What do you look for when hiring in your business?

Skills?

Finding employees with the right technical skills is often the most important criteria for employers who believe these candidates can hit the ground running. Sometimes the emphasis on technical skills can mean missing culture-fit, values, leadership and potential. In some cases it is impossible to overlook the required skills, so companies focus on looking for them whilst also prioritising the candidate’s alignment to company values and culture. The thing you need to remember here, is that you can teach skills, but its very difficult to teach culture-fit. If you don’t look beyond the skills, the cost and damage of the wrong hire can be great. 

Experience?

If you can manage to find candidates with experience in a similar role it is likely that they have transferable experience which reduces training and time taken to get up to speed. What you would need to bear in mind is that each business has its own unique context, role expectations, culture and team dynamics. So experience in one company may not actually transfer directly to the next company. Flexibility may be required to adapt to new requirements.

Potential?

Hiring for potential can be so valuable to an organisation. You may not benefit from skills or experience immediately but you are choosing long-term gain over short and it makes your selection pool so much wider. The key here is to make sure that your measure of potential is scientific and not based on gut feel. And, you need to provide the right training and support to ensure your Hi-Po succeeds.

A successful hiring formulae…

Forward-thinking and entrepreneurial businesses are managing to remove the old-fashioned mindset of only hiring professionals with industry skills and experience. Combining skill, experience, AND potential is the way to go in order to hire candidates with the highest chance of success and growth in your company.

Start by finding candidates who possess a level of skill and experience that gives you comfort, without eliminating high potentials. Once you have your initial pool, look to identify those that possess potential.

Most progressive organisations utilise a whole battery of psychometric tools incorporating cognitive measures, personality, values, integrity, emotional intelligence, leadership ability and job-related competencies. This approach is aligned with a “hiring for growth” mindset. It becomes possible to accurately predict a candidates curiosity, willingness to learn and change, resilience, innovation, openness to change, teamwork, collaboration capability, and much more.

Applying this formulae is certain to give you a richer result in your battle for talent.

https://encapsulate.co.za/our-solutions/psychometric-competency-based-assessment/

Encapsulate which means “to express the essential features of (something) succinctly”, was founded with the vision to partner businesses to make informed recruitment decisions by knowing the essential features of a job applicant. We aim to encapsulate various measures of the head, hands and heart utilising scientifically proven tools to give our clients a clear understanding of who they are employing.