these preferences come from a manager’s previous successful experience with a great team member.
Unfortunately, relying on aspects like age and education won’t tell you much about how well an applicant might do in a specific position. But behavioral assessment test details will.
3. Reveal Applicants’ Motivations
Ideally, you want to hire an employee who considers working for you to be their dream job. The truth is that most job seekers are using the “spray and pray” method. They send out hundreds of applications and hope that a few interviews will materialize from their efforts.
Job seekers may be desperate to land any job just to stay afloat financially and have no real interest in working for your organization for the long term. Behavioral assessment results will reveal each applicant’s motivational traits. When you ask candidates to take an assessment before the interview process, you’ll gain insight into their true motivations.
4. Match Candidates’ Soft Skills to the Position Requirements
Soft skills, such as the ability to think critically, can be particularly important in a wide range of work settings. But other skills can be crucial to success in specific positions. For example, a high level of attention to detail is critical in a laboratory setting where an error could mean the difference between life and death for a patient.
Some individuals possess more persistence than others. Candidates who are naturally more persistent will likely continue working on a problem, such as a software bug, until it’s solved.
Managers can help employees improve this skill. But hiring a candidate with a naturally high tendency toward persistence, as indicated in behavioral assessments, will improve the team’s output.
5. Assist in Predicting On-the-Job Behavior
Hiring managers would like to have a crystal ball to help them understand one critical factor about the job applicants they’re interviewing. Specifically, they want information about the individual’s likely on-the-job behavior.
Onboarding a person with a tendency to exhibit toxic behavior, such as trying to make their co-workers look bad, is best avoided. Careful study of assessment results will indicate if a candidate might bully others in certain work environments. In addition, behavioral assessment results also reveal whether an applicant is likely to be a high producer.
Summary
There’s plenty of buzz in the marketplace about whether the DiSC system is better than the predictive index assessment. The truth is this: Using a comprehensive psychometric assessment like TeamTraitTM will generate the best results.
But remember this advice about requiring job applicants to take a behavioral assessment. You will be most successful when you use the information wisely as you make your hiring decision.
About C. Lee Smith
C. Lee Smith is the founder and CEO of SalesFuel®, which provides Research for Revenue Generators™. He is also a Certified Behavioral Analyst specializing in buyer behavior and workforce analytics. An Amazon International Bestselling author of SalesCred: How Buyers Qualify Sellers and Hire Smarter, Sell More!, he’s a sought-after keynote speaker and provides consulting on how salespeople can be viewed as more credible by their prospects. He is also the creator of AdMall®, a sales intelligence platform for local media sales teams in the U.S. and TeamTrait, a sophisticated behavioral assessment tool for hiring, retention and optimization of sales teams.
