The right person for the Job (Part II)

Selections Based on Emotional Intelligence Provide Big Return

A key component of job fit is understanding and leveraging emotional competencies like self- discipline, interpersonal skills, empathy, and motivation. Companies who determine the emotional competencies that are most important for success in a job, and then purposely seek out people who have those qualities, are finding a significant return on investment. These are from Daniel Goleman’s Working With Emotional Intelligence:

•  At a global consumer beverage firm, 50 % of division managers were leaving within two years resulting in search costs of close to $4 million. When the firm started to evaluate for competencies such as initiative, self-confidence, leadership, and the like, the retention rate was much greater – only 6 percent of new hires left within two years.
•  At cosmetics giant, L’Oreal, sales agents who were selected for their strengths in emotional competence had 63 percent less turnover during their first year than did those whose selection disregarded their competence profile.
•  Among newly hired sales reps at a start-up computer company, those hired for emotional competence were 90 percent more likely to finish their training than those hired on other criteria.
• How Job Fit Addresses Key Problem Areas
• Job fit is not a “nice-to-have.” It is critical to success. If offers many benefits, solves many problems and enables companies to capitalize on key opportunities.

Retention & Turnover

When people are happy and fulfilled with their work, they are less likely to be lured away. Studies have shown that retention rates are higher where job fit is employed in both the initial selection process and in continuing career development

Brain Drain

Job fit helps blue the “brain drain” by helping you determine who else in the organization has traits similar to those in key positions.

Attracting Talent

Being an organization committed to people and providing meaningful work will help you attract start talent. Culture matters!

Recruiting & Staffing

Job fit assessments help you filter out applicants that aren’t good matches so that you can focus on those that are. Providing job fit information to potential candidates also helps discourage poor fits early in process and motivates good fits to action.

Performance

When people are matched with work that makes the most of their natural talents and is in sync with the passions, productivity increases.

Doing More With Less

Employees stand a far greater chance of being able to take on additional work if the work is in keeping with their natural talents (i.e. the stuff that comes easy for them).

How Do You Achieve Job Fit?

There are many different kinds of tools and methods you can use to achieve job fit. It is critically important that you get to know not only people (look under the hood so to speak), but also the organization and nature of work – the context of the job.

One of the primary flaws in many assessment approaches is that they only look at the person. There is every manner of test these days for every type of competency one can imagine. You can assess for interpersonal skills, cognitive preferences, emotional intelligence, adaptive intelligence, performance under pressure, empathy, leadership, learning style, you name it. There is no doubt value in all (well maybe not all) of these process, but the key is that it does absolutely no good to assess a candidate without first assessing an organization and a job. How else do you know what you’re looking for?

OK, so real job fit requires that you identify what it is you’re looking for before you set out to find a match. Hey what a concept! You look at the job and determine both the explicit, technical skills required, but more importantly, the tacit, intuitive, emotionally based competencies that are important to success.

You also identify, if it hasn’t been done already, the values and personality of the organization. What are the cultural characteristics that are important to fit? What does the organization value and therefore reward?

Think about it. If you only look for a match on the obvious things like technical skills and work experience in the same area, you’re missing easily 50% of what actually determines success in an employee.

Again, study after study has shown that it’s less about what you know and more about who you are. Emotional competencies, soft skills, interpersonal skills, leadership skills, motivation, these are the things that make a difference in terms of why one person succeeds and another doesn’t. It’s not about IQ, advanced credentials, or who you’ve worked for. It goes much deeper than that. It’s about your deep interests, behavioral patterns, cognitive preferences, and emotional and social needs.

Look Under the Hood

If you compare hiring an employee to buying a car (sadly, most of us put more time an effort into car selection than we do hiring), you realize that we way we typically go about hiring – Put out a request for a specific set of technical skills and hire the first person whose resume has those same skills listed. It’s like buying a car because the list of features on the sticker matches what you were looking for. You wouldn’t do that. You wouldn’t buy a car without first looking under the hood, giving it a test drive, getting a “feel” for it.

Why shouldn’t you do the same thing when you’re hiring an employee? Here’s how it translates:

Look under the hood....... Test drive.................... How does it feel?...........

Identify natural talents, passions, and motivations Find out how they’ll respond in real world situations

What’s your gut feel - How well does this person “fit” the organization in terms of values and core competencies? 

By Pamela Holloway