Whether you’ve got low or high turnover, if you’re not using a structured hiring process you’re missing a big opportunity to improve the quality of your workforce.
A data-driven hiring strategy can be implemented to avoid having your hiring managers hire from their gut. The goal is to create a process that will allow you to make quality hires more consistently. Pre-hire assessments are great tools to screen applicants against a quality benchmark and reduce the chance of making poor hires. Envision the quality of your workforce in a bell curve, with a bottom 20% and a top 20% and everyone else falling in between. The first objective of a pre-hire assessment is to ensure the applicants that benchmarked on the lower half the curve never enter the hiring picture.
What are the key elements to the screening process?
The pre-hire assessments when recruiting for front-line roles should include a variation of the following:
Behavioral Assessment
The objective of pre-hire assessments is to collect and piece together an overall picture of the applicant’s culture fit and behaviors as it relates to the position. At Mindfield, we start off our recruitment process with our Like-minds Predictor (LMP), which is a 90-question assessment that ranks applicants based on their behavioral fit. This proprietary assessment is tailored to each role and customer to rank applicants who would be best suited for the job. We run this assessment at the end of the online application and see approximately an 89% completion rate. Look for an assessment that considers the candidate experience, simple to use and has a clean design and interface.
Phone Interview
Many companies encourage a phone interview as the next step in the process prior to on-site interviews. This allows the recruiter or manager to conduct an interview that reviews the individuals experience, attitude and demeanor over the phone.
On-Site Interview
The on-site interview should be anchored using an interview guide that has been driven from the unique behaviors scored in the initial assessment. Basing the interview questions on data will allow you to gauge the candidate on the requirements of the specific role while gauging their behavioral fit.
Reference Checks
Reference checks offer the opportunity to gather candid feedback from an applicant’s previous employer. You can identify a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses as well as use this as a predictive tool for their potential success at your company. One question that should be considered is if their previous employer would re-hire that candidate, and reasons as to why or why not.
Criminal Background Checks
This later stage pre-hire assessment gives you information if the candidate has any prior criminal activity affecting their employment history. Do your due diligence to identify any red flags that the candidate did not disclose. This also is your precautionary step to ensure you are maintaining a safe work environment.
Don’t forget about the candidate
The candidate experience must be considered at all times, reduce the barriers for participation and make it simple for candidates to apply and understand what is expected of them and what the next step in the hiring process will be. Solidify a good channel for communication to guarantee clarity for applicants.
Understand the hiring experience from the candidate’s perspective. It can offer valuable insight into your recruitment process. It can reveal areas of opportunities to streamline, add, or eliminate steps.
Get better at it!
Always look to continuously improve the quality of your hourly workforce with the applicants you are vetting into your recruitment process. Use these pre-hire assessments to improve your process for identifying quality candidates, and rely on the data to weed out potential bad hires from ever entering your workforce.
To learn more about how Mindfield uses pre-hire assessments to make quality hires, click here.