Is your recruitment process current, based on today’s challenges?

It’s a fast-moving, dynamic business environment out there. To succeed, people are key; they are your greatest asset. A fast moving environment requires people with certain attributes. Forbes, the authoritive business magazine, recently published the top 5 qualities to look for in hiring people, in order to succeed in today’s ‘cut and thrust’ business world. These are:

1. Action-oriented – hire people who take chances and take action.

2. Ambitious – hire those people who can only help your company if they want to help themselves have a better career.

3. Autonomous – hire people who can get the job done without extensive hand-holding.

4. Leadership – hire people who you see playing a significant part in your company and leading future employees of the firm.

5. Results-orientated – hire those tenacious, hard working people who can execute.

There are other lists out there on the key qualities of people, in other magazines, in books and in blogs. The interesting thing is, though, like that of Forbes, all of them highlight the importance of behaviours over skills.

You can train an employee on your product or service, but you can’t train someone to be action-orientated, ambitious, autonomous, result-orientated and a leader.  The message is clear: be flexible on background requirements, but continue to be stringent on personality traits.

This resonates with our own view at Anderson Scott. We believe it’s not what the candidates know today. Information can always be taught.  The most intelligent companies, in today’s business environment, hire on future success and heavily weigh personality when determining the most apt employees.

What this means for recruitment, in our opinion, is relying less on someone’s experience and using the CV less as the key tool in the recruitment process to validate that experience.

For us, it starts by understanding and properly defining the type of person you want, beyond just experience. These are a person’s wider characteristics, and attributes, that will make a person outstanding in a role. We define this type of person as “the complete individual”.

We believe that other factors are as important, if not more important, than experience. Evidence actually shows that someone’s ability to be successful in a particular role is more determined by these other factors, rather than just experience.

There’s even more good news about adopting this different approach – an approach more in-tune with today’s business realities. You can actually test for these wider characteristics in order to make a far more objective, and better, decision about someone’s fit to a role, than you ever could with a CV. Conducting psychometric tests makes your recruitment far more accurate – about 75% accurate to be precise – compare to just 25% in using CVs.

So, we suggest that you ask yourself, does your current recruitment process,   really help you to accurately assess those things that are really important for someone to be successful in a role – and that’s likely to be personality rather than experience!